Insightful article.

Entrepreneurship and private enterprise creation will need to finally be given free reign. As measured by the World Bank, Egypt ranks near the global bottom in enterprise creation: for every 1000 persons of working age, 0.13 enterprises come into existence yearly. Bureaucracy and registration expenses remain much higher than the world average, to which one should add the cost of corruption and bribes. Many of the business-oriented reforms promised by the past few governments have only seen the light in the form of legal texts and remain to be implemented. A more concerted approach, involving the government, private and citizen sectors, could allow young entrepreneurs to create their own enterprises and build their own economic future–in the true spirit of the Egyptian revolution.

Yes.

Freedom of Speech and Expression, a necessary requirement for any long-lasting freedoms.

The New Yorker examines the effects of the “Tyrant Tax”.

Not surprisingly, when autocratic regimes in the region have tried to change their economies they’ve done so primarily with an eye toward maintaining power. A recent study by the political scientist Oliver Schlumberger shows, reform did not, for the most part, aim at introducing genuine free-market competition, the most important feature of a healthy capitalist system. Instead, it strengthened what he calls “patrimonial capitalism”—a system in which the key determinant of success is how close you are to those in power.

From Arabist:

Amr Moussa represents the past. He’s appealing because he’s a known quantity at an uncertain time. And he’s argument number one for why you need alternatives to get their names and faces known, because right now, the only person known to most Egyptians and seen as presidentiable is Moussa. And that’s a scary fact.

A founder of Justin.tv on the merits of going to college. Two of my favorite quotes:

For a lot of students, college is a vacation, and it is a bunch of bullshit if we pretend otherwise. If we want to have a subsidized four year holiday in the prime of our lives, then I’m seriously all for it, but let’s call it what it is.

…and…

It didn’t teach me any skills relevant to anything I’m doing now. I learned nothing about programming, web development, design, product management, project management, general management, basic accounting, corporate strategy, business communication, or really anything useful. I was a Physics and Philosophy major, but from conversations with other friends (science majors who went on to med school, or econ majors who went to hedge funds, etc) no one seemed to learn anything useful in their later careers. Most of the foundation in communication, writing, and quantitative reasoning I developed in middle school and high school, and not in college.

Prof. Erik Demaine (MIT)

If you want to be a world-class programmer, you can program every day for ten years, or you can program every day for two years and take an algorithms class.

From Wikipedia:

Franco has been described as having “an unusually high metabolism for productivity…a superhuman ability to focus”. Dissatisfied with his career’s direction, Franco reenrolled at UCLA in the fall of 2006 as an English major with a creative writing concentration. Having received permission to take as many as 62 course credits per quarter compared to the normal limit of 19 while continuing to act, he received his undergraduate degree in June 2008 with a GPA over 3.5. For his degree, Franco prepared his departmental honors thesis as a novel under the supervision of Mona Simpson. He moved to New York to simultaneously attend graduate school at Columbia University’s MFA writing program, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for filmmaking, and Brooklyn College for fiction writing, while occasionally commuting to North Carolina’s Warren Wilson College for poetry. He received his MFA from Columbia in 2010. Franco is a Ph.D. student in English at Yale University and will also attend the Rhode Island School of Design.

Talk about productivity. (Thanks @SPytlik)

One of the most outrageous stories today, that’s for sure. But apparently, Saudi King has $150b in cash laying around.

Great of them to profile the website. Available in both English and Arabic.

Pebbles.

The world’s first recorded cure for stammering was the “pebble method”: go down to the seashore, fill your mouth with pebbles, and force your words to overcome the impediment. This was the self-help cure that, in the 4th century BC, cured the stuttering orator Demosthenes, and launched his career as the greatest public speaker of the ancient Greek world.