Daniel Lubetzky

Click play on the link here to see an example of excellent data visualization, and to get a sense of the depth of this recession.

Matthew Crawford wrote a really interesting article, The Case For Working with Your Hands, in The New York Times Magazine, about the overlooked intellectual rigor required when making physical things.

It could not come at a better time, as we are becoming more virtual, digital, commodified, and dissociated from nature – and from the simplicity of tangible output. Whether it is the Internet, financial derivatives, chicken mcnuggets or "nutrition" bars made with stuff you can’t decipher or pronounce, society is on a trajectory to twist and pretend away from simple realness.

KIND, by the way, is a counter-cultural effort to reconnect with the goodness of real, authentic, transparent wholesome natural unadulterated ingredients you can see and pronounce.  The philosophy underlying everything we do is to stick to authenticity: a) avoid pretentious wannabe names that betray the reality of the products we make with allegorical cute titles; b) avoid fillers; c) avoid artificial ingredients and artificial sweeteners; d) avoid overprocessing and emulsification; and just in general stick to wholesome ingredients you can see and pronounce.™

[Read more →]

From an article in the NYT by Ron Lieber, good financial advice from unusual sources – religious:

Those who structure their standard of living to allow a little surplus control their circumstances. Those who spend a little more than they earn are controlled by their circumstances. They are in bondage.

By N. Eldon Tanner, Church leader

One of the best efforts I have seen at explaining the way we are consuming and living beyond sustainability in this world comes from The Global Footprint Network.  At the Skoll World Forum a couple weeks ago, Mathis Wackernagel handed me a business-card sized brochure that very poignantly and clearly explains how consumption in the developed and oil-producing world is depleting our globe in measurably dangerous ways.  You should visit the page tracking human development growth and related ecological footprint growth.  Their solution, not easy to implement but succintly showing the only way forward, is to aim for sustainable human development.

You can take a quiz to establish and track your own human footprint.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb highlights the dangerous (and inequitable) way the US Government and other countries have handled the recent abuses that brought out the financial crisis:

2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

Think about it! It’s crazy.

The full article, which is excellent, is in the Financial Times (and below).

[Read more →]

Jon Stewart’s interview of Jim Cramer earlier tonight was a stunning indictment of the financial sector, the insider chicaneries of Wall Street, the complicity of financial networks like CNBC, and the overall sad state of affairs of corporate America.  See art.

It is scary that the best reporting out there comes from a comedy show, while regular networks and publications have effectively sold out to corporate sponsors.  One starts sounding like a conspiracy theorist or left wing radical, but when you listen to this stuff, it confirms some of the scarier theories!  Just like you are not paranoid if you really are being followed, so too is the case that you are not wrong to suspect Wall Street’s transparency and integrity and to assume insiders are rigging it against ordinary investors.

Here are a couple of samples of good reporting:

Tom Friedman wrote a provocative article about how we have been living our lives and running our economy at the expense of the next generations – and how the environment and the planet will not bail us out.

Peter Thum, the co-founder of Ethos Water (later sold to Starbucks) and I had a conversation a couple weeks along these lines – about how successful new business models will strive to ensure retail, food, entertainment gifts and consumption are sustainable.

The advent of the internet and related electronic worlds and virtual worlds could theoretically provide some clues here – except for the sobering fact that a lot of these seemingly cost-free worlds and avatars actually cost a ton in terms of energy/electricity, storage, etc.  Whoever decodes this will make a huge contribution…

[Read more →]

Thank goodness Ben Stein is an independent thinker who can elucidate why exuberant enthusiasm over a cap-and-trade system is misguided and dangerous. I am afraid we are condemned to this inefficient dreamed artifice, whereas straight taxation of emissions would be far more effective.

[Read more →]

This gripping article from Michael Lewis (Liars’ Poker) and David Einhorn is a must-read:

THE END OF THE FINANCIAL WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

[Read more →]

Here is another good article on the misaligned incentives that came about when Wall Street went public.

[Read more →]