I have to see for myself what I'm selling

To lead a products company successfully, you can go to business school, or you can just read this EMAIL RANT BY BILL GATES. Comments?

This is a good time to recommend a couple of excellent little products I've noticed. We take the big ones for granted, of course, Google, Microsoft (I LOVE Clip Art, and those document templates for writing letters, resumes and all that)...

The first is Weebly. Make a free website. Site looks nice. No ads.
The second is cbox. Nice clean chatbox/shoutbox on your webpages. Customize colour, size, etc. No user logins or payment required.

Where the rich folks at?

World now has 10 million millionaires
North America is still home to the most millionaires, with a third of the world’s wealthiest, but their ranks are growing fastest in Brazil, China and India. By the Associated Press. (Read More...)

Much Respect to Dubai

Premiere architecture dynamique au monde à Dubaï
by allcurious

The Da Vinci Tower (also known as Dynamic Architecture Building) is a proposed 313 m (1,027 ft), 68-floor tower in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The tower is expected to be architecturally innovative for several reasons. Uniquely, each floor will be able to rotate independently. This will result in a constantly changing shape of the tower. Each floor will rotate a maximum of one full rotation in 90 minutes. The entire tower will be powered from turbines and solar panels, and five other buildings in the vicinity will also be provided with electricity. The turbines will be located between each of the rotating floors. They will generate 1,200,000 kilowatt-hours of energy from the movement of the floors, and the solar panels will be located on the roof. Construction of the Da Vinci Tower is expected to be completed in 2009.

DO WHAT YOU LOVE

Such as...

Brain Drain? Try again.

Beyond brain drain
From Economist.com
Source

Human capital increasingly votes with its feet
The shift of workers abroad used to be called “brain drain”. But Manpower argues that this scarcely captures the complexity today's increasingly globalised “market for talent”. It proposes a lexicon of no less than six categories of brain mobility.

Along with brain drain, which is when a country loses more educated brains than it can replace, there is the even more negative “brain waste”: when people go abroad to do work that pays better but is less skilled than what they would do at home.

“Brain export” is the more positive version of drain and waste. This happens when educated workers leave their home countries but more than pay for their absence through remittances, technology transfer and boosting their native countries' workforce when they return.

“Brain globalisation” is simply the recognition that international mobility of skilled human capital is now an integral part of life in multinational companies and the global economy. “Brain circulation” refers to skilled workers moving between countries to ply their trade. “Brain exchange” is when multinational firms move skilled workers between their operations in different countries—having cosmopolitan workers, especially executives, is increasingly seen as a competitive advantage in leading global companies. (More...)

50,000 Megawatts

Expect state of emergency declaration in power sector by July, President Yar’Adua assures
Source

President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua announced on Friday June 13 in Paris that his Administration will formally declare a state of emergency in Nigeria’s power sector next month.

Responding to concerns expressed by prospective French investors over current power supply problems in Nigeria, President Yar’Adua said that under the emergency which will be in force for three years, the Federal and state governments will set aside Five Billion Dollars for the rehabilitation and expansion of Nigeria’s power generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure.

The President told the gathering of French businessmen that after the three-year emergency period, Nigeria’s generation and distribution infrastructure will be privatised while its transmission infrastructure will remain under the control of a state-owned company.

He said that Nigeria will seek additional financing from international finance institutions for the rehabilitation and expansion of its power infrastructure, adding that his Administration intended to establish a proper foundation for the increment of Nigeria’s power generation capacity to about 50,000 megawatts by the year 2020. More...

Comments!

Wanna ride another housing bubble?

You've always wanted to buy and own a home...Now IS the time.
The US has seen the worst of the downturn and the bulls will soon be charging again. In a few years people will be flippin' those houses like they never even heard of the 2007 sub-prime meltdown.
The next housing bubble starts now. Do you have any research supporting or disproving this? Post a comment.

What's your Money Personality?

Source

By Brent Kessel, MSN Money

In my experience, the people who are happiest with their relationship to money are fairly balanced among most, if not all, of these archetypes. But the reality is that most people have one or two dominant archetypes that keep them stuck with unsatisfying financial habits.

One of the areas where our dominant archetypes can create the most damage is investing. For example, the Guardian prefers ultraconservative assets such as certificates of deposit and bonds, and can tend to trade too much to avoid losses. My advice for such a personality: Create a long-term investment plan that requires little meddling, and stick to it.

Or take the Star. When it comes to investing, he or she chooses assets because they're in vogue, such as tech stocks in the late 1990s, real estate and hedge funds more recently or "green" companies for the future. For such a personality, I advise investing 90% of his or her net worth in a "boring," disciplined portfolio and only 10% in a "cocktail party" account, so he or she still has investments to brag about.

Our dominant archetypes can change over time, especially with guidance.

"For many years, my focus was on building my business and savings, to the point of not really taking the time to fully enjoy or share the fruits of my success," says Abacus client John Baudhuin, a co-founder of fitness company Spinning, which developed the group-cycling program used by 35,000 gyms worldwide.

"But in recent years, I've shifted some of the emphasis from the Saver and Empire Builder to the Pleasure Seeker and Caretaker, and my life is more balanced as a result. For example, I started a family and splurged on a high-performance car I never would have considered buying even a few years ago."

Baudhuin's story shows how emphasizing the money types we've been neglecting can lead to greater financial fulfillment.

Read the rest of the article to find your money personality.

On the environment and CO2 Capture.

How to stop global warming? CO2 "scrubbers," a new book says
By Kenneth R. Fletcher, Smithsonian magazine, June 2008
Source

Wallace Broecker, of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, first warned in the 1970s that the earth would warm because of a buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases released by burning fossil fuels. In his new book, Fixing Climate (co-authored by Robert Kunzig), Broecker, 76, argues that we must not only reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) but also remove it from the atmosphere on a massive scale to avert environmental ruin. He is an unpaid adviser to Global Research Technologies, a Tucson firm developing devices to capture CO2 from the air.

By the 1970s, you already believed that CO2 from emissions was causing global warming.
Looking at the earth's past climate told me that the earth is very sensitive to changes. It concerned me that as we warmed the planet we were heading into unknown territory. I've convinced myself that it is going to be absolutely necessary to capture and bury CO2. The best way to do that is to take it directly out of the atmosphere.

How do you "fix" climate?
We need something that can be manufactured, like air conditioners or cars, by the millions. Each day, a unit would take about a ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere, liquefy it and send it out through pipes to wherever it's going to be stored. The developers are now envisioning a device about 6 to 10 feet in diameter, 50 feet high. It would be like a little silo, in that shape so the wind could blow through it from any direction.

CO2 emissions are going up faster than the highest scenarios. Developing nations are going gangbusters using fossil fuels, so they are eclipsing any savings that the rich nations are making. At some point we are going to have to get tough about it. There is going to be a demand to bring the CO2 level back down again because of the environmental damage it's doing. The only way to do that would be with this sort of device.

How many devices would be needed?
Each of us in America is responsible for generating about 20 tons of CO2 a year. So I suppose roughly 17 million scrubbers would take care of the United States. Worldwide, we'd need a lot more. On a long time scale the rich nations can do more than just stop or neutralize their own emissions. They can also neutralize some of what was done in the past.

The scrubbers don't have to be near the source of pollution?
No. They can be put anywhere. The units would operate best at low humidity and would be best deployed in deserts.

What happens to all the CO2 the scrubbers take out of the air?
There are many places to store it. The most obvious is the saline aquifers that are under every continent. Ultimately, I think we'll want to put CO2 into the deep sea. We at Columbia are exploring with Icelanders the possibility of injecting CO2 dissolved in water into basaltic terrains that make up the earth's mantle, to combine the CO2 with magnesium and convert it into a mineral. One has to figure out a clever way to do this without using a lot of energy.

Of course, this whole thing has been a race against time. We have done relatively little since 1975, when I first became really concerned about climate change. People say Kyoto was a great accomplishment. It trimmed production of CO2 a bit, but it's just one percent of the solution. We've got a huge distance to go.

Is this safe?
We're going to have to prove that. People aren't going to want CO2 underneath their houses unless they can be assured that it's not going to come back in any violent way. I think it would be easier to convince people that putting it in the deep sea is safe.

We have to do something. Otherwise we're going to have a very hot planet and the environmental damage is going to be huge. Any solution is going to have its own environmental consequences. We have to make sure those are very small compared to the consequences of doing nothing.

What about alternative energy sources?
I don't think anybody believes that alternatives will supply the energy we'll need. The long-term solution is solar electricity. But it is far too expensive—there have to be breakthroughs. If they were to occur in the next 10 or 20 years, great, we could put the whole CO2-capture idea on the shelf. But we have to develop that technology, because it looks right now like solar energy is not going to become affordable in that time scale. We are going to need some way to bail ourselves out.

We have enough coal to run the planet for several hundred years. We could make gasoline out of coal for the equivalent of $50 a barrel. People are not going to use solar energy if it costs 10 times more than energy derived from coal. We are not putting enough resources into developing the technology to capture and store carbon. Everybody is worried about carbon footprints as if that is a solution. It's not. It is important, I'm not putting that down, but conservation in itself can't do it. The world has to run on energy.

How would we pay for the carbon scrubbers?
Whenever carbon is taken out of the ground in whatever form, some sort of tax would be paid. Ultimately there would be a smooth system. Carbon is taken out, a price is paid and that money goes to companies that are burying it. Of course, the transition from nothing into this huge enterprise is very complicated. An enormous amount of work has to be done.

With all of the greenhouse gases being produced, could capturing and storing really put a dent in climate change?
It would have to. Otherwise why do it? Most of us think that by the year 2070 we need to have a carbon-neutral planet. We can no longer increase the CO₂ content of the atmosphere. But poor people on the planet are going to want to have a decent standard of living. To have a decent standard of living requires energy. Just take China. Their energy use is going to go way up. China has coal, so they burn coal. The temptation is going to be to go to a coal economy. Every time we create some CO₂ we have to take the equivalent amount out and bury it. To capture and bury all the CO₂ we're going to be producing is something like $600 billion a year for the world.

Do you think the world is ready for millions of CO₂ scrubbers?
No, I don't think so. Not yet. People are really concerned about CO₂ that's true. But I don't think most people realize how tough a problem it is and what's really involved. The awareness doesn't extend to the tough decisions that are going to have to be made by the world if we are going to ever rein this thing in.

Are you optimistic?
I'm an optimist, but I wish I was a little bit younger and could see how this thing really plays out over the next 50 or 60 years. It will be the major issue in the world for a long, long time.

As the world seriously warms, the realization that we have to do something is going to become ever more intense. Clearly something is happening.

About the Company: Global Research Technologies
Related Books: Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat--and How to Counter It by Wallace Broecker and Robert Kunzig