“One way to get to know Yossi is through his portfolio. Here´s a list of the companies he´s invested with: they include Ilcu, Foxytunes, Gteko, recently sold to Microsoft, Fixya, a very clever customer support web 2.0 site, AtlasCT, a competitor to Google Maps, and Fring, competitor to Gizmo Project or Truphone.”
Investor and venture capitalist Yossi Vardi is a living legend in Israel. Last night we watched a TED Talks video of Yossi on Local Warming. Regular seekerblog readers know we are huge fans of the free TED lectures. Don’t miss this one, and think about subscribing to TED via iTunes:
Investor and prankster Yossi Vardi delivers a careful lecture on the crisis of local warming in the blogging community. Specifically, um, for men.
And here’s an excerpt from Michael Arrington’s recent Vardi interview:
Yossi Vardi is one of the people I’ve had the pleasure to get to know since starting TechCrunch. You can find him at technology events worldwide - just look for the smiling, wild-haired guy surrounded by a pack of people.
…I spoke with Yossi this week and asked him about his investment approach. He generally invests in young entrepreneurs and only takes common stock. If someone has failed before he’s even more likely to invest - “It makes them want to win even more,” he said. He generally doesn’t look at business plans at all, and just invests in the individual.
Technorati Tags: Humor, Humour, Venture Capital
Saudi Arabian cultivated fields as visible using Google Earth. Each circle is an irrigated area of about 1 km diameter. The whole square is about 10 km side. The coordinates are 26°47′21.64″N, 49°10′41.43″E.
Look at these irrigated fields in Saudi Arabia, just an example of the cultivations that dot the desert. However, in a few years these fields may disappear. Peak water may have taken place in Saudi Arabia already more than 10 years ago.
According to recent news from Reuters (2008) the Saudi government has decided to stop all subsidies to agriculture. It means abandoning a policy that had obtained self sufficiency in food production and that had allowed Saudi Arabia to be a major food exporter in the past. According to Reuters, “The kingdom aims to rely entirely on imports by 2016″. The desert is going to win back the land it had ceded to agriculture.
These news come as a surprise, but not so much. Saudi Arabian food production has been based on “fossil water.” It is water from ancient aquifers that can’t be replaced by natural processes in times of interest for human beings. Fossil water is non renewable, just as oil is, and it is unavoidable that it has to run out one day or another.
A wealth of data on the Saudi Arabian water situation can be found in the paper by Walid A. Abderrahman (2001) “Water Demand Management in Saudi Arabia”. From this paper, we learn that water production in Saudi Arabia has reached a peak in the early 1990s, at more than 30 billion cubic meters per year, and declined afterwards. Today, it is at around 15 billion cubic meters, less than half than the peak value. We also learn that most of this water, 90% at the peak, came from non renewable aquifers.
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I cross-checked Dr. Bardi’s quoted energy efficiency of desalination [4 kWh/cubic meter is among the lowest values reported, but it is probably possible on large scale plants.] Our own CSIRO here in Australia is involved in a multi-university research project with the goal of improved energy efficiency. Stephen Gray of Victoria University is the lead scientist, so I took his comments from 25 June 2007 as being a current estimator [from “Why Desalination Doesn’t Work (Yet)”]:
Current methods require about 14 kilowatt-hours of energy to produce 1,000 gallons of desalinated seawater.
That’s equivalent to 3.6 kWh per kilolitre [same as cubic meter] — much the same as Dr. Bardi’s 4 kWh/kL.
Technorati Tags: Water, Water Crisis
A useful op-ed by Greg Mankiw that I missed while exploring Argentina. Still completely relevant:
WITH the health care system at the center of the political debate, a lot of scary claims are being thrown around. The dangerous ones are not those that are false; watchdogs in the news media are quick to debunk them. Rather, the dangerous ones are those that are true but don’t mean what people think they mean.
This Peter Huber article is a bit dated [from April 10, 2007] but the content is just as worthy of consideration today:
Bad policies deliver their disasters when overtaken by events. A peace-in-our-time narcotic stupefied democracies for years while Hitler seized power and built Panzers. We are now four decades into another self-induced daze that will end in another great spasm of death.
When Jonas Salk announced his polio vaccine in 1955, humanity’s century-long war against germs seemed all but over. Public sanitation had driven them out of the water supply. Vaccines and antibiotics had then chased them out of the lungs, fluids and intestines of the public itself. “The time has come to close the book on infectious disease,” our surgeon general would announce in 1967. “We have basically wiped out infection in the United States.”
Viewed in that context, the FDA amendments that President Kennedy signed into law in 1962, to regulate drugs in the peaceful, germ-free future, seemed to make good scientific sense. Cholera had indeed given way to cigarettes and cholesterol. The diseases of the future would be choreographed by lifestyle and genes, not germs. The drugs of the future would target cancer, arthritis and other problems rooted in human chemistry. The new killers would creep up rather predictably and evenly, on adults, not children. Widely prescribed, pill-a-day treatments might easily cause more harm than good. Just months earlier, a horrified world had discovered that one drug of the future — thalidomide — relieved morning sickness and helped people fall asleep; but it also halted the growth of a baby’s limbs in the womb.
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Technorati Tags: FDA
For the especially unscrupulous con artist, the elderly are a tempting target. Now researchers have confirmed in the lab what frauds already knew instinctively: as they grow older, even people who seem perfectly on top of things may have trouble making good decisions.
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Technorati Tags: Ageing, Aging
A new product from IBM could help businesses get more from their data by making it easy for workers to mash together simple tools to create something better. Known as mashups, these software applications have been very popular with consumers. But few people have the technical ability to create them. Jeff Schick, vice president of social software for IBM, says that Lotus Mashups will change that, by reducing the technical skill required to combine the applications, and by adding features to protect sensitive data.
…”The holy grail for a long time has been to design something that lets the nontechnical person do software engineering,” says John Gerken, a senior architect for the Emerging Internet Technologies Software Group at IBM. “This is a step toward that goal.” The product’s drag-and-drop interface conceals several technical problems that had to be solved to build the software, he says.
I could use that — I have several things I would like to do with Google Maps. [more]
Although there’s been an explosion of widgets on the Web in the past year, Gerken notes that in most cases, it’s easy for users to make widgets share space on a Web page, but not to make them share data. “They’re mixable, not mashable,” he says. For example, Facebook users can paper their profiles with a variety of simple applications, but those applications are isolated from each other. In contrast, Mashups allows users to combine widgets, so that taking an action within one widget triggers the others to act too. For example, a user could build an application for tracking stock prices of different companies, using a chart as the central widget. The chart could include company name, location, and ticker symbol. Clicking a line in the chart could send data to several connected widgets, such as one that looks up the company name on Google, one that maps the location of the company headquarters, and one that retrieves the most recent stock price for the company. Gerken adds that IBM is participating in the Open Ajax Foundation’s effort to create standards for widgets, which will hopefully make it more common for widgets from different sources to share data.
To build these applications, a user selects from lists of widgets and data sources and drags them together onscreen. Dropping a list of store locations onto a map widget makes the system automatically plot those locations on a map. Gerken says that a major design challenge was programming the system so that it could understand what the user likely wants it to do in such a situation. To try to solve that problem, the system tries to recognize similarities in data that might not be tagged the same way. It must recognize, for example, that an “address” field is likely the same as a “street address” field.
Jeff Jarvis gets a free DNA test:
23andMe, the DNA company, offered free tests to 1,000 of the Davosati, unlocking our DNA for each of us, telling us about certain genetic propensities, identifying our heritage, and opening up a new social network of the gene.
We went to a booth in the fancy party hotel and spit — and spit and spit and spit some more — into a plastic tube and created a web account. Investor Esther Dyson even brought a few kits with her to the fancy final-night dinner party and had moguls salivating. In a few weeks, I’ll have my report back. This one is on the house for Davos participants. Otherwise, it costs $1,000.
Biofuels, especially those grown in Europe, are one of the least cost-effective ways of reducing carbon emissions…
Feb 24, 2008: I have updated this post to include more background on the Open Europe think tank — see below.
Very interesting — check out these two just-released reports — it all looks on target. The central theme is the economic inefficiency of biofuels mandates and renewable energy targets. Recommended policies are centered around a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
The report by Europe Economics – one of the most respected firms of economists in the UK – looks at the different costs of reducing emissions using all the available policy options: different types of taxes, trading systems, subsidies for different technologies, energy efficiency measures, and targets for the use of biofuels.
It concludes that biofuels are one of the most expensive of reducing emissions, and that straightforward carbon taxes are likely to be a far more cost effective way to reduce emissions than subsidies for the heavy use of renewables.
The report finds that biofuels and many of the subsidies for renewables do not meet the Government’s own criteria for deciding whether a project is worthwhile – the so-called “social cost of carbon”.
…Europe Economics’ research has also found that placing a clear and stable price on carbon, and using the revenues to lower taxes elsewhere in the economy would bring net economic benefits by reducing the deadweight loss of taxation – as well as encouraging investment in lowering emissions. They recommend an ‘upstream’ tax on the consumption of all primary fuels (e.g. coal, gas, oil) in proportion to their carbon content. Unlike emissions trading this would allow a carbon price to be extended across the entire economy. It also has the advantage of price stability, and predictability for business.
Levying taxes on a negative externality such as CO2 emissions should not solely be regarded as a means of restraining pollution. It also creates an opportunity to cut taxes in other areas of the economy, effectively relieving the burden of taxation on productive wealth-creating activity, and shifting it towards a harmful activity that does incur a long term cost that would not otherwise be internalised by business if the market were left to its own devices.
I found PDFs of the Europe Economics reports here:
A Comparison of the Costs of Alternative Policies for Reducing UK Carbon Emissions
What works? How to reduce emissions at the lowest cost
A bit more at the Financial Times.
Open Europe is a UK-based free market oriented think tank, funded by business. Here is how they describe their mission:
Open Europe is an independent think tank set up by some of the UK’s leading business people to contribute bold new thinking to the debate about the direction of the EU.
While we are committed to European co-operation, Open Europe believes that the EU has reached a critical moment in its development. ‘Ever closer union’, espoused by Jean Monnet and propelled forwards by successive generations of political and bureaucratic elites, has failed.
The EU’s over-loaded institutions, held in low regard by Europe’s citizens, are ill-equipped to adapt to the pressing challenges of weak economic growth, rising global competition, insecurity and a looming demographic crisis.
Open Europe believes that the EU must now embrace radical reform based on economic liberalisation, a looser and more flexible structure, and greater transparency and accountability if it is to overcome these challenges, and succeed in the twenty first century.
The best way forward for the EU is an urgent programme of radical change driven by a consensus between member states. In pursuit of this consensus, Open Europe will seek to involve like-minded individuals, political parties and organisations across Europe in our thinking and activities, and disseminate our ideas widely across the EU and the rest of the world.
Their list of supporters shows a large number of small to large UK business executives and owners.
Technorati Tags: Carbon Tax
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