Twitterin’ Tesla It is Saturday morning and that time which will forever be cartoon time to me and those in my generation who grew up waiting expectantly for this very time of week. Do you remember Sylvester (a.k.a Sylvester James Pussycat, Sr.)? His catchphrase was a spittle-soaked version of “Sufferin’ Succotash!” We mostly grew up not having a clue what that meant, but being amused by its rhythmic sound. Perhaps we knew that the combination…
Teaching to Teach I have been teaching at the graduate business school level since 2007. That represents fifteen years or approximately 20% of my life (deducting a bit for the interregnum between teaching at Cornell and University of San Diego). I have taught a variety of subjects including hedge fund investing, securities finance, pension funds, project finance, advanced corporate finance and now business ethics. This semester I am teaching a course called Law, Policy and…
Jettisoning Junk This summer when I travel to the old homestead in Ithaca, which I even call Homeward Bound, I will take on the task of depersonalizing the house of all the memorabilia that I will want to keep once the University takes over the house for good at the end of the year. Several people have called this the end of an era and they are not wrong in characterizing it as such, but…
Voting as a Duty Yesterday I watched an interview with E.J. Dionne and Miles Rapoport, the authors of a somewhat radical new book called 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting. This book argues that the best way to cut through all the voter suppression and voter fraud crap we are living through is to make voting a mandatory obligation of citizenship. That sounds so radical, but it really isn’t. There are many mandatory obligations…
The Art of Peace There are so many places one can take the subject of peace. It is perhaps one of the universal desires of mankind no matter what word is used to describe it, and yet it is certainly the most illusive of goals mankind has ever faced. I think it is fair to suggest that primordial man might know it when he saw it, but probably was not so presumptuous as to ever…
Faith I am rewatching the Netflix series The Crown and finding it great entertainment and chock full of thoughtful issues worthy of contemplation. That is the sign of well-produced, directed and acted movie or series. Being thought-provoking is something I very much value in my movie and TV viewing. It seems somehow easier to do be thought-provoking in a written piece and easier to be entertaining in a visual piece, but the ability to enroll…
The Jungle of My Mind My readers have often heard me harp about my distaste for the tropics. I lived six of my first seven years in the tropics of Venezuela and Costa Rica and it has left an indelible mark. There are few places I would rather not find myself stranded in than a dense dark jungle. I think its a combination of the humidity-driven discomfort and the truly creepy crawly things that thrive…
One Stolen Accordion There is a social media site that I now connect with that throws me bits and pieces about local goings on. It’s called Nextdoor and it has spread in it’s twelve-year existence to encompassing 116,000 local areas, serving over ten million members. That is still a relatively small fraction of the population, but if we assume it is more popular in non-urban settings, that is quite a lot of users. The U.S.…
The Magic Kingdom My visiting family just returned from a two-day stint at Disneyland. They are a Disneyworld family, but they enjoy Disneyland equally well. I wrote several months ago about my visit to Disneyworld and how impressed I was by the pleasure it evokes in so many people who visit and visit regularly. Yesterday, the state of Florida revoked Disneyworld’s special district permit that it has enjoyed for 55 years when it was used…
I’m Shrinking Do you remember that scene from the 1957 classic, but somewhat cheesy movie The Incredible Shrinking Man when he starts to shrink so much due to exposure to radiation and insecticide that he literally shrinks away into oblivion? As he does so you hear him say in a smaller and smaller voice, “Help! I’m shrinking…I’m shrinking…” Well, it turns out that this is where science fiction meets reality. News flash! We are all…