Monday, November 30, 2009

Hot Flat and Crowded or Fooled by Randomness

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America

Author: Thomas L Friedman

Thomas L. Friedman's No. 1 bestseller The World Is Flat has helped millions of readers to see the world, and globalization, in a new way. With his latest book, Friedman brings a fresh and provocative outlook to another pressing issue: the interlinked crises of destabilizing climate change and rising competition for energy--both of which could poison our world if we do not act quickly and collectively. His argument speaks to the 2008 presidential election--and to all of us who are concerned about the state of America and its role in the global future.

"Green is the new red, white, and blue," Friedman declares, and proposes that an ambitious national strategy--which he calls geo-greenism--is not only what we need to save the planet from overheating, it is what we need to make America healthier, richer, more innovative, more productive, and more secure in the coming E.C.E.--the Energy-Climate Era. Green-oriented practices and technologies, established at scale everywhere from Washington to Wal-Mart, are both the only way to mitigate climate change and the best way for America to "get its groove back"--to "reknit America at home, reconnect America abroad, retool America for the new century, and restore America to its natural place in the global order."

As in The World Is Flat and his previous bestseller The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he explains the future we are facing through an illuminating account of recent events. He explains how 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the flattening of the world by the Internet, which has brought three billion new consumers onto the world stage, have combined to bring the climate and energy issues to main street. But they have not really gone down main street yet. Indeed, it is Friedman's view that we are not really having the green revolution that the press keeps touting, or, if we are, "it is the only revolution in history," he says, "where no one got hurt." No, to the contrary, argues Friedman, we're actually having a "green party." We have not even begun to be serious yet about the speed and scale of change that is required.

With all that in mind, Friedman lays out his argument that if we are going to avoid the worst disruptions looming before us as we enter the Energy-Climate Era, we are going to need several disruptive breakthroughs in the clean-technology sphere--disruptive in the transformational sense. He explores what enabled the disruptive breakthroughs that created the IT (Information Technology) revolution that flattened the world in information terms and then shows how a similar set of disruptive breakthroughs could spark the ET--Energy Technology--revolution. Time and again, though, Friedman shows why it is both necessary and desirous for America to lead this revolution--with the first green president, a green New Deal, and spurred by the Greenest Generation--and why meeting the green challenge of the twenty-first century could transform America every bit as meeting the Red challenge, that of Communism, did in the twentieth century.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded is classic Thomas L. Friedman--fearless, incisive, forward-looking, and rich in surprising common sense about the world we live in today.

The New York Times - David G. Victor

The litany of dangers has been told many times before, but Mr. Friedman's voice is compelling and will be widely heard…Heads will be nodding across airport lounges, as readers absorb Mr. Friedman's common sense about how America and the world are dangerously addicted to cheap fossil fuels while we recklessly use the atmosphere as a dumping ground for carbon dioxide.

The Washington Post - Joseph S. Nye Jr.

Like it or not, we need Tom Friedman. The peripatetic columnist has made himself a major interpreter of the confusing world we inhabit. He travels to the farthest reaches, interviews everyone from peasants to chief executives and expresses big ideas in clear and memorable prose. While pettifogging academics (a select few of whom he favors) complain that his catchy phrases and anecdotes sometimes obscure deeper analysis, by and large Friedman gets the big issues right.

Publishers Weekly

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Friedman (The World Is Flat) is still an unrepentant guru of globalism, despite the looming economic crisis attributable, in Friendman's view, to the U.S. having become a "subprime nation that thinks it can just borrow its way to prosperity." Friedman covers familiar territory (the need for alternate energy, conservation measures, recycling, energy efficiency, etc.) as a build-up to his main thesis: the U.S. market is the "most effective and prolific system for transformational innovation.... There is only one thing bigger than Mother Nature and that is Father Profit." While he remains ostensibly a proponent of the free market, he does not flinch from using the government to create conditions favorable to investment, such as setting a "floor price for crude oil or gasoline," and imposing a new gasoline tax ($5-$10 per gallon) in order to make investment in green technologies attractive to venture capitalists: "America needs an energy technology bubble just like the information technology bubble." To make such draconian measures palatable, Friedman poses a national competition to "outgreen" China, modeled on Kennedy's proposal to beat the Soviets to the moon, a race that required a country-wide mobilization comparable to the WWII war effort. Recognizing the looming threat of "petrodicatorship" and U.S. dependence on imported oil, this warning salvo presents a stirring and far-darker vision than Friedman's earlier books.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Risa Getman - Library Journal

The audio edition of three-time Pulitzer® Prize winner/New York Times columnist Friedman's The World Is Flat, which won an Audie® Award in 2006, remains Macmillan Audio's top-selling title of all time. Audie® Award-winning actor/narrator Oliver Wyman, who skillfully voiced that title, does the same with this one, in which Friedman addresses the triple threat of global warming, overconsumption, and population explosion not just to the environment but to political stability and the economy. The currency and gravity of this topic cannot be overstated; regardless of their political leanings, readers will sit up and listen. Highly recommended for all library collections; expect heavy demand. [Audio clip available through us.macmillan.com.-Ed.]

Kirkus Reviews

The world is flat, New York Times columnist Friedman told us in his bestselling 2005 book of that name. Now things are getting worse, and the clock is ticking. Americans have squandered most of the goodwill extended since 9/11, writes Friedman, and in the years of the Bush administration no thought has been given to what 9/12 is supposed to look like. The climate is changing, but the administration has spent most of its tenure denying it and insisting on a particularist view that we deserve to be profligate because we're Americans. Our political blindness and ignorance vis-a-vis other nations now butts up against the world's instability and, Friedman continues, "the convergence of hot, flat, and crowded is tightening energy supplies, intensifying the extinction of plants and animals, deepening energy poverty, strengthening petrodictatorship, and accelerating climate change." The way out of those tangles, he says, is for America to go green in any way possible-and to do it right away, investing in every kind of alternative and renewable energy form imaginable, setting the best of examples for the rest of the world and exporting green technologies everywhere, thus winning back allies and influencing people. Readers who have been paying attention to Fareed Zakaria, Jared Diamond or similar writers know most of this, but still the word has been slow getting out. Many others have written about these subjects, but few enjoy Friedman's audience, so it's good that he's turning to such matters, if a touch belatedly. His case studies-from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's insistence on a fleet of hybrid taxis on the street to British firm Marks & Spencer's insistence that going green is PlanA and that "there is no Plan B" -are well-selected, detailed and, in the end, quite inspiring. That inspiration is needed, along with a lot of hard work. A timely, rewarding book. Agent: Esther Newberg/ICM



Table of Contents:

Pt. I Where We Are

1 Where Birds Don't Fly 3

2 Today's Date: 1 E.C.E. Today's Weather: Hot, Flat, and Crowded 26

Pt. II How We Got Here

3 Our Carbon Copies (or, Too Many Americans) 53

4 Fill'Er Up with Dictators 77

5 Global Weirding 111

6 The Age of Noah 140

7 Energy Poverty 154

8 Green Is the New Red, White, and Blue 170

Pt. III How We Move Forward

9 205 Easy Ways to Save the Earth 203

10 The Energy Internet: When IT Meets ET 217

11 The Stone Age Didn't End Because We Ran Out of Stones 241

12 If It Isn't Boring, It Isn't Green 267

13 A Million Noahs, a Million Arks 297

14 Outgreening al-Qaeda (or, Buy One, Get Four Free) 317

Pt. IV China

15 Can Red China Become Green China? 343

Pt. V America

16 China for a Day (but Not for Two) 371

17 A Democratic China, or a Banana Republic? 395

Acknowledgments 415

Index 423

Go to: Ugly Americans or The Answer

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Now in a striking new hardcover edition, Fooled by Randomness is the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about business and the world. Nassim Nicholas Taleb–veteran trader, renowned risk expert, polymathic scholar, erudite raconteur, and New York Times bestselling author of The Black Swan–has written a modern classic that turns on its head what we believe about luck and skill.

This book is about luck–or more precisely, about how we perceive and deal with luck in life and business. Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill–the world of trading–Fooled by Randomness provides captivating insight into one of the least understood factors in all our lives. Writing in an entertaining narrative style, the author tackles major intellectual issues related to the underestimation of the influence of happenstance on our lives.

The book is populated with an array of characters, some of whom have grasped, in their own way, the significance of chance: the baseball legend Yogi Berra; the philosopher of knowledge Karl Popper; the ancient world’s wisest man, Solon; the modern financier George Soros; and the Greek voyager Odysseus. We also meet the fictional Nero, who seems to understand the role of randomness in his professional life but falls victim to his own superstitious foolishness.

However, the most recognizable character of all remains unnamed–the lucky fool who happens to be in the right place at the right time–he embodies the “survival of the least fit.” Such individuals attract devoted followers who believe in their guru’sinsights and methods. But no one can replicate what is obtained by chance.

Are we capable of distinguishing the fortunate charlatan from the genuine visionary? Must we always try to uncover nonexistent messages in random events? It may be impossible to guard ourselves against the vagaries of the goddess Fortuna, but after reading Fooled by Randomness we can be a little better prepared.

PRAISE FOR FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS:

Named by Fortune One of the Smartest Books of All Time

A Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year


“[Fooled by Randomness] is to conventional Wall Street wisdom approximately what Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses were to the Catholic Church.”
–Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink

“The book that rolled down Wall Street like a hand grenade.”
–Maggie Mahar, author of Bull! A History of the Boom, 1982—1999

“Fascinating . . . Taleb will grab you.”
–Peter L. Bernstein, author of Capital Ideas Evolving

“Recalls the best of scientist/essayists like Richard Dawkins . . . and Stephen Jay Gould.”
–Michael Schrage, author of Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate

“We need a book like this. . . . Fun to read, refreshingly independent-minded.”
–Robert J. Shiller, author of Irrational Exuberance

“Powerful . . . loaded with crackling little insights [and] extreme brilliance.”
–National Review

“If asked to name the five best books written about markets, Fooled by Randomness would be on my list.”
–Jack D. Schwager, author of Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders

“Excellent and thought-provoking . . . an entertaining book.”
–Financial Times

Paul Wilmott

A blast of common sense. From classical to modern philosophers, via cab drivers, businessmen, and dentists . . .

Marco Avellaneda

Intelligent, honest, and revealing. There exists a distinct Taleb way of thinking and it is contagious.

Robert J. Shiller

I really liked this book. . . It is fun to read, refreshingly independently-minded and at the same time playful.

Peter L. Bernstein

. . . Taleb will grab you. As a non-random consequence, your understanding of life (and your money will expand exponentially.

Donald Geman

Taleb's book is mathematically sound as well as entertaining and informative for the general public, which is quite an achievement . . .

Victory Niederhoffer

Whether you agree with Mr. Taleb or not, his book will leave you with many suggestive queries.

Publishers Weekly

In this look at financial luck, hedge fund manager Taleb (Dynamic Hedging) addresses the apparently irrational movement of money markets around the world. Using his own investing experience and examples of others' successes and disappointments, he discusses theories like Monte Carlo math (easy; considered cheating by purists) and the concept of Russian roulette. Taleb tells interesting, well-wrought stories about individual behavior: "While Nero has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, both personally and intellectually, he is starting to consider himself as having missed a chance somewhere." While serious investors and mathematics enthusiasts will be intrigued, readers looking for practical investment strategies will be disappointed by this rambling intellectual discourse. Tables. 40,000-copy first printing; $150,000 marketing budget. (Oct. 30) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.



Sunday, November 29, 2009

Greenspans Bubbles or Small Business Owners Manual

Greenspan's Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve

Author: Bill Fleckenstein

No matter who you are-investor, trader, homeowner, 401(k) holder, or CEO-you are bound to feel the impact of Alan Greenspan's “Age of Ignorance” for years to come.



According to MSN Money columnist William A. Fleckenstein, Greenspan's nearly 19-year career as Federal Reserve Chairman is even worse than anyone imagined. Labeled “Mr. Bubble” by the New York Times, Greenspan was nothing less than a serial bubble blower with a long history of bad decision-making. His famous “Greenspan Put” fueled the perception of a Goldilocks economy-but, as this explosive exposé reveals, the bear has finally caught up with Goldilocks.



Using transcripts of Greenspan's FOMC meetings as well as testimony before Congress, this eye-opening book delivers a timeline of his most devastating mistakes and weaves together the connection between every economic calamity of the past 19 years:



  • The stock market crash of 1987
  • The Savings & Loan crisis
  • The collapse of Long Term Capital Management
  • The tech bubble of 2000
  • The feared Y2K disaster
  • The credit bubble and real estate crisis of 2007

Fleckenstein explains just how far-reaching Greenspan's mess has been flung, and presents damning evidence that contradicts the former Fed chief's public naiveté concerning shifts in the market and economy. He also points to a disturbing fact, that throughout his career, Greenspan not only made costly mistakes, but made the same ones-over and over again. And not only was he never able to recognize or admit to those mistakes, he constantly rewrote his own history to justifythem.



Greenspan's Bubbles offers a lock-stock-and-barrel portrait of a flawed but fascinating man whose words and actions have led a whole generation astray, and whose legacy will continue to challenge us in the years ahead.





Go to: AppleScript or Google Apps Administrator Guide

Small Business Owner's Manual: Everything You Need to Know to Start up and Run Your Business

Author: Joe Kennedy

An Owner's Manual provides fast, practical and direct advice and that's what you get with this book! The Small Business Owner's Manual is useful for newly minted entrepreneurs as well as seasoned business owners and can be read from cover-to-cover or to quickly lookup information in the midst of a crisis. For example:

  • Choose among 13 ways to get new financing and the 17 steps to building a winning loan package.
  • Weigh the pros and cons among 8 legal structures, from corporations to LLCs.
  • Write winning ads and analyze 16 advertising and marketing alternatives including the latest in Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.
  • Develop a powerful business plan in half the time.
  • Learn to sell products and services by considering 10 possible sales and distribution channels.
  • Discover the latest trends to quickly and inexpensively set up a web-site and e-store.
  • Get taxes paid on time, collect from deadbeats, protect the business from litigation and get legal agreements with teeth by effectively finding and partnering with CPAs and attorneys. * Get a quick overview of the 14 top forms of business insurance including workers comp and medical. * Looking to lease? Exploit a comprehensive review of the top 18 critical factors used to evaluate locations and 24 of the most important clauses in lease agreements.
  • Understand the legal side of hiring, firing, and managing employees and contractors.
  • Minimize taxes by learning the ins-and-outs of business income taxes, the top 5 payroll taxes, sales and use taxes, common tax dodges, and the latest loopholes for business owners. Filing schedules, form names, form numbers and download links are also included.
  • Credit cards are critical these days - so learn how the system really works and minimize chargebacks, disputes and headaches. Includes 35 important definitions and 12 ways to minimize fraud.
  • Lots more too!



Saturday, November 28, 2009

Nickel and Dimed or Working with You Is Killing Me

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America

Author: Barbara Ehrenreich

The bestselling, landmark work of undercover reportage, now updated

Acclaimed as an instant classic upon publication, Nickel and Dimed has sold more than 1.5 million copies and become a staple of classroom reading. Chosen for “one book” initiatives across the country, it has fueled nationwide campaigns for a living wage. Funny, poignant, and passionate, this revelatory firsthand account of life in low-wage America—the story of Barbara Ehrenreich’s attempts to eke out a living while working as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart associate—has become an essential part of the nation’s political discourse.

Now, in a new afterword, Ehrenreich shows that the plight of the underpaid has in no way eased: with fewer jobs available, deteriorating work conditions, and no pay increase in sight, Nickel and Dimed is more relevant than ever.

New York Times

One of today's most original writers.

Chicago Tribune

Ehrenreich is passionate, public, hotly lucid, and politically engaged.

Boston Globe

Ehrenreich's scorn withers, her humor stings, and her radical light shines on.

Ms. Magazine - Vivien Labaton

Nickel and Dimed is an important book that should be read by anyone who has been lulled into middle-class complacency.

New York Times Book Review - Dorothy Gallagher

We have Barbara Ehrenreich to thank for bringing us the news of America's working poor so clearly and directly, and conveying with it a deep moral outrage and a finely textured sense of lives as lived. As Michael Harrington was, she is now our premier reporter of the underside of capitalism.

Publishers Weekly

In contrast to recent books by Michael Lewis and Dinesh D'Souza that explore the lives and psyches of the New Economy's millionares, Ehrenreich (Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class) turns her gimlet eye on the view from the workforce's bottom rung. Determined to find out how anyone could make ends meet on $7 an hour, she left behind her middle class life as a journalist—except for $1000 in start-up funds, a car and her laptop computer—to try to sustain herself as a low-skilled worker for a month at a time. In 1999 and 2000, Ehrenreich worked as a waitress in Key West, Fla., as a cleaning woman and a nursing home aide in Portland, Maine, and in a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis, Minn.

During the application process, she faced routine drug tests and spurious "personality tests"; once on the job, she endured constant surveillance and numbing harangues over infractions like serving a second roll and butter. Beset by transportation costs and high rents, she learned the tricks of the trade from her co-workers, some of whom sleep in their cars, and many of whom work when they're vexed by arthritis, back pain or worse, yet still manage small gestures of kindness. Despite the advantages of her race, education, good health and lack of children, Ehrenreich's income barely covered her month's expenses in only one instance, when she worked seven days a week at two jobs (one of which provided free meals) during the off-season in a vacation town. Delivering a fast read that's both sobering and sassy, she gives readers pause about those caught in the economy's undertow, even in good times.

Dorothy Gallagher

"Barbara Ehrenreich . . . is our premier reporter of the underside of capitalism."
—Dorothy Gallagher, The New York Times Book

Eileen Boris

"With grace and wit, Ehrenreich discovers . . . the irony of being nickel and dimed during unprecedented prosperity."
—Eileen Boris, The Boston Globe

Stephen Metcalf

"Ehrenreich is a superb and relaxed stylist {with} a tremendous sense of rueful humor."
—Stephen Metcalf, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Diana Henriques

". . . you will read this explosive little book cover to cover and pass it on to all your friends and relatives."
—Diana Henriques, The New York Times

Anne Colamosca

"Angry, amusing . . . An in-your-face expose."
—Anne Colamosca, Business Week

Susannah Meadows

"Jarring, full of riveting grit . . . This book is already unforgettable."
—Susannah Meadows, Newsweek

Library Journal

A close observer and astute analyzer of American life (The Worst Years of Our Life and The Fear of Falling), Ehrenreich turns her attention to what it is like trying to subsist while working in low-paying jobs. Inspired to see what boom times looked like from the bottom, she hides her real identity and attempts to make a life on a salary of just over $300 per week after taxes. She is often forced to work at two jobs, leaving her time and energy for little else than sleeping and working. Ehrenreich vividly describes her experiences living in isolated trailers and dilapidated motels while working as a nursing-home aide, a Wal-Mart "sales associate," a cleaning woman, a waitress, and a hotel maid in three states: Florida, Maine, and Minnesota. Her narrative is candid, often moving, and very revealing. Looking back on her experiences, Ehrenreich claims that the hardest thing for her to accept is the "invisibility of the poor"; one sees them daily in restaurants, hotels, discount stores, and fast-food chains but one doesn't recognize them as "poor" because, after all, they have jobs. No real answers to the problem but a compelling sketch of its reality and pervasiveness. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/01.] Jack Forman, San Diego Mesa Coll. Lib. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Between 1998 and 2000, Ehrenreich spent about three months in three cities throughout the nation, attempting to "get by" on the salary available to low-paid and unskilled workers. Beginning with advantages not enjoyed by many such individuals-she is white, English-speaking, educated, healthy, and unburdened with transportation or child-care worries-she tried to support herself by working as a waitress, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart employee. She discovered that her average salary of $7 per hour couldn't even provide the necessities of life (rent, transportation, and food), let alone the luxury of health coverage. Her account is at once enraging and sobering. In straightforward language, she describes how labor-intensive, demeaning, and controlling such jobs can be: she scrubbed floors on her hands and knees, and found out that talking to coworkers while on the job was considered "time theft." She describes full-time workers who sleep in their cars because they cannot afford housing and employees who yearn for the ability to "take a day off now and then-and still be able to buy groceries the next day." In a concluding chapter, Ehrenreich takes on issues and questions posed before and during the experiment, including why these wages are so low, why workers are so accepting of them, and what Washington's refusal to increase the minimum wage to a realistic "living wage" says about both our economy and our culture. Mandatory reading for any workforce entrant.-Dori DeSpain, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

What People Are Saying

Molly Ivins
Reading Ehrenreich is good for the soul.


Diane Sawyer
Barbara Ehrenreich is smart, provocative, funny, and sane in a world that needs more of all four.




Table of Contents:
Introduction: Getting Ready1
1Serving in Florida11
2Scrubbing in Maine51
3Selling in Minnesota121
Evaluation193

Book review: SalonOvations Day Spa Operations or How to Cure a Hangover

Working with You Is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself from Emotional Traps at Work

Author: Katherine Crowley

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