Public domain

Pick your poison privately

It’s a mystery how some people just feel like home.

The amazing thing is that even after we've fallen, we'd still get in line to do it again.

Stranger in a Strange Land

The way to love someone is to lightly run your finger over that person’s soul until you find a crack, and then gently pour your love into that crack.

The things that matter don’t necessarily make sense

Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don’t always like, but you fall for them anyway.

The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters

The US shale revolution is a reminder of the deep pools of ingenuity, risk taking, and entrepreneurship in America

By Mark J. Perry 

I just finished reading an advance copy of a really interesting new book titled “The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters” by Gregory Zuckerman, a financial journalist and special writer at the Wall Street Journal. It’s a fascinating and detailed account of America’s great shale revolution, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in learning more about what is probably the most important energy chapter in US history.

Zuckerman skillfully presents a very detailed and readable story of the American wildcatters who eventually “cracked the code” for shale oil and gas and revolutionized the US energy sector starting in about 2008. While the major oil companies had given up on finding new oil and gas in America and focused on exploration elsewhere – Africa, Asia, Russia – a small group of US “petropreneurs” were determined to find cost-effective technologies to unlock the oceans of oil and gas they knew were trapped inside shale rock formations saturated with fossil fuels miles below the Earth’s surface.

As the promotional material for the book explains: “Everyone knew it was crazy to try to extract oil and natural gas buried in shale rock deep below the ground. Everyone, that is, except a few reckless wildcatters – who risked their careers to prove the world wrong.”

Here is a slightly edited excerpt from the last chapter of the book that I think captures some of the key points about America’s shale revolution and the petropreneurs who made it happen:

A group of frackers, relying on markets cures rather than government direction, achieved dramatic advances by focusing on fossil fuels of all things. It’s a stark reminder that breakthroughs in the business world usually are achieved through incremental advances, often in the face of deep skepticism, rather than government-inspired eureka moments.

Action, Time, and the Market

The Market integrates all the factors affecting human action into a systematic whole

by Jeffrey M. Herbener

The wellspring of all economic theory is the reality of the human condition. As a finite being, man makes a distinction between ends and means. He cannot attain his ends by an act of will alone, but must apply means to attain his ends. Man lives in an orderly but finite world. Using means produces only limited effects in attaining ends. Endowed with reason, man is able to perceive the causal connection between the use of means and the attainment of ends. 

Any action toward the attainment of an end requires surrendering the attainment of another end with the same means. And any action using a set of means requires foregoing using another set of means to attain the same end. Action, therefore, requires choice. As a purposeful being, man selects what he perceives to be higher-valued ends to pursue and what he perceives to be lower-valued sets of means to employ. 

Choice, therefore, requires a judgment of the mind. Since attaining the end is the purpose of an action, the value a person attaches to the attainment of the end is primary. A person attaches only derivative value to the means used in action since they are merely aids to the attainment of the end. Means have no value independent of the value a person attaches to the end they help attain. The human mind imputes value to the means according to the aid they render in attaining a valuable end. The technical properties of each of the means that combine to attain an end can be valued differently by different persons or by the same person at different times and, therefore, have no causal impact on choice and action independent of the judgment of the mind.

Swedish reforms have been many, systematic, and comprehensive

A Swedish Lesson 

By Anders Åslund

To Brits, Sweden with its tightly regulated social welfare state is often a byword for socialism. But in the last two decades the country has been transformed. today it offers a flexible and dynamic European model with ever falling public expenditure, lower taxes, economic growth and budget surpluses.

After many years of absence from the Swedish debate, I attended a conference on the Swedish economy in the southern city of Malmö in May, organized by Swedbank. The 180 speakers represented the full range of Swedish views, which have moved amazingly far to the free-market right, not least social democrats and trade union leaders. Key values are competition, openness and efficiency, while social and environmental values remain. The idea is not to abolish social welfare but to make it more efficient through competition among private providers. A new consensus has emerged on having a social welfare society rather than a social welfare state.

The changes have been dramatic. While Sweden’s public expenditure has fallen by one-fifth of gross domestic product since 1993, between 2000 and 2009 Britain’s public expenditure skyrocketed by 15 per cent. This has brought Swedish and British public spending to a similar level, but Sweden’s is still steadily falling. Swedish taxes have been cut and her markets have opened up. The Social Democratic Party was in power from 1932 until 1976, and again from 1994 until 2006, but Sweden was actually quite a liberal market economy until 1968. After a century of superior growth, its GDP per capita was the third highest in the world.

Need a Hand?

Boy Gets Prosthetic Hand Made by 3-D Printer (Cost $5 vs. $30K Medical Device)

by Mike "Mish" Shedlock

What do you do when you cannot afford a $30,000 prosthetic hand that your son needs?
Two years ago, Paul McCarthy began searching for an inexpensive yet functional prosthetic hand for his son Leon, who was born without fingers on one of his hands.
McCarthy came across a video online with detailed instruction on how to use a 3-D printer to make a prosthetic hand for his son. McCarthy made a prosthetic hand for his son for a cost of $5 and free time on a 3D printer.

Link for the video  prosthetic hand made by 3-D printer

Large Mechanical Hand
A "large mechanical hand" invention by Ivan Owen is what kicked off the technological progression to "Robohand".

I, Airplane

Made on Earth

by DON BOUDREAUX

The above nearly speaks for itself.  Many U.S. imports are indeed inputs used to make manufactured goods in the U.S. And, of course, each of these parts is itself the result of creative minds and parts and raw materials from all around the world.  As Cato’s Dan Ikenson would say, Boeing jetliners are “Made on Earth.”

As Entrepreneurs Keep Reminding Us, They Lied To Us In Econ. 101

A combination of passion and perseverance

By John Chisholm

Can theoretical, scientific study of complex systems inform the hardscrabble world of start-ups?

Yes.

To see how, meet the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). [1]  Founded 30 years ago in Santa Fe, NM by Nobel laureates in physics and economics, SFI is the worldwide epicenter of complexity science.  SFI first recognized that the environment, the human brain, the economy, and other complex systems have much in common:

·                     Order in them emerges not from top-down command and control but bottom-up from the interactions of large numbers of interconnected elements.  These elements may be individual species creating sustainable ecosystems; neurons creating thought patterns; or buyers and sellers creating business cycles and wage and price levels.

·                      Those interconnected elements also form feedback loops that can produce unpredictable and often extreme results (e.g., peacocks’ tails, fads, best-sellers, cancer).

·                     Diversity tends to grow with the number of combinations of elements, that is, exponentially with the number of elements (e.g., the Cambrian explosion and the Industrial Revolution).  Diversity tends to enhance robustness (e.g., genetically similar crops are more vulnerable to parasites; identical PC operating systems, to viruses).

·                     Unintended consequences arise if you try to control such systems top down (e.g., drug wars foster organized crime; draining of wetlands cause flash floods and droughts; rent control reduces the quantity and quality of housing and thus may drive up rents).

·                     The systems are dynamic and never at equilibrium.

So what do complex systems and SFI tell us about entrepreneurship?

More Deserts to Bloom, This Time in Israel

Extracting the Mediterranean Sea’s water could provide Israel with an unquenchable supply of clean water

Water from the Mediterranean Sea rushes through pipes en route to being filtered for use across Israel in a process called desalination, which could soon account for 80 percent of the country's potable water

By Ben Sales

As construction workers pass through sandy corridors between huge rectangular buildings at this desalination plant on Israel’s southern coastline, the sound of rushing water resonates from behind a concrete wall.

Drawn from deep in the Mediterranean Sea, the water has flowed through pipelines reaching almost 4,000 feet off of Israel’s coast and, once in Israeli soil, buried almost 50 feet underground. Now, it rushes down a tube sending it through a series of filters and purifiers. After 90 minutes, it will be ready to run through the faucets of Tel Aviv.

Set to begin operating as soon as next month, Israel Desalination Enterprises’ Sorek Desalination Plant will provide up to 26,000 cubic meters – or nearly 7 million gallons – of potable water to Israelis every hour. When it’s at full capacity, it will be the largest desalination plant of its kind in the world.

“If we didn’t do this, we would be sitting at home complaining that we didn’t have water,” said Raphael Semiat, a member of the Israel Desalination Society and professor at Israel’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. “We won’t be dependent on what the rain brings us. This will give a chance for the aquifers to fill up.”

The new plant and several others along Israel’s coast are part of the country’s latest tactic in its decades-long quest to provide for the nation’s water needs. Advocates say desalination — the removal of salt from seawater – could be a game-changing solution to the challenges of Israel’s famously fickle rainfall. Instead of the sky, Israel’s thirst may be quenched by the Mediterranean’s nearly infinite, albeit salty, water supply.

How 3D printing could take over the manufacturing industry

Imagine a machine that could disassemble old unwanted objects, and use the materials to print new objects — all in the comfort of your own home

By John Aziz

The laptop I typed this article on is the culmination of a vast, sprawling, and elaborate process over many continents, using many resources, many people, and many machines.

My laptop's construction incorporates plastics built out of crude oil, metals mined in Africa and forged into memory in Korea and semiconductors in Germany, and an aluminium case made from bauxite mined in Brazil. Gallons and gallons of refined oil were used to ship all the resources and components around the world, until they were finally assembled in China, and shipped out once again to the consumer. That manufacturing process stands upon the shoulders of centuries of scientific research, and years of product development, testing, and marketing.

The manufacturing industry today is a huge mesh of complex processes. Capitalism and the systems that it builds are the product of an evolutionary process gradually adjusting around consumer demand and the imperative of maximizing profit. Just as the internet has revolutionized communications and the distribution of information, new technologies already exist that if widely adopted may do the same thing for manufacturing.

3D printers allow physical objects to be designed digitally and printed using physical materials — mostly plastic, but increasingly almost anything (including human cells). Designs can be shared — or bought and sold — through the internet. Already, there are schematics for cars,homes, guns, sex toys, and all manner of trinkets and household items.

The technology is about 30 years old, but with the costs of the machinery rapidly falling — entry-level, fully assembled 3D printers are now for sale for under $500 — 3D printing is poised to move into the mainstream.

The European Miracle

"Why Europe? Because Europe enjoyed a relative lack of political constraint."

By ralph raico

Among writers on economic development, P.T. Bauer is noted both for the depth of his historical knowledge, and for his insistence on the indispensability of historical studies in understanding the phenomenon of growth (Walters 1989, 60; see also Dorn 1987). In canvassing the work of other theorists, Bauer has complained of their manifest "amputation of the time dimension":

The historical background is essential for a worthwhile discussion of economic development, which is an integral part of the historical progress of society. But many of the most widely publicized writings on development effectively disregard both the historical background and the nature of development as a process. (Bauer 1972, 324–25)

Too many writers in the field have succumbed to professional overspecialization combined with a positivist obsession with data that happen to be amenable to mathematical techniques. The result has been models of development with little connection to reality:

Abilities and attitudes, mores and institutions, cannot generally be quantified in an illuminating fashion.… Yet they are plainly much more important and relevant to development than such influences as the terms of trade, foreign exchange reserves, capital output ratios, or external economies, topics which fill the pages of the consensus literature. (Ibid., 326)

Even when a writer appears to approach the subject historically, concentration on quantifiable data to the neglect of underlying institutional and social-psychological factors tends to foreshorten the chronological perspective and thus vitiate the result:

It is misleading to refer to the situation in eighteenth -and nineteenth-century Europe as representing initial conditions in development. By then the west was pervaded by the attitudes and institutions appropriate to an exchange economy and a technical age to a far greater extent than south Asia today. These attitudes and institutions had emerged gradually over a period of eight centuries. (Ibid., 219–20)[1] 

Why Read Old Books?

Reading Thucydides or Dante for the comfort that we are not alone

By Victor Davis Hanson

We all know the usual reasons why we are prodded to read the classics — moving characters, seminal ideas, blueprints of our culture, and paradigms of sterling prose and poetry. Then we nod and snooze.

But there are practical reasons as well that might better appeal to the iPhone generation that is minute-by-minute wired into a collective hive of celebrity titillation, the cool, cooler, and coolest recent rapper, or the grunting of “ya know,” “dah,” and “like.” After all, no one can quite be happy with all that.

Classics are more than books of virtues. Homer and Sophocles certainly remind us of the value of courage, without which Aristotle lectures us there can be no other great qualities. Instead, the Greeks and Romans might better remind this generation of the ironic truths, the paradoxes of human behavior and groupthink. Let me give but three examples of old and ironic wisdom.

The Race Goes Not to the Swift.

The problem with Homer’s Achilles ^[1] or Sophocles’ Ajax ^[2] was not that they were found wanting in heroic virtue. Rather they were too good at what they did, and so made the fatal mistake of assuming that there must be some correlation between great deeds and great rewards.

No One Knows How to Make a Can of Coke

The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero

by CHUCK GRIMMETT

Over at Medium, tech pioneer Kevin Ashton unknowingly wrote a tribute to Leonard Read’s classic, I, Pencil.

What Coke Contains begins,

The Vons grocery store two miles from my home in Los Angeles, California sells 12 cans of Coca-Cola for $6.59 — 54 cents each. The tool chain that created this simple product is incomprehensibly complex.

From there Ashton gives a fascinating overview of what it takes to make a can of Coke, in the same style Leonard Read used for the pencil in 1958. I contacted Ashton after a friend shared his piece with me, and it turns out that he didn’t know about I, Pencil beforehand.

He closes with a wonderful hat tip to decentralized knowledge, spontaneous order, and the price system:

The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space. Coca-Cola did not teach the world to sing, no matter what its commercials suggest, yet every can of Coke contains humanity’s choir.

It is great to see these ideas being explored independently. If you haven’t read it yet, here it is:

What Coke Contains

The Vons grocery store two miles from my home in Los Angeles, California sells 12 cans of Coca-Cola for $6.59 — 54 cents each. The tool chain that created this simple product is incomprehensibly complex.

Each can originated in a small town of 4,000 people on the Murray River in Western Australia called Pinjarra. Pinjarra is the site of the world’s largest bauxite mine. Bauxite is surface mined — basically scraped and dug from the top of the ground. The bauxite is crushed and washed with hot sodium hydroxide, which separates it into aluminum hydroxide and waste material called red mud. The aluminum hydroxide is cooled, then heated to over a thousand degrees celsius in a kiln, where it becomes aluminum oxide, or alumina. The alumina is dissolved in a molten substance called cryolite, which is a rare mineral from Greenland, and turned into pure aluminum using electricity in a process called electrolysis. The pure aluminum sinks to the bottom of the molten cryolite, is drained off and placed in a mold. It cools into the shape of a long cylindrical bar. The bar is transported west again, to the Port of Bunbury, and loaded onto a container ship bound for — in the case of Coke for sale in Los Angeles — Long Beach.

Farming in the sky in Singapore

Singapore leads in the development of 'vegetable factories'

By Kalinga Seneviratne 
With a population of five million crammed on a landmass of just 715 square kilometers, the tiny republic of Singapore has been forced to expand upwards, building high-rise residential complexes to house the country's many inhabitants. 

Now, Singapore is applying the vertical model to urban agriculture, experimenting with rooftop gardens and vertical farms in order to feed its many residents. 

Currently only 7% of Singapore's food is grown locally. The country imports most of its fresh vegetables and fruits daily from neighboring countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, as well as from more distant trading partners like Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Chile. 

An influx of immigrants has resulted in a rapid crowding of Singapore's skyline, as more and more towering apartment buildings shoot up. And meanwhile, what little land was available for farming is disappearing fast. 

The solution to the problem came in the form of a public-private partnership, with the launch of what has been hailed as the "world's first low carbon, water-driven rotating vertical farm" for growing tropical vegetables in an urban environment. 

Print me a jet engine

Additive manufacturing

By The Economist

CONFIRMATION as to how seriously some companies are taking additive manufacturing, popularly known as 3D printing, came on November 20th when GE Aviation, part of the world’s biggest manufacturing group, bought a privately owned company called Morris Technologies. This is a small precision-engineering firm employing 130 people in suburban Cincinnati, Ohio. Morris Technologies has invested heavily in 3D printing equipment and will be printing bits for a new range of jet engines.Morris Technologies uses a number of 3D printing machines, all of which work by using a digital description of an object to build it in physical form, layer by layer. Among the 3D printing technologies used by Morris Technologies is laser sintering. This involves spreading a thin layer of metallic powder onto a build platform and then fusing the material with a laser beam. The process is repeated until an object emerges. Laser sintering is capable of producing all kinds of metal parts, including components made from aerospace-grade titanium.

The Route to Transformative Growth

How Sub-Saharan Africa Is Evolving Into A Global Economic Powerhouse

Growth in sub-Saharan Africa has accelerated since 2000. And the potential for further growth is enormous given its positive demographics and natural resources.

by David Cowan

The potential for economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is enormous given the continent’s positive demographics and the abundance of natural resources, but historically, infrastructure, political and policy challenges have stood in the way. Without question, there has been a sharp pick up in real GDP growth in the region in the 2000s compared to the previous two decades, when SSA was often seen as a development disaster. This pick-up has led to a marked change in how many investors think about SSA, and has facilitated a switch from decades of Afro-pessimism to the new wave of Afro-optimism.

To give an idea of the potential impact of growth, Citi’s February 2011 long-term growth projection paper, Global Growth Generators: Moving Beyond ‘Emerging Markets’ and ‘BRIC’ , argued that Africa could move from accounting for only 4% of world GDP in 2010 to 7% by 2040 and 12% by 2050. In this new report we examine in much greater depth the prospects for growth in SSA and ask what steps need to be taken to generate truly transformational development that can unlock the potential of the continent's demographic and resources dividend. Critically, to unlock the full potential policymakers must find a path from the current growth model to one which achieves greater global economic integration.

The “invisible” strangers that make our lives better

Giving thanks for the invisible hand, and productivity of the free market, and no turkey czar

by Mark J. Perry

Like in previous years, most of you probably didn’t call your local supermarket ahead of time and order a Thanksgiving turkey this year. Why not?  Because you automatically assumed that a turkey would be there when you showed up, and it probably was there when you showed up “unannounced” at your local grocery store and selected your Thanksgiving bird.

The reason your Thanksgiving turkey was waiting for you without an advance order? Because of the economic concepts of “spontaneous order,” “self-interest,” and the “invisible hand” of the free market.  Turkeys appeared in your local grocery stores primarily because of the “selfishness” and “self-interest” (maybe even greed in some cases) of thousands of turkey farmers, truckers, and supermarket owners who are complete strangers to you and your family.  But all of those strangers throughout the turkey supply chain co-operated on your behalf and were led by an “invisible hand” to make sure your family had a turkey on the table to celebrate Thanksgiving this year.  The “invisible hand” that was responsible for your holiday turkey is just one of millions of everyday examples of the “miracle of the marketplace” where “individually selfish decisions must lead to a collectively efficient outcome,” as economist Steven E. Landsburg observed.

How a $20 tablet from India could blindside PC makers, educate billions and transform computing as we know it

From the poor in the developing world, to the poor everywhere

Suneet Tuli, CEO of Datawind, holds up the commercial version of his company's new Aakash 2 tablet

By Christopher Mims

Suneet Tuli, the 44-year-old CEO of UK/Canadian/Indian startup Datawind, is having a taxing day. “I’m underwater,” he says as he struggles to find a cell signal outside a restaurant in Mumbai. Two days from then, on Sunday Nov. 11, the president of India, Pranab Mukherjee, will have unveiled the seven-inch Aakash 2 tablet computer Tuli’s company is selling to the government for distribution to 100,000 university students and professors. (If things go well, the government plans to order as many as 5.86 million.) In the meantime, Tuli is deluged with calls from reporters, and every day his company receives thousands of new orders for the commercial version of the Aakash 2. Already, he’s facing a backlog of four million unfulfilled pre-orders.

We’re speaking over the same overtaxed cellular networks that he hopes will enable Datawind to educate every schoolchild in India through the world’s cheapest functional tablet computer. But it’s a losing battle, as his connection to one of the 13 separate cell carriers in Mumbai buckles under too much competing traffic. He has to repeat himself when he tells me the ultimate price university students will pay for his tablet, after half its cost has been subsidized by the Indian government.

It’s $20.