Earlier today, Vice President Joe Biden unveiled a strategy to spend a whopping $53 billion on high-speed rail over the next six years. It’s a plan that will, according to Biden, bring the U.S. closer to giving 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail in the next 25 years–a goal highlighted in Obama’s recent State of the Union address.
To many people on Wall Street, gambling is a dirty word. Overlords at firms like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan take great pains to differentiate the sober, serious profession of investing from the irresponsible, impulsive act of betting. Conversely, many traditional investment houses are eager to dismiss newfangled equity trading techniques as something closer to spins of the roulette wheel than to long-term investment strategies.
Technology has played a fundamental role in this change. No self-respecting cosmopolitan man looking for an evening of companionship is going to lean out his car window and call out to a woman at a traffic light. The Internet and the rise of mobile phones have enabled some sex workers to professionalize their trade. Today they can control their image, set their prices, and sidestep some of the pimps, madams, and other intermediaries who once took a share of the revenue.
A year of research went into this.
None of the mummies in Cairo’s main archaeological museum were damaged during a break-in last week but 70 other exhibits will need restoration, top Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass said on Sunday.
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Egypt’s cultural treasures are now secure, Hawass said. “The Valley of the Kings is safe, the pyramids are safe, 24 museums are safe, the synagogues and the monasteries and the Muslim monuments are completely safe,” he said.
As we enter the 14th/15th day of protests, this is great news.
Fascinating piece from A Smart Bear:
Consulting is a great way to earn a living and a smart way to self-finance a startup.
The trick is to avoid all these traps. For example, you know billing a full 40 hours per week is critical, so make it a habit to review hours weekly to make sure no one is consistently falling behind. As another example, set up incentives where employees get to share in the profits when they bust ass.
It’s always hard. Most consulting companies don’t make much profit, and it’s one in a thousand that has the discipline to launch a successful product during off-hours. If you’re going to make it happen, you yourself need to be serious, disciplined, and relentless.
The job might require competing with Netflix and Amazon with one hand tied behind your back, as Hulu’s big backers (Fox, ABC, NBC) no longer seem to believe in the business model.
The Howard Development blog noticed that if you search on Google for the keyword Chatter, the ads that appear are, first a Salesforce ad and second, an ad for Chatter competitor Yammer.
Seems that Yammer went out there and bought all the keywords for Chatter. Anyone who searches for “Chatter” after the Super Bowl gets to learn about Yammer, too. Smart.
Michael Lind, a policy director for the Economic Growth Program at the New American Foundation:
If the American rich increasingly do not depend for their wealth on American workers and American consumers or for their safety on American soldiers or police officers, then it is hardly surprising that so many of them should be so hostile to paying taxes to support the infrastructure and the social programs that help the majority of the American people. The rich don’t need the rest anymore.
I disagree, for a number of reasons, but it still makes for a good read.