Dana Blankenhorn

Two Enemies

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 9 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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Each generational crisis contains elements of those that came before.

As in 1968, we see a nation divided by war and growing debt. As in 1860, this is mainly a regional split, north vs. south. As in 1896, it's all about money, with a small Gilded Age crowd of oligarchs seeming to hold all the cards.

But there's also a great commonality with the crisis that consumed Franklin Roosevelt after 1932. Democracy is at stake, with the greatest risks to it being false choices and apathy.

The New Deal was created to address the key problem of the economy, but that program did not define the existential crisis of the Greatest Generation. That was a more basic question: could democracy survive? Could freedom live in a highly scaled industrial era, against the false choices of communism and fascism?

The Next Recession

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 8 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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As an economic recovery proceeds, it carries within it the seeds of its own destruction and the next recession.

To those with a Clue, these seeds are easy to see. It was easy for me to see the growing Internet bubble in the late 1990s, and soon after I launched a-clue.com I began warning of it, sometimes stridently, amazed that everyone around me on the Internet Commerce beat was ignoring it.

The same thing was true for the last recession. There were many voices shouting from the economic rooftops that there was a bubble in housing prices, that liar loans carried risks, and that the “insurance” being purchased against default wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. These voices were ignored as well.

There are two reasons for this.

The Cloud Gold Rush

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 7 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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Last year I wrote a lot about the “barbell” developing in computing.

The computing middle class of PCs and servers were being replaced on the one hand by cheap devices and on the other hand by clouds delivering software and services.

Recent events have shown that, from the U.S. perspective, this barbell has only one side.

That side is the cloud.

In Defense of Zoos Killing Off Their Charges

by Robin Blankenhorn

This is one of a series of articles written by Robin Blankenhorn, a range and wildlife graduate of Texas A&M in Kingsville, Texas, concerning urban wildlife issues. Enjoy. 

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I am sure by now that you have heard about the Copenhagen Zoo. How they put down a healthy 2-year old male giraffe named Marius even when there were other options available. 

Many people are now outraged. There have been death threats sent to to the zoo and even the director of the zoo. People say it was wrong to decide to end his life. They are insulted that he was then fed to lions and tigers.

I wonder if you understand the whole story. I want to defend the zoo.

The Value of Emotional Intelligence

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 6 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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The industrial era was marked by shortages, and the need for technical expertise to overcome those shortages.

That expertise came in many forms. There was political and economic expertise, there was engineering and scientific expertise. A host of new professions grew up around this expertise. The world that these people built was defined by this kind of knowledge, turned to science, then through engineering transformed into technology.

The Internet Era has flipped all this on its head. You don't necessarily need to know stuff when you can Google it. The job of building knowledge, which was once about brute force, is now more about building connections, both among facts and among the people with access to those facts.

This is why the center of economic life has shifted in the 21^st century. Power that resided in factories early in the 20^th century, then moved to offices later in the century, now resides on university campuses.