Monthly Archives: August 2005

Ten Great Selling Tips

The other day I had lunch with George Coutts, a friend of mine. George has worked in sales most of his career, and is now a sales executive at Duro-Test Canada. Sales is not my forte, but I recognize good … Continue reading

Posted in Working Smarter | 3 Comments

Could You Live Without Money?

The modern ‘working’ family, whether one-income or two-income, is, by most standards, a lousy business model, with poor, fragile margins and a terrible (sometimes negative) ‘return on investment’. If you presented your household budget to an accountant without describing what … Continue reading

Posted in Collapse Watch | 26 Comments

Human Nature – An Unscientific Survey

My parents raised my brother and me in the 1950s and early 1960s. My wife and I raised our two kids in the mid 1970s to late 1980s. They in turn are raising their families in the early 2000s. This … Continue reading

Posted in Collapse Watch | 8 Comments

Living on Borrowed Time

James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency is, at its heart, a story. It is a dystopia, but an entirely credible one. The pieces of this story have all been told before — the failure to learn from the lessons of history, … Continue reading

Posted in How the World Really Works | 13 Comments

Saturday Links – Early

Guess where this was shot? Read on to find out. Since I may not have time Saturday to post them, here is my list of most interesting links of the week, a day early. Another Service Decline: From Citizen to … Continue reading

Posted in How the World Really Works | 7 Comments

The Moral Hazard Myth

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article in the New Yorker explains why it is that: The leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the US is unpaid medical bills The death rate for Americans without health insurance is 25% higher than for those … Continue reading

Posted in How the World Really Works | 7 Comments

Three Philosophers: Noam Chomsky, Doug Rushkoff, George Carlin

Earlier this week I wrote about the work of environmentalist Bruce Sterling, one of the interviewees in David J Brown’s Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse. Three other philosophers interviewed in the book steal the show, and for those … Continue reading

Posted in Collapse Watch | 20 Comments

Blogs and the Gift Economy as ‘Disruptive Innovations’

In The Innovator’s Solution, Clay Christensen identifies two types of disruptive innovation in business: Low End Disruptive Innovation: Offering a lower-cost product to existing over-served customers, which incumbents don’t care about because these products are at the low-margin end of … Continue reading

Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology, Working Smarter | 4 Comments

Environmentalists vs Environmentalists

Technophoria is the irrational, overexuberant belief that technology can solve all the world’s problems. It has existed for over a century: since the zealots of the early industrial revolution promised us a life free of toil and drudgery,  since futurists … Continue reading

Posted in Collapse Watch | 14 Comments

Eulogy: Learning to Let Go

On Friday our beloved Chelsea passed away. She was about age 11 (we don’t know for sure — she was a pound rescue). She died of massive liver cancer, complicated by abdominal bleeding and a sudden onset of critical anemia, … Continue reading

Posted in Collapse Watch | 28 Comments