The GDP per capita metric is helpful to gauge the level of economic development within a region, but misleading in that the metric gets skewed by extraction-based industries like mining and oil (which is why Botswana, Namibia, and Gabon) are higher than their neighboring countries). Visual Capitalist has published a map of the per-capital GDPs of most of the African nations (in most cases rounded...
I’m in a reprise mood this season… recently thinking about a blog post from 2015 with a lesson learned in an old movie on how to blow up a dam. A lesson about the expectations when making a big change to the world. The lesson comes from Force 10 from Navarone, starring Harrison Ford and Robert Shaw. This is a movie I first saw on a Sunday afternoon on TV as a pre-teen, and then dozen...
“History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” (Twain). Wednesday, November 6th, and it feels a bit more repeat than rhyme. Eight years ago I posted Plan 11. It seems apt to reprise that post. 2016 Every event in Seattle this week seems to start with a lamentation of last week’s election results. Three days after posting about #lemonade and I’m getting more funny...
The amazing Berkshire Hathaway set two new huge milestones this week: (i) The stock price of the BRKA shares are now more than $700,000 each, up from $7.50 when Warren Buffett bought his first share in December 1962. And with that (ii) the market cap of the company now exceeds $1 trillion. Quite amazing unto itself, but even more amazing when you look at the other trillion dollar companies of the...
