Thanks to my good pal Keith (Check out his cool Travel blog about the Tuvaluan Island of Nanumea  ) I’m directed once again to the capitalist controversies. www.ft.com A letter to capitalists from Adam Smith By David Rubenstein To: Capitalists of the World From: Adam Smith What has become of my beloved capitalism? Co

The US Presidential elections are much more about marketing more governance, and it’s been interesting as an internet marketeer to watch the brilliancy of the Obama campaign with respect to online media and especially social media. For example, right about NOW he’s on YouTube answering questions from voters: ht

The World’s largest snowflake, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, was observed this day of January 28th in Montana by a farmer. Google’s doodle of today celebrates his discovery, though it appears he may have been the only witness to this frozen snowflake miracle of nature. From Wikipedia we learn

It’s always annoying when folks say how busy they are when – almost always – - they are involved in many hours per day of unnecessary TV watching, Facebooking, gaming, making your own hair gel, hobbies, gardening, etc.   Nothing wrong with all those things but it’s not the same as “being busy&

Here at CES Las Vegas you can feel the energy of the thousands of bloggers, all of whom hope to spawn their own success stories.    I like bloggers and blogging a lot, but I think much of the early promise of blogger as citizen journalist is getting co-opted by commercialization – the need to [...]

CES 2012 Wednesday – Fox news reporting from CES Originally uploaded by JoeDuck Here is FOX news reporting (I think live) from CES 2012 here in Las Vegas. As always the show is a sea of consumer technology and people. Some 125,000 (approximate) attendees, 6000 press and 3700 Vendors. This appears to be Microsoft’

Well I should be reporting live from CES 2012 right now rather than the Medford Oregon Airport where fog kept me from leaving yesterday for CES Las Vegas, the world’s premier consumer electronics show held every January. I was supposed to be reporting live over at our Retirement blog from this morning’s keynote

I’d hoped to use this “QuickPresss Home Page form”  for  my reporting from CES 2012 but just lost a nice detailed post. Update – seems to be working OK now.  I’m wondering if maybe I lost connectivity here at the Rogue Valley Airport while writing the post leading to its untimely death?   I

I’m a big fan of WordPress but QuickPress just burned me after I penned a LONG CES 2012 Post that simply vanished after saying “you forgot to write something”. So, I tried it and I hate it so far … Use caution if you use the “QuickPress Home page form”

Wow, I’d forgotten how hard it is to build and troubleshoot a huge website, but things are finally coming together at Retire USA, a project I’ve got going with three other partners.  The plan is to showcase retirement options across all the states in the USA. Although comments about this are welcome, you’

The Google Custom Search allows a simple addition of code to your site that creates a customized search engine run by Google.   This is often added via your adsense account (under ads / search) and it is a brilliant way to add search to you site that helps monetize your peeps with google advertising [...]

Wishing everybody a merry Christmas. May 2012 bring peace and prosperity to you and yours.

Dear Staff of Shoemoney (SOSs), Shoemoney, and fellow Affiliate Americans - Honestly you probably will not  and probably should not  choose me for the Shoemoney Affiliate Summit West Contest. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a pretty good guy, fun to hang out with, and fairly well informed.   Heck, I might even have

Retirement | Poudre Property Services | Cadence Bank |   UT Medical Group | Eskaton | Palm Springs Family Care Center OK, so this is kind of clever and kind of pathetic all at the same time.    Google can take too long to index new content, but Joe Duck has good “authority”

I’m having a great discussion with my good pal Keith about whether Bill Moyers is “biased”.   I think Bill Moyers has become an authoritative and articulate spokesperson for the mainstream American left.   To me, that is almost the definition of bias.   I like Bill and agree with him on many topics  

The rumors, of course, are true.   Starting immediately, over at Technology Report, I’m covering the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with “pre show” coverage.  In January I’ll be there roaming the halls in real time looking for the next big thing in Consumer Technology.    One of the fun t

In My Humble Opinion ….. it seems that many of the most fascinating people tend to be *specialists* in their fields – highly focused experts in academia, cooking or sport or film or whatever.  Yet it seems the most interesting life you can lead is that of a *generalist*, dipping more lightly into the many [...]

It seems to me that one of the most underrated notions in the world is that of the “optimal” arrangement.    You hear a lot of folks talking about things like  ”exploitation”, “growth”, “fairness”, “maximizing profits”, etc, etc, but it seems to me we don’

After some time looking I finally found the number I’ve been after, which is the cutoff point in terms of the wealth of those elusive and mysterious  ”1% people” everybody is talking about.  Here’s the excellent research document: http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_589.pdf We learn that the cutof

Last year I began an experiment with PROSPER peer to peer lending.    The concept is great – cut out the banking middlemen and middlewomen, delivering higher returns to lenders and more borrowing power to investors.     Years ago PROSPER struggled with its initial implementation, running into SEC issues which, I t

I just spent a half hour troubleshooting a problem I’d never seen before. If you don’t want to read on simply remember to CHECK YOUR COMPUTER FOR THE CORRECT DATE and TIME before you proceed with other ideas. I was having lots of trouble accessing gmail, getting a cryptic message about an invalid security certif

Yes, of COURSE you’ll be doing Twitter soon, so might as well jump on the bandwagon now.  Below are the instructions to the extent you need any – Twitter is, if nothing else, very easy to use. The normal phases of Twitter adoption are 1. “Wow, Twitter is  stupid!”  2. Hmm, lots of people LIKE [...

For me the  ”Eat the Mofo CEOs!” argument, aka “CEO pay is an outrageous inequitable violation of human rights”, etc, etc.  isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s just very incomplete. What we DO KNOW is that most folks are a lot better off here in USA than in most of the alternative economies.

Dave Bowman: Hello, HAL. Do you read me, HAL? HAL: Affirmative, Dave. I read you. Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL. HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. Dave Bowman: What’s the problem? HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. Dave Bowman: [...]

Don’t look now but the UARS Satellite might be crashing into you!    Just when we thought Global Warming would fry our butts, the Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite crash is looming – probably today or tomorrow. There’s a  statistic  floating around the interwebs that does not sound right at all to m

[summary info source - US National Guard Article] The president is asking Congress for $671 billion for FY2012 $553 billion DOD “base budget”plus $118 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Military personnel account for $142.8 billion of the base budget. Operations and maintenance is $204.4 billion, procurement

Yes, something seems very VERY fishy about Cardilly, but it also seems odd that scammers would be so persistent in the face of so much negative buzz.    My tentative guess at this time is that this is a questionable  ”gray hat” business, at best testing out something to see how it flies and at [...]

Cardilly.com is either a scam or has a very unusual social media strategy going, since much of the buzz about Cardilly is very negative right now with many people insisting it’s a scam.   I think it’s probably NOT a scam, but surprised they are not addressing critics, and fast.   Is this all part [...]

I’ve just finished watching Ken Burns “The Civil War” and (as usual) I think I’d argue a very unusual position in terms of what the North and South “should” have done given the massive cost in lives and prosperity and pride.    It seems to me that: The South was reckless to secede.   T

S&P’s decision to downgrade the US debt rating from AAA to AA+ is very unwelcome news but it should not surprise anybody, especially in Washington where neither party has been willing to tackle the deficit or the debt in a responsible manner. It’s time to cut the only two things in the budget that really [..