Categories
Business

Entrepreneurship, Business, and Inspiration

Prologue The other day my friend Sam asked me where I turn to for business and entrepreneurship inspiration, which led to the following thought: “Yeah, good question – where the hell do I get my inspiration from?”. So after a day of intermittent soul searching, here’s my incomplete list of what’s currently driving me. What’s […]

Categories
Grand Forks

Grand Forks: Welcome to UAV Central

It seems that the city of Grand Forks has succeeded in placing itself at the center of the unmanned aircraft business. This is great news for the region’s economy. MPR: Unmanned aircraft systems are becoming big business. It’s estimated the Department of Defense will spend as much as $80 billion on unmanned aircraft in the […]

Categories
Business

SIGG Water Bottles: A Lesson In Destroying Your Brand’s Reputation

Last week we witnessed SIGG, maker of aluminum water bottles, lose the admiration and trust of its core customers in a single day when it admitted that for years, its products contained Bisphenol A (BPA) – despite giving the impression that they did not. Update (8/26/2009): Via The Consumerist,  it appears that SIGG has created a voluntary exchange […]

Categories
Recommendations

Tab Sweep – August 2009 Edition

I’ve been reading of great articles on the web lately, and I thought I’d share some of the best with you, my dear readers. Enjoy. Totally Wasted – Mother Jones’ epic special report on the War on Drugs. Damning evidence that our country needs a major shift in drug policies. The Great American Bubble Machine […]

Categories
North Dakota

Is North Dakota the Recession’s Big Winner?

Last night, Marketplace had a great story about the strength of North Dakota’s economy in this recession. In short, our state is thriving right now: What is happening is a combination of planning and luck that’s left the state with something rare these days: a $700 million budget surplus and a big fat tax cut. […]

Categories
Economy

Cascading Failure

As I watch our country slip deeper and deeper into economic depression (yes – this is a depression, like it or not), I often wonder how bad it’s going to get, how things will look on the other side, what will finally get us to the other side, and what this all means in the […]

Categories
Insights

The Future Will be Decentralized

More and more, I’m beginning to think that our success as a nation – and as a species on this planet – depends on us looking back to our ancestors for wisdom and insight for survival. And, I think that will lead us to one overarching theme: Decentralization. As the human race became more modern […]

Categories
Economy

Feeding the Monster (or, The End)

The more time passes, and the more that I learn about America’s crumbling financial system, the more I think maybe we should just let it all burn. You know, start over from scratch.

Categories
Politics

What Are We Going To Do About It?

If there were any doubts, this week should confirm the fact that our country is in deep $#!&. We were (are?) closer to a complete collapse of the U.S. financial system than most people will ever realize, and that’s just one of a number of crises that are boiling up: The root of the recent […]

Categories
Microsoft

Perceptions and the “Mojave Experiment”

Quick – What do you think of Windows Vista? Next question – Have you ever used Windows Vista?