ricaurte

Agreed this is a completely absurd move by the Treasury Department. What brought the financial industry to its knees was too much leverage. Venture capital firms don't use leverage, so they can't be a systemic risk.

He fails to mention the restrictive state laws on the books that heavily regulate who can pay for what in health care. With 90% of health care being basic and routine care, we should only need insurance in catastrophic situations.

For example, a health care start-up in Seattle (Qliance, website: http://qliance.com) had to lobby to have the State of Washington's laws clarified so they could legally operate, while the insurance industry lobbied to make their innovative model too costly to operate.

I bet if everyone in America had affordable basic health care, such as that provided by Qliance, the health care debate would become more or less mute.

For additional reference, the Direct Primary Care Coalition: http://www.dpcare.org/

And not to nitpick as well, but I never said that entrepreneurs necessarily were. :)

Thanks for posting the Orwell article. I hadn't thought about the difference between democratic and tyrannical weapons before.

To be "normal", you are by definition average, and to achieve anything, you need to be "above average" in some way. If you're "above average", then you must by definition be "abnormal". Considering anything "abnormal" is a disease in psychiatry, then anyone that achieves anything must have some type of psychiatric disease. :)

A law by Congress cannot override a Supreme Court decision. The Supreme Court has the final say on the Constitutionality of laws in the United States via judicial review, which was used for the first time by the court in Marbury v. Madison.

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/article03/13...

I have a feeling if he made this a centerpiece of the defense case he could have it appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. If you "buy" something, you own it. Similar to the car comment, if you buy a new home, it's not like you get it with a EULA that says you can't modify it, although home owners associations act in a similar manner.

He could also potentially counter-sue with a class-action lawsuit claiming that the video game systems makers committed fraud by way of falsely advertising to people that they were "buying" the game systems, when in fact, they were actually leasing them.

If this holds for the vast majority of people, that most people don't learn from their failures, then it should also hold that if you can learn from your own failures you will be able to get a nice head-start on life.

It would then also be good to reflect and make sure one learns from each of their failures instead of continuing on the worn and useless path.

Given the method they've created to make carbon nanotubes, it should drive down the price of making the nanotubes and allow things to pan-out. Now if there is some serious flaw that comes-up in the commercialization process, then it probably won't, unless it is relatively inexpensive to overcome.

Ah, good to know. I'm just now getting to the link.

It would make sense that teleportation (or perceived teleportation) would be possible from it, since all matter is is stored information. Now the question is if matter is the only way to store information aside from light. If this is so, then if you reduced an object or human to its light representation, you would be able to travel at the speed of light, but no faster, which would be perceived teleportation - I'm assuming teleportation is instantaneous whereas going the speed of light is not. Hopefully no one would slow you down in the meant time.

I really like the idea of sauteeing the rice in oil and spices beforehand. I'll have to try this.

Great article. I had heard missionary and mercenary CEO's mentioned, but hadn't seen anything about it yet.

In the video he says (paraphrased), "if you can't see yourself doing this your whole life, don't do it", if you're a missionary CEO. So the thought that came to my mind is - what if you're on a mission and your start-up solidly aligns with it, but one start-up might not handle your entire mission? If a start-up is a launching pad, are you a missionary, mercenary, or combination of the two?

Thanks for the elaboration, and agreeing with ThomPete, this article isn't going after academic skills but how the brain learns in general.

Care to elaborate? They didn't cite a bunch of studies in Science Daily (but I'd assume in the article published in Science they would), and the article is taken directly from the University of Washington's press release.

http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=50883

Imagine if all teachers were even 10% as invested in their students as Mr. Kumar - "He coached them for free and paid for their lodging. His mother cooked all their meals. For months, he stoically toiled with their books till 2am every night. On the big day, he dropped them at their test centre, and waited."

Also, this next quote applies to pretty much everyone. The second someone has the confidence that they can do anything and feel empowered, they will do amazing things, which is exactly what you pointed out, Squirrelman. “Basically, all poor lack confidence even if they have the brains,” Mr Kumar said. “You instil confidence in them, and the world is their oyster.”

I whole-heartedly agree with the last phrase - "Schools don't teach the way children learn." It's amazing how much more learning happens outside of the classroom than in it, especially when you look at how much time you had to spend in the classroom to begin with. Hopefully some educators will take the practical advice in the article, and if the education leaders don't heed it, they might be watching some of this research.

With people exploring different ways to improve education, there are some interesting tidbits in an article published in Science last week that talked about how scientists are creating a new foundation for education by understanding learning's three principles, "learning is computational, social, and supported by brain circuits linking perception and action that connect people to one another."

One of the things they found - "Apparently babies need other people to learn. They take in more information by looking at another person face to face than by looking at that person on a big plasma TV screen."

The Press Release on ScienceDaily.com: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090716141134.ht...

Your last two paragraphs hit on a point that more managers need to implement but are afraid to, because most managers think that if they make themselves redundant, then they'll be laid-off, instead of promoted.

I know of one manager in particular that is amazing at managing restaurants, but his problem is that he has to put in long hours to make sure the restaurant runs, and if he leaves on vacation, then the restaurant has often fallen apart (not to mention the years of increased stress levels it entailed worsened his cholesterol levels to the point he needed surgery). If instead he had trained everyone else to do his job, not only would he have had a ready supply of people to promote all these years, but he would also be a lot less stressed-out and maybe wouldn't have needed surgery.