Food for Thought

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 option...

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 loca...

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 kind...

Talks about sovereign debt default by Greece, followed my a few other countries, are gaining credibility. The ECB is likely to start dropping interest rates fast, and in the not very far future we might see close-to-zero rates. With inflation at anything higher than the ECB rate, essentially they are paying for people to take the Euro. What I am interested in right now is how the ratings agencies that are followed and very respected by the investment 'community' as a tool to monitor investment risk (in spite of catastrophic misjudgements in the past), may be turning into one of the investors worst enemies. "A banker will lend you an umbrella when it is sunny and take it away when it starts raining. A ratings agency will ensure it rains as soon as there are enough clouds."  Well, rating agencies can and do make the rain pour when it is cloudy. i.e.,  Their actions result in higher costs of borrowing when what is necessary is the opposite, thus ensuring that the s...

So an 'insider', Pippa Malmgren, who is on the board of Deutch Bank among others, says that Germany has started printing the Deutsch Mark in a hurry. This is backed by public opinion in Germany where 71% see no future for the Euro. Pippa Malmgren | Commodity Online: Germany may in fact be preparing to abandon the Euro : I was surprised at first by the concept, but on second thought it makes huge sense: Germany strength IS Euro's main problem (lack of discipline by governments in peripheral countries obviously not far behind) and their removal would increase competitiveness of weaker European economies via corrective devaluation. The widely discussed scenario of marginal countries such as Greece and Ireland dropping out of the Euro presented a serious issue: once their currency dropped in value, relative debt would increase proportionally because they were issued in the stronger currency. This would trigger mass defaults by the countries that left, and further dest...

The current economic crisis is frequently blamed on over-borrowing by states, banks and citizens. I suggest another angle: the source of the problem is excessive accumulation of wealth, by some countries such as China and large financial groups, such as pension and hedge funds. Think about it. Money had become cheap, very cheap, in recent years. The hoarders needed to put the money to 'work', they had run out of productive businesses to invest on, so the competition between these hoarders intensified, causing drops in the cost of money and enticing many countries and a significant part of the population to take debt as a normal fact of life. Money is still cheap, suggesting that the hoarders still have huge reserves, but they are also worried that they might not be repaid in full, so they throw s#*t into the fan by forcing austerity measures that should ensure that they get paid before anyone else. Borrowers had choices on who to borrow from while money was cheap. Once th...

The Economist come to the rescue! I had endless discussions with people in Ireland about how we get far less value for money on our taxes than the Swedes. My argumentation was based on comparing notes with a Swede before the crisis started on a similar gross salary to mine and similar 'overheads', like car, children, mortgage, and so on. The finding was that although the 'take home' salary was slightly higher in Ireland, the disposable income was far lower after paying for child care, road tax, insurance and other transport costs. Since 2007 the comparison makes Sweden look even better. The table below doesn't show Ireland, but puts Sweden in a good light that might surprise some people. Effective tax rates: Taxing times | The Economist : 'via Blog this'