Music, Art & Engineering
As young boys growing up in rural America, Michael Rawlins and Jacob Williams spent much of their time playing in the woods, swimming in creeks and discovering the wonders of nature around them. The forest that bordered their family farms seemed an endless expanse of wilderness frontier. They could walk for hours, deep into the forest, over trails, rocks, riverbeds and deer trails and never encounter signs of civilization or another human soul.
In the elegant machinery of economics, supply and demand form a perfect circle—each feeding the other in a self-sustaining loop, like the smooth symmetry of a donut. In the new world of AI, the donut isn’t just missing its center—it’s crumbling from the inside out.
It happened in a bookstore café in Midtown—of all places. James had wandered in while visiting a friend. He was sipping black coffee and thumbing through a used copy of Leaves of Grass when a voice rang out: “Lyons? Is that really you?”
We are social animals. Our sense of self-worth is deeply tied to how we’re valued by society. While fear of economic insecurity is certainly real in modern society, most of us have a deeper anxiety of becoming irrelevant, of having nothing meaningful to offer in return for recognition or belonging. Despite what we think makes for a successful career, what we really crave is fairness and social validation; it’s a primal need to feel useful to the collective.
Bancor was a supranational currency proposed in 1944 to facilitate international trade by balancing global liquidity and preventing chronic trade deficits and surpluses through an International Clearing Union.
Social media influencers have not only altered the way financial information is consumed, but the markets themselves.
Bond markets are the referee for economic discipline, raising an eyebrow to reckless borrowing and sternly saying, “Behave, or I’ll raise your yields.”
How would Spock invest in the stock market?
The broad range of technologies that we call Artificial Intelligence or AI are going to change the world, but probably not in the ways many speculate. The underlying question is not just the core technology, it’s how it can be applied to deliver practical cost-effective value without egregious energy.
Is the system of money we use today working ? Are there are better alternatives on the horizon? There’s certainly a lot of talk about cryptocurrency. Can we learn anything from the gold standard about crypto’s potential to establish a new type of currency?
Today is Black Friday, the day where most of the citizens of the United States, after participating in a day of gorging on food and disposing most of it into the garbage get into their automobiles and swarm to various department stores to buy stuff they don’t need and justify it because the goods are supposedly deeply discounted, marking the beginning our annual mania of consumption of mass consumer products. In a 2019 study, it was estimated that 80% of these goods will end up in landfills.
Software product development and jazz music share a remarkable similarity in their essence: both are grounded in creativity, exploration, and improvisation.
Do we, influenced by our inherited conception of time, find it challenging to appreciate each moment for its own sake, rather than its usefulness for future goals?
From straight-edge hardcore punk to modern wellness social media influencers, it’s been a long journey to make clean living cool again.
The ability to step into another’s shoes and understand their situation and challenges is a powerful trait that builds trust, faith and cohesion that is essential to the success of teams and organizations.