Food for Thought

Bitcoin hype, the party that takes place when the greedy, the naive and the clueless get together. I am not saying that there isn't a place for the technology of Blockchain, there certainly is, but the pseudo-currencies sitting on it are unlikely to have a fair valuation or to be stable enough to become the currency that enables national economies. In fact, national economies are at serious peril from parallel currencies. But this post is not about a making a full review of the state of crypto currencies - that would be too ambitious. What I want to do is compile my past commentary for future reference and share it. Yes, I am a sad soul that enjoys making predictions and tracking how well they age, or not. In early 2014 I posted my first publicly shared view about Bitcoin. On the day I posted the above, Bitcoin was selling for 572 US Dollars.  On 13th Jan 2013 (BTC @ US$268) I got involved in another Bitcoin debate,  In December '17, a few days before

I read recently a suggestion that countries that experience severe drops in population levels due to traumatic events might never recover psychologically. Today Ireland's population remains 25% lower than what it was before the famine (from 8 to 6 million in the whole island). Ireland is a country that re-lives its history everyday. The almost genetically ingrained memories of pain from the great famine and the long process of securing independence are obvious on a daily basis. Much progress and healing has occurred in recent years, but it doesn't take much to raise the old resentment. Even apparently innocuous mistakes by UK press such as naming a famous Irish person as British (They actually tend to claim Irish actors and athletes as theirs in the good days, but remember correctly the person's origin when they are associated with any bad news) can trigger highly protective feelings. Northern Ireland has one of the most fractured societies in the world, and intoler

Screenshot of the drawing made during the video RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms (YouTube) My heart shrinks a little bit every day when I drop my kids to school, specially the younger ones. It shrinks because I know that their experience ought to be so much better than it is. While some benefits exist in how education is delivered today, much damage is also being caused, and even worse, the knowledge exists about how to improve things, but teachers and the catholic church control of education in Ireland are incredibly powerful points of resistance to change. Take my four year old daughter as an example. She started school last September. Within three weeks, she could recognize three letters of the alphabet, but she had already been taught to pray, word by word at least two prayers. My 13 year old, who is facing some challenges in secondary school recently was offered support. He had to give up one normal class during the week to meet a support teacher. The options gi

Almost every country in the world has an expensive national body of elected public representatives. Whether it is called the Congress, Dail, parliament, Bundestag, or Riksdag, the process is the same: people elect the public representatives for their region, they get together in a big building somewhere and they get busy talking and legislating. This system of public representation has several well known weaknesses, such as the potential for over representation by wealthy private interests via lobbying, funding, and corruption.  I heard arguments before that this is the price of democracy, but I will not discuss this contentious point here. One 'point of failure' that I haven't seen discussed before is the unsuitability of these politicians to decide laws that will be exploited by professional lawyers and accountants (how many politicians do you know who have a law or financial background?). People tend to vote for the politician that secured funding for the local schoo

The three most important aspects for a start up to consider are probably staffing, business model, and financing are. Bad planning and implementation in any one of them has the power to sink even the brightest of concepts. Sure, cashflow is king, we all know that, so not much to say other than plan with plenty of time to spare, double the costs and extend the time to revenue a fair bit more. Cash hardly ever comes in according to plan. Your business model is the backbone of your business. If it doesn't add up, you are going nowhere fast. Even if you have your financial structure in place with all the required contingency plans, and a fantastic business model ready for implementation, the people you sign up will determine the fate of your enterprise. Sure, we all know that skills and experience are essential aspects, and in general 'acquiring the right CVs' is (usually) a straight forward exercise where success is related to the financial strength of the s

In the old days, not so so long ago actually, wisdom passed from generation to generation. Knowledge was in low supply compared to today, and advice from the elderly was listened and valued. One of my strongest movie scene memories from my childhood is from a Wild West movie where an old and a young Cherokee Indians/native Americans were sitting by the fire and the old man said: "All the words that were ever said are still in the air". I was around 12 at the time, and probably at the right age to go into months of thinking about that line. Was he referring to spirits? Or was it about the acoustic energy not being transformed? In any case, I learnt quite a lot from trying, rather unsuccessfully, to figure that one out. The shortage of what I call high-intensity information like this scene when we were young allowed us time to go into deeper thought about what we heard, but children today cannot afford this reasoning time. They are bombarded with all kinds of information, a