Brown Motion

The library again yielded some worthwhile content to read.  I did.  The entire weekend was spent lazily soaking in history and state of the planet we occupy. First title was Rocket Billionaires  - Musk, Bezos et al.. This narrative is the historic perspective on how the privatization of the space we call 'outer space' came to be.  A series of lucky coincidences, entrepreneurial hubris and flawed government oversight in the form of NASA and bloated bureaucracies largely paved the way for commoners to dream of cracking the Karman line (named for a Hungarian physicist), which is an imaginary plane at 100 km altitude above earth. While full commercial flight into outer space is not a reality there are significant strides to solve for a flight of fancy.  Why someone would want to take a joy ride for hundreds of thousands of dollars to be in the rarefied atmosphere and gaze down is akin to a solution waiting for a question. Yet there is an aspiration to reac...

The more you read about global economic chaos it becomes clear that all of it is rooted in basic human greed. Since it is very hard to create excessive return on investment from nothing (something akin to E=mc2) there has to be a flaw in the system somewhere. Recent admission by a large US bank that it lost over $2 Billion in a bad trade underscores the core issue. There is no such thing as Impressive Market Valuation. Its a fallacy created by marketers of various commodities to lure dumb people to part with their money. This impacts the people that are the most susceptible without their active participation. It can happen when a common man's pension fund invests in a derivatives market and the trade goes south. The derivative of this transaction is that the common man gets buried while the make believe world of high finance makes a killing. What is required then is a basic safety net. Governments of the world need to invest in the five core industries and guarantee their ...