Back in 1989 I was given responsibility in my business brief for my bank’s business in Canada. At the time, that consisted of one office in Toronto that took the form of what was called a Schedule B bank, which was basically a small banking office that performed all the basic functions of a bank. The operative word in that description is small. Canada was approximately 10-11 times smaller than the U.S. economy. The United…
From my perch in my living room, if I look out to the west I have to look through floor-to-ceiling glass windows out to my deck and then through a 42” high plate glass railing out to the distant vista beyond. It’s a tad misty this morning, but as I look out in that direction, what I see is an end-to-end array of rolling hills that populate the dozen or so miles from this hilltop…
During the movie Tora! Tora! Tora!, the 1970 epic war film which depicted the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 from both the American and Japanese perspectives (considered one of the more historically accurate Pearl Harbor films, co-directed by American and Japanese filmmakers), the Japanese pilots never actually say, “Bansai!” They do say “Tora! Tora! Tora!” That phrase (which means “Tiger, Tiger, Tiger” in Japanese) became famous not just historically, but culturally (mostly thanks to…
Several years ago why trying to build a megastructure on New York Harbor, the New York Wheel, I spent some time studying the whys and wherefore of megastructures in the history of mankind. People don’t “have to” build megastructures, but throughout history they’ve chosen to for several noteworthy reasons. The biggest of these is for demonstrating power and authority. Massive structures like pyramids show “we have the resources, organization, and power to do this.” They’re…
Georgie Porgie is a classic English nursery rhyme that goes like this: Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie, Kissed the girls and made them cry. When the boys came out to play, Georgie Porgie ran away. The origins of the rhyme are a bit murky, but it’s been around since at least the 19th century. There are various theories about who “Georgie Porgie” might have been based on. Some suggest it referred to King George I.…
I am aware that I live too much in my mind. I can’t seem to help it. Someone broke off my internal volume control knob and I’m fairly certain many people who know me only wish I had an accessible external volume control. I recall during my college fraternity days that there was a caricature artist who came to the fraternity once a year (with 54 fraternities and probably 15 sororities at Cornell in those…
This week I cannot recall how many articles I have seen with the headline about what the government shutdown means to me (or anyone reading the article). I know there are Republicans out there who do wish the government didn’t go into shutdown, but there are way too many that are busy finding it a good thing for apparently two reasons. The first is that it allows them, by virtue of the Senate voting process,…
We all learned that Jane Goodall died today. Jane Goodall was a renowned British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist, best known for her groundbreaking research on wild chimpanzees in Tanzania. In 1960, at age 26, she began studying chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. Her work revolutionized our understanding of chimpanzees and human evolution. She’s the person who discovered that chimps make and use tools, eat meat, and have complex social behaviors, findings that…
Yesterday I was on a ride out to the eastern part of the county to an area called Sunrise Highway. It is in the Laguna Mountains near the Mexican border and defines the line between the western and eastern parts of San Diego with the Carizzo Valley to the east that runs down towards the Salton Sea. The high plains basin of Lake Cuyamaca and the ridge line to the east of that are some…
I’ve always kept an eye on Echostar, the company that built out the Dish Network. That started about 35 years ago when I met my friend and VC mentor, Frank. Frank ran a venture capital business in the DC Beltway area and was wired into the Department of Defense technology vortex that spun out of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the U.S. Department of Defense’s primary research and development organization focused on breakthrough technologies…