“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” -Georg Hegel Back in March, I was reading everything I could find about COVID-19 and about pandemics. Eventually that tapered off. But this week I decided that it was time to go back and… Read More
All posts tagged “bill gates”
The case for being a generalist
As many of you know, I am huge of Malcolm Gladwell. And one of the things that he has popularized through his writing is this idea that we all need to spend at least 10,000 hours specializing on someting in order to become truly exceptional… Read More
Bill Gates on the first modern pandemic
After watching the docuseries, Inside Bill’s Brain, I couldn’t help but think that the work he and Melinda are doing isn’t getting nearly enough exposure. Here they are working tirelessly to eradicate global diseases, like polio, and find new ways to combat climate change. And… Read More
COVID-19 in the developing world
One of the things that Bill Gates mentions in his recent TED talk about the coronavirus is that we need to be aware of what might be coming in developing countries, particularly in the southern hemisphere with winter about to arrive. (There’s some evidence of… Read More
How to respond to the coronavirus
I just finished watching this TED talk with Bill Gates. For those of you who are up on their TED talks, this is not the one from five years ago where Bill predicted a pandemic and told us all that we were nowhere near ready.… Read More
Global distribution of wealth
Bloomberg recently came up with a new index to define the distribution of wealth across adults in the world. They’re calling it your “net worth number” and the scale ranges from -2 to 11. Sadly, because the gap is so significant between the rich and… Read More
Comparing ICE vehicle and electric vehicle travel times
While we were doing our West Palm Beach to Toronto road trip last weekend, I started wondering how much longer the trip would be taking had we been driving a Tesla. The drive, according to Google Maps, is normally about 20 hours and 46 minutes.… Read More
Bill Gates on tech and climate change
Bill Gates recently spoke with David Rubenstein at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. Full video, here. The bit that got a lot of attention is his admission that Microsoft should have dominated in mobile (in lieu of Android). The core competencies were all there… Read More
3 thoughts on employment
There’s lots of talk these days about how technological innovation and globalization are taking our jobs. Of course, these are not unreasonable concerns. The data suggests a hollowing out of the middle class and the threat of automation feels perhaps more real than over with… Read More
A Detroit story of single family homes and pianos
https://500px.com/embed.js I was reading Aaron Renn’s blog this morning and a post called, How Urban Planning Made Motown Records Possible, caught my attention. His argument – taken from a book called Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story – is that the prevalence of pianos in… Read More