Dana Blankenhorn

Blockchain!

Recently I was asked by my latest big client to start a new column. As always, not much money in it, but lots of good learning ahead.

It is a tech column. Specifically, it’s about financial technology, or fintech.

Square is fintech and Apple Pay is fintech. But they’re all fintech of a type we have had now for two generations, ever since the Los Angeles Chargers derived their name from a credit card, Carte Blanche. They’re taking existing payment networks and putting them inside cell phones, or providing access through the phones.  

They’re not that exciting.

You know what is exciting? Blockchain is exciting. Over the next 10 years blockchain is going to kill more jobs than the self-driving car. (Don Tapscott, to the right, was an early blockchain advocate. Follow him on Twitter.) 

At its heart, a blockchain is very simple. Think of a database. Now imagine that each entry in that database is encrypted. Now imagine that the entries are connected, just like entries in a database are often connected, but in the form of a general ledger.

Now you’ve got a blockchain.

A Few Words in Defense of Our Country

One of the most insane things I’ve seen, heard and read over the last few months has been this liberal hand-wringing which assumes Donald Trump has, or is about to, destroy the United States of America.

It’s true that a President can start a nuclear war, which could spread into a general conflagration doing untold damage to people and the environment. But that’s always true, and it’s like Bugs Bunny said about Martin Martian’s death ray, “But all my friends are on da Earth!” The point being no one wants to make that decision, unless they are truly forced to and Donald Trump is, whatever else he might be, still a human being.

Don’t count your Armageddons before they’re hatched.

Green Acres Revisited

A half-century ago, when TV comedy was all fantasy, before Norman Lear brought it back to Earth, many shows were set in a comic Appalachia.

Shows like Green Acres. 

Green Acres was the story of a lawyer, Oliver Wendell Douglas (that’s how we know he’s a lawyer), who decides to get away from it all by moving to the country.  He was a success in the city, but here he is constantly humiliated by the locals upon whom he has made himself dependent. People like Mr. Haney, who had sold him the place, and Sam Drucker, who runs the general store. Even Eb Dawson, his farmhand, seems able to outwit him.

Green Acres is set in Greater Appalachia. It is less a place than a state of mind, a byword for white, rural poverty, the kind Democrats used in the mid-60s to sell Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Nixon and Norman Lear made everything more real. There was a “rural purge” of shows like Green Acres in 1971, poverty became a black and brown thing, and under the Nixon Thesis of Conflict, or Reaganism if you prefer, good people were to recoil from poor folks.

What if you were trying to make Green Acres today?

Most of our world would be easily recognizable to folks a half-century ago – cars are cars, homes are homes, and utilities are utilities. Hooterville, and the countryside surrounding it, would not look familiar. The Internet has transformed society, and made places like this redundant.

The Full Politicization of Sport

When politics gets me down, I take comfort in sport.

Sport can’t be political, can it?

Yes it can.

One of the biggest sports stories right now is the rise of Atlanta United , a new MLS soccer team. They have sold out Georgia Tech’s football stadium, and will do the same at the Atlanta Falcons’ palace when they move there this summer.

When I walk around my intown neighborhood these days I am greeted by dozens of Atlanta United banners, hung out of doorways and hanging on flagpoles in front of porches.

But turn on sports talk radio and you won’t hear a word about it. There the talk is of nothing but American football, and, given that it’s spring, of baseball.

There is no business excuse for not talking about the soccer team. There is only a political one.

The Atlanta Braves are the reason for this. The Braves are a baseball team. They started in Boston, as the Red Stockings, in 1876, and got their current name after a group of New York investors affiliated with Tammany Hall bought them over a century ago. They’re starting their season soon, although you can’t prove that from my neighbors.