Growthology

Special Edition: Apple & Steve Jobs

I have made up my mind.  I am buying a new desktop iMac when the new versions are available, which the rumor mill says will be in January (see here, here, here and here). 

But a surprise announcement says that Steve Jobs won't be doing the famous Stevenote address at MacWorld.  Wha ... ??!!?

• WIRED asks Where is Steve Jobs? So does CNNMoney/FORTUNE.
• The Wall Street Journal imagines Apple without Steve.

The story of Steve Jobs is interesting and important for a number of reasons, many rooted in his rise and fall and rise. For one, he seems to validate the notion that individuals matter. History doesn't just happen, it is made. Second, he is a champion for company founders who often get muscled out by the capitalists.

Here are my favorite books on Apple and Jobs, I've read them all cover to cover:

• Accidental Empires
• Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders
• The Second Coming of Steve Jobs

While you're at it, don't miss Robert X. Cringely's 603rd and last (!) column for PBS published just days ago. Bob, for the record, this shows you have the worst timing in the world: quitting a job (the first time he wasn't fired) during the worst economic recession of your life matches up well with your decision to turn down Steve Jobs offer of early Apple stock in favor of "loot." Wherever you land, sir, I will follow. For now, we can keep up with Bob at http://www.cringely.com.

No Creative Destruction in Detroit

President Bush announced a rescue plan for General Motors and Chrysler LLC Friday morning that will make $13.4 billion in federal loans available almost immediately.

What a shame. What a lost opportunity. In the immortal words of Dr. (Garett) Jones: "Creative Destruction, it was fun while it lasted." If you can't count on a lame duck president to do the right thing, what's left?

The bailout has some severe strings attached to it, its defenders will say.  But it is not bankruptcy, so the depth of restructuring will pale next to what is needed to revitalize the American auto industry. That means the answer is, no, I'm not buying it.

UPDATE: This also seems to be a blatant violation of the TARP, which weeks ago the administration was saying would not (and I thought legally could not) be used for industrial policy. So is it Constitutional? It was once fashionable to re-interpret the intent of laws written decades or centuries ago. Now it seems the time horizon for creative interpretation of the law has converged to months.

Communication Weirdness

It's a new world humanity is moving into, and sometimes downright goofy when technology works, but works in weird ways. Be warned, this is post with me talking out loud. Would love to hear your comments.

This is information age, we're told. As an economist, I tend to abstract concepts down to a variable (presumably linear), and I often think about measuring all of technology as the famous "A" reisdual term in Solow's growth equation. But what if we want to break technology into a taxonomy -- communications, production, health, construction, transportation? But even then, no category is big enough to measure using a linear variable.  Communications is a great example. We tend to think that faster commo is one of the best measures of human advancement, but that would imply that technological advanced peak the day I plugged into the Internet, right?  That day I became connected at the speed of the light to anyone.

Aha.  Maybe not anyone.  What about that Ethiopian villager?  So we need to extend the variable by adding a scale dimension to it, right?  That's easy, but still obviously incomplete. Communication is multi-dimensional in terms of type (voice, email, text, imagery) and time (asynchronicity is the great power of email) and ... what else? How do you evaluate RSS or Hulu or webcams?

Well the weirdness for me is that Google keeps coming up with amazing technologies, and they all keep stretching my sense of how to measure communication. One of the most useful little things they have is called Google Alerts (wiki here), which I have been using for years (I think).

While this is a fascinating thread in its own right, this morning I am just laughing at how I get my daily Alert for any web postings that have written about "growthology" or "Tim Kane." Unfortunately, I live in a state where I nearly share a name with the Governor, Tim Kaine. It seems like a lot of other mothers didn't realize my name was taken and gave it to their sons also.  So, some days I get cool stuff like this:

Google News Alert for: "tim kane"

GRIDIRON Third Team Offense Joliet Herald News - Joliet,IL,USA "Tim has a good leg," Tigers coach Tim Kane said. "He kicks the ball into the end zone with some regularity, and he's consistent with his extra points and ... See all stories on this topic It seems there is a Tim Kane who is a good super-hero artist, and that MUST be me living in an alternate universe.  There are a handful of Tim Kane professors. And of course the governor, and almost Vice President. What is hard to imagine is how communications technology continues to advance. But we know it will. The natural extension is the way that tecting allows an individual to be hyper-aware of multiple other individuals.  Right now, text/chat involves active engagement, meaning that others have to actively send messages. But how long before that becomes passive? Can't you imagine the demand for parents to have heartbeat and location monitors on their children? What about devices that monitor in real-time what we browse?  I still think the hive mind is creepy, but you know me, I'm a Luddite.

Neal Stephenson Interview ...

... over at Goodreads.com. A sample:

GR: You've mentioned that you use a different writing system for each book. You famously wrote the nearly 3,000-page Baroque Cycle with a fountain pen. Did this book demand a new system? Describe a typical day spent writing.

NS: In this case I used a very similar process. Up in the morning, go to office, read through yesterday's pages and edit them, then move on to writing new pages. By 10 or 11 in the morning I'm done. Eventually I transfer it into a computer. Then I go exercise and spend the afternoon working on something completely unrelated. The only real difference between how I wrote Anathem and how I wrote The Baroque Cycle was that in the case of Anathem I printed out the manuscript and read through it quite a bit more frequently than I did in the case of The Baroque Cycle.

Where was SOX?

Larry Ribstein and Henry Butler ask a good question, in the wake of huge investment firms collapsing and now the 50 billion Madoff ponzi scheme.:

The crisis shows that SOX did not have the advertised payoff of flushing Enronesque risk out of the market. Firms now collapsing from risks hidden in their walls and foundations were subject to SOX. What, exactly, did SOX accomplish other than imposing huge costs and giving us a false sense of security for six years?

This is a good question by itself. But the solution offered is very insightful and deserves serious attention: why not let the shareholders make adopting SOX optional?

But many of the smaller and newer firms may decide that SOX's costs outweigh its benefits. Allowing them to opt out would be like giving a tax break to entrepreneurs to help restart the economy.

Don't Ban Google Maps, Mash With It!

Sometimes our responses to technology are tragically short-sighted. Exhibit A? This article from The Times Online

An Indian Court has been called to ban Google Earth amid suggestions the online satellite imaging was used to help plan the terror attacks that killed more than 170 people in Mumbai last month. A petition entered at the Bombay High Court alleges that the Google Earth service, "aids terrorists in plotting attacks". Advocate Amit Karkhanis has urged the court to direct Google to blur images of sensitive areas in the country until the case is decided.

Now why do they want to ban it? Because it's not safe to have this information in the hands of the public, or so we're told. But of course, banning it is a bit like banning aeroplanes after 9-11 and likely to have just as many damaging effects. The trick, of course, isn't to ban the technology that the terrorists use, but to use it for purposes that save, rather than destroy. Which brings us to exhibit B: mashups that are saving lives. Take the case of this fire chief who is saving lives using the power of Twitter. Seriously.

Rebooting the Firefighting Arsenal Twitter Humphrey monitors for keywords like "LA" and "fire." During 2007's 800-acre burn in Griffith Park, he got real-time reports on flare-ups and wind directions from Twitterers on the ground, then relayed the information to commanders battling the flames. This data-aggregation app lets Humphrey keep tabs on crises elsewhere. (In September, he knew about a poison gas scare in the Toronto subway as it happened.) Implication: If terrorists launch a multicity attack, he'll know in seconds. A head start could save countless lives. Mobile Alerts One of Humphrey's projects-in-progress is a Web site where users can plug in addresses—like home and the kids' school. Whenever an incident is reported at any of those sites, the system will beam a notification to the subscriber's cell phone or PDA. Map Mashups The LAFD already charts major fires with Google Maps. Humphrey wants more: images that blend street and satellite views with USGS topo data to supply firefighters with critical info, like the location of steep terrain or other hazards (dynamite factory, two blocks north!).

The potential for mashups are literally endless as this Cato Policy forum illustrates. That is, of course, if the government puts our data online which would only make sense...

Newspaper Economics

Via the Economist blog ... which clips Surowiecki.  Good debate.  Economist comments:

Does this mean that news, as a business, is dead? Not necessarily. Some papers will survive by selling things other than news—reputation, say, or exclusivity. Others will hang on until the print market shrinks enough that profitability is possible for a handful (or fewer) of national papers. Survivors in both groups are also likely to capitalise on the demand for news products that remain scarce—especially investigative reporting.

So, in the future, people will pay for information. A lot will be free, or national in scope so that large volume supports ad-based revenues. But people will pay for details on things they care most about. Hmmm. Sounds like a disaggregating market for information. Everyone a consumer, almost everyone a producer? Echoes of Neal Stephenson's "stringers" in Snowcrash.

Job Churn in Georgia

West Point today isn't the same town Ferguson grew up in. Textile company executives used to live here. But when the textile industry collapsed in the 1980s, the victim of foreign competition, they moved away. Thousands of jobs were lost. A few small technology firms took up some of the slack. But the high-tech bust of the late 1990s proved to be another job killer. "We survived without a federal bailout," Ferguson says sarcastically. Now, while much of America wallows in the gloom of a recession, there's great joy in West Point. "West Point will have more economic growth in the next 24 months than anywhere else in the country," Ferguson boasts. And he may be right.

KIA has come to town. The Korean automobile manufacturer is building a huge assembly plant, which will employ 2,900 workers when it begins turning out cars a year from now.

That's a section from Fred Barnes' story about the "other American Auto industry" in the U.S. -- foreign brands or "transplants." The story is filled with interesting anecdotes from the field and some good analysis. But I especially liked this paragraph above which captures three cycles of creative destruction over a short span of time.

Weight Loss (Aversion)

Economists and psychologists are making amazing discoveries, and one of the most interesting is the cornerstone of "prospect theory" based on research by Nobel prize recipients Kahneman and Tversky. This theory suggests that people tend to have a greater aversion to losses than they have attraction to making gains. And now we see more policies and programs rooted in good theory.

To wit, if someone paid you to lose weight with your own money, would that get you to pump iron? Beter phrased, what if they withheld payments if you gained weight, would that affect you? The latest research says yes.

"[Researchers] said weight-loss programs that reward people with money -- and remind them of the cash they stand to lose if they fail -- provided a powerful incentive to lose weight compared with more conventional approaches.

. . .

[Volpp the main researcher] said many weight-loss programs fail because people are being asked to make sacrifices now for rewards in the future.

"We wanted to create a reward system which gave them rewards in the present," said Volpp, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Volpp and colleagues studied two kinds of incentive programs for weight loss. One was a lottery-based design in which participants played a lottery and were allowed to collect their winnings if they met their weight-loss target.

The lotteries were running daily, and people were told what their winnings would have been if they had met their weight-loss target.

"There is a very strong sense of loss aversion," the theory that people are highly motivated to avoid losses, Volpp said in a telephone interview.

"The idea was to create a mechanism where loss aversion would help drive people's motivation," he said.

Facebook Viruses, Or Destructive Entrepreneurial Behavior

Facebook is now twice as big as France -- 125 million inhabitants and growing fast. The Motley Fool suggests that it may be an economy like any other.

Last week, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said that Facebook has 280,000 applications hosted at its site, small programs that enhance the service. Some, like Mob Wars, are huge moneymakers. Facebook's own virtual gifts -- $1 page decorations -- bring in more than $30 million annually.

That's today. Tomorrow, Sandberg says, you'll see Facebook become like France -- and the U.S., U.K., China, or any other country -- as a platform for business.... Facebook is creating a business-friendly virtual economy whose borders have yet to be fully defined.

It's an interesting idea; one that shouldn't entirely surprise us, given the proliferation of online shopping.

World of Warcraft and SecondLife fans have known about the benefits of an online market for years as this Reason.tv video makes clear, but Facebook promises to turn the idea fully mainstream in a way Peter Thiel's PayPal-dreaming libertarianism never really could. (But if you're planning of taking all your money and storing it in a virtual world, be forewarned. Congress was at work in 2006 trying to figure out ways to tax virtual worlds.)

But as with any economy, there can be disruptions and yes, even terrorism. Witness the Facebook virus, Koobface: (via Reuters)

Facebook's 120 million users are being targeted by a virus dubbed "Koobface" that uses the social network's messaging system to infect PCs, then tries to gather sensitive information such as credit card numbers.

It is the latest attack by hackers increasingly looking to prey on users of social networking sites.... Koobface spreads by sending notes to friends of someone whose PC has been infected. The messages, with subject headers like, "You look just awesome in this new movie," direct recipients to a website where they are asked to download what it claims is an update of Adobe Systems Inc's Flash player.

If they download the software, users end up with an infected computer, which then takes users to contaminated sites when they try to use search engines from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Live.com, according McAfee.

How cool, how creative, how destructive! Wired Magazine has more.

Law and Economics 2.0

Fortune has a nice article discussing Kauffman's new initiative (championed by Bob Litan) to focus Law and Economics on entrepreneurship / innovation / growth.  It's a very well written piece by Roger Parloff that has some pithy quotes by Bob as well as good political and historical context.

How does the current economic collapse — and its implicit lesson that over-reliance on market mechanisms have led us to disaster — affect his [Litan's] and Kauffman’s plans?

“Ironically,” he responds, “it may be an even bigger deal now that economy is collapsing. We are now about to have a huge national debate on the role of markets and regulation … and how much are we going to roll back from the market-oriented philosophy in which a lot of law-and-economics participated. … From our viewpoint we’re hopeful that whatever repairs we make in the economic system, we don’t kill off risk-taking and entrepreneurial drive, because that’s what we need for growth.”

The Stewart Mandel BCS Challenge

One of my all-time favorite writers is a guy named Stewart Mandel who covers college football for Sports Illustrated, but his latest ranking of the 34 college bowls games included a line that struck me as a personal challenge. Keep in mind that Mandel, like most sports writers, knows more about statistics than your average journalist. These folks live and breathe numbers, and then make a living by wrapping prose around them. But when Mandel dropped the C-bomb in his article (correlation), he crossed into my turf. 

Here's what he said: "...I think you will find that the date a game is played no longer bears any correlation to the quality of its matchup."

No correlation?  As in R-squared equals 0.00? I couldn't believe it. So I decided to put the two data series side by side and test Mandel's hypothesis that there is no correlation between quality and timing of college bowl games. The "game quality" data series was easy enough to create because Mandel gives us a simple 1-34 ranking that most observors would agree with (say with 90 percent correlation). The "timing" series I assembled pretty quickly by creating a number for each game that represents the days before the BCS championship game, which will be held on January 8, 2009 between the University of Oklahoma and the University of Florida. The chart below shows you that in fact, there is some correlation, 0.265 to be exact. So is Mandel wrong?  Well, you could interpret this result to say that he is 73.5 percent right. Not too shabby for a sports journo, eh? He's still not correct, but the man has a very good point.

The chart shows each of the 34 games as dots on the grid. On further analysis, I decided to highlight the key BCS games (Fiesta, Rose, Sugar) as well as the Poinsetta Bowl. Why Poinsetta? Because this clash between 10-2 TCU and undefeated Boise State is played 16 days before the championship - one of the earliest - yet is ranked the #5 game by Mandel. The chart also highlights the four other games to be played on New Year's Day in addition to the Rose Bowl. Those are the BCS Orange Bowl, Outback Bowl, Gator Bowl, and the great SEC-Big10 undercard Capital One Bowl (which I believe contender Florida lost last year to this year's hapless Michigan).

For many decades, January 1 was the day of days for college football. This was the day that all the great games were played, when the Cotton Bowl was one of the biggies, and when Notre Dame was sure to be on the tube. With the advent of the BCS, college football stretches the greatest games out. The powers that be have not yet caved into demand for a playoff - and for that I am glad. Every other sport has caved into playoff mania, and in many of them there are more teams that make the playoffs than don't. In college football at least, every game matters.

Congrats to all the teams playing bowls this year, even Louisiana Tech (7-5) vs. Northern Illinois (6-6). You guys are doing a lot better than the poor kids who played in the Apple Cup (still meaningful!).

Disclaimer: there are two reasons college football is relevent to growthology.org readers.  First, if its big enough for President-elect Obama to get involved, it's big enough for us.  Second, my son and I are about to create a new blog for fun based on college football and statistics -- an entrepreneurial venture of sorts. I'm hoping the experience teaches him some math skills (how many other 8th graders are learning econometrics?) and also some Internet skills. Will keep you posted.

Kotkin: U.S. Industry is Rising, Just not Michigan

If you are interested in what is really happening to U.S. manufacturing, check out this essay by Joel Kotkin:

Overall, U.S. industry has become among the most productive in the world--output has doubled over the past 25 years, and productivity has grown at a rate twice that of the rest of the economy. Far from dead, our manufacturing sector is the world's largest, with 5% of the world's population producing five times their share in industrial goods.

So what is the problem then? If it is not the effort and ingenuity of American workers or our infrastructure, Detroit's problems must lie somewhere else, largely with almost insanely bad management.

Henninger's Warning

The greatest danger in the current economic crisis is that the United States will lose its historic appetite for risk. The mood now is that risk-taking got us into this mess. Risk, though, is the quintessential American trait that built the nation -- from the Battle of Bunker Hill to the rise of the microchip. If we let risk give way to a new ethos of commercial reserve and regulatory restriction, the upward arc of the U.S. ascendancy will flatten. Maybe it already has.

...

This is the moment for Americans to rediscover the "frontier thesis" of Frederick Jackson Turner. In a seminal paper delivered in 1893 to the American Historical Association, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," Turner argued that the U.S. found its identity as it pushed away from the Eastern seaboard and crossed a series of frontier "fall lines": the Allegheny Mountains, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the plains, the Rocky Mountains and California.

...

The current crisis is the result of a world gone madly long on real estate. Daniel Boone, the famed American frontiersman, went belly-up speculating on Kentucky land. He moved on in 1788 and paid his debts. So should we, without losing sight of the American frontier, where we discovered the rewards of risk.

So says WSJ's columnist Daniel Henninger. (I've never read one of Henninger's columns without being happy that I did, and going forward a little wiser).

The Coming Browser Revolution?

Notwithstanding the tremendous success of Mozilla's Firefox at dislodging Internet Explorer, most people still use I.E for patrolling the Internet which just goes to show you that the best product isn't always the first.

As reports InformationWeek,

Mozilla's Firefox has seen steady growth in market share this year, reaching more than 20% as Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Internet Explorer has fallen below 70%, a Web metrics firm said Tuesday.

As of the end of November, Firefox had a 20.78% share, while IE had fallen to 69.77%, according to Net Applications. Throughout the year, Firefox usage on the Web has grown steadily, starting in January with a 16.98% share. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, started the year with a 75.47% share.

Also showing steady growth is Apple's Safari browser, which rose to 7.13% after starting the year with a 5.82% share, Net Applications' figures showed. Google Chrome topped 1% when launched in September, and soon fell below that mark. The browser did not reach 1% again until Nov. 27, but ended the month with a 0.94% share.

My R.A., Charles, convinced me to switch from IE to Firefox over the summer ... an experiment that lasted about 4 days. I'm perfectly happy with IE, but will keep an eye on the churning here. Oddly, Charles has switched over from Firefox to Google Chrome, which as of yet isn't available for Macs, but promises to be one of the coolest new browsers around. The Google suite -- gmail, gchat, YouTube -- all seem faster on Chrome, but he's very upset that it isn't perfectly delicious compatible as Firefox's latest version. Still, Google's promised that Chrome will have more add-ons, so he's pretty excited.

Wired Magazine has a fun time imagining what the browsers of the future will look like and how they'll be modified to suit very particular markets. It's an interesting idea -- that browsers will be designed for specific types of people -- and one that will totally revolutionize the way you interact with the web.

Imagine the first company that allows users to have access to their click stream -- that is what they click on over time. Imagine a web browser that knows what you want before you know it. Far-fetched? Not quite. Just check out our post on the awesomeness that is Netflix's recommender system. (For those interested in recommender systems, you might want to check out Wired Magazine's article on Gavin Potter, a 48 year old British psychologist who may end up winning Netflix's $1,000,000 prize for designing the best recommendation system. He blogs (infrequently) at Just a guy in a garage.)

The downside of clickstream is that utilizing its power involves a major privacy tradeoff. Kids don't want parents watching their every cyber-step. Same goes for spouses. It may be one of the great ironies of this age of discovery that one of the biggest truths we discover is that the human animal needs, more often than not, to be left alone.

Some more food for thought: Read John Battelle's masterful book, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. It is essential reading for understanding how Google and other search companies but the information in information technology. For those who don't have the time to read the book, Battelle gave a great hour-long lecture on the book for Google NYC. 

Also, promising is Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of  a (forthcoming) book and blog tentatively entitled, The Googlization of Everything. Vaidhyanathan did a bloggingheads.tv with Will Wilkinson of Cato talking about Google and its revolutionary search power and effect on culture. He's a little too dismal for my tastes, but all in all, worth watching.

Picturing The Jobs Report

First, some charts of what today's BLS Employment Situation report are showing, followed by some personal thoughts. The three charts compare the change in employment numbers relative to the first month of the recession for the present recession as well as an average of the last five recessions. Note, I count the dual 1980-82 recession as a single event.

It seems evident from these three charts that no matter what measure you consider, our present situation is worse in at least the intensity of decline. Also, many recessions end after 12 months or less, and a turnaround is often visible in the data - revised data, I should add. I'm afraid 2009 will be an ugly one economically. The story in the New York Times tells us how bad and surprising the report is.

Again, everyone is surprised at how bad the recession is getting. It defies forecasting models as if they were the dunces in the corner. Why?  Because this is not a mathematical downturn. We already know the panic in the financial markets led to a consumption drop way beyond what rational behavior would suggest, and now we know that employers are overeacting as well.  Kind of feels like the economy has downshifted to a lower equilibrium, or is in the process of doing so.

So this is what its like to stop living beyond your means, I guess.

Anyone looking for a positive note, remember that this downturn is all relative. Comparisons to the Great Depression are overblown because no matter what happens, we have things like electricity, central air conditioning, and cheap telecom that put out level of prosperity in another world. We should remember that a modern global depression is strongly preferable to a 1928 boom. A much greater percentage of our babies will be born healthy and surive their first year, far fewer people will die in pain and hunger, plus our movies have much better special effects. Let's keep our priorities straight.

Transformational Ideas -

Some great advice here in an article (by Greg Huang) about Nick Hanauer, the first non-family investor in Amazon.com. It's a terrific article, but this line is my favorite:

So entrepreneurship is a dangerous field, he said. “The difference between being an idiot and being a genius is very, very thin.”

Exactly.  And I try to stay right on that line! OK, now back to the wisdom from Hanauer:

—If you have a breakthrough idea, you don’t need a breakthrough way to get it to the market. “If you have transformational value, people will beat down your door…Focus on the product. If the product is good enough, marketing will take care of itself. If the product sucks, no amount of marketing will get you over the hump.”

—”I’m not a technologist. From my point of view, technology is simply a thing that allows you to bring transformational things to customers…People get excited about a particular technology, and they forget the question: what does this do for people? It’s about what the customer gets compared to the alternatives.”

—”As an entrepreneur, I’ve never been concerned about competition. If you’re early, run like hell. It’s all about execution at the end of the day. It’s about having a great idea, executing like hell, and delivering value to customers.”

Bloomberg: bankruptcy now on the table

General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC executives are considering accepting a pre-arranged bankruptcy as the last-resort price of getting a multibillion-dollar government bailout, said a person familiar with their internal discussions.

Auto executives have warned bankruptcy would lead to liquidation as customers abandoned the companies. Staff for three members of Congress have asked restructuring experts if a pre- arranged bankruptcy -- negotiated with workers, creditors and lenders -- could be used to reorganize the industry without liquidation, a person familiar with that matter said.

Blommberg reports.  Hat Tip to Mish.

Lynn LoPucki, who teaches bankruptcy law at Harvard University and the University of California at Los Angeles, said Democrats’ goal of preserving a U.S. auto industry is not doable without a bankruptcy.

“A workout requires everybody’s agreement,” LoPucki said. “If I own bonds, GM can’t force me to take less than 100 cents on the dollar outside of bankruptcy court. Bankruptcy is the only thing that can work because GM and the government need the ability to force people to go along with the plan. Paying everyone in full is prohibitively expensive.”

The Bankruptcy Pledge So Far

On December 3, 2008, I made this pledge:

I will buy a new vehicle from the first American auto company to enter bankruptcy. I will buy it within six months of the date of entry, on the condition that it has to be a real bankruptcy, and the company must follow through with real restructuring.

Since then, three others have made the same pledge in writing to me at kanepledge@gmail.com. They deserve recognition, and have my sincere thanks.  They are:

• David Scalzo (the first to write in)
• Ken Girardin
• Caliban Darklock

Mini-Nuclear Reactors Coming to An Exotic Locale By You?

Hyperion Power Generation recently announced that they'll be building mini nuclear reactors to power remote areas of the world. But just what would someone want with a nuclear reactor?

"There is a strong humanitarian bent to these reactors," said John "Grizz" Deal, Hyperion's CEO. "This was invented to provide electricity and hot water to remote locations, where people might not have electricity or clean water." Deal says that Hyperion has already received more than 100 orders for the $25-30 million-dollar reactors, which are sealed shut with concrete and have no moving parts. The reactors are designed to generate electricity or boil water clean after being hooked up to water piped near their 500-degree surfaces.

At a price of $25 million a reactor, it's a little bit outside my price range, but certainly within the realm of possibility for mining, offshore oil drilling, and anywhere else people need to be. A potential business plan would be for one of these companies to use the nuclear reactor for power and then sell it to the inhabitants. It may even be a good idea to give it away as part of corporate social responsibility.

And if nothing else, a nice stocking stuffer for the kids this Holiday ...