After the success of “The World is Flat”, Friedman turns to the negative effects of the globalization; the global warming and its the chilling consequences in his new book “Hot, Flat and Crowded – Why We Need a Green Revolution–And How It Can Renew America”. He makes an argument that America needs a big problem to re-motivate itself. It was a dominant force in the industrial and information era. But as the world gets hotter — due to greenhouse emissions by increasing spread of the technology, flatter — due to IT and communications revolution and crowded — due to population growth, America needs to provide leadership in providing sustainable solutions to the world.

The book gives a good insight into the global warming. Though I have been aware of the term, it was eye-opening because of the different examples and quotes. Friedman proposes many ideas, some of which are intriguing. e.g. establish a floor price of $5 per gallon on gasoline for next N years. This will motivate the alternative energy industries to accelerate their development of their technologies. (He also argues the government will get benefited (because of the tariff collected), but that point is debatable, because the oil-producing nations will immediately bump their prices up to extract the profits). He also dreams up some scenarios of energy technology companies coming up with energy dashboards to help you monitor and optimize your energy usage. There are some examples of how going green helps the US military gain an upper hand. (It seems a lot of money is spent by the military in air-conditioning! By building unconventional and greener bases, they reduce or eliminate the demand for transporting gasoline to the bases, thus saving money and the lives of people who transport the gasoline!)

Overall, I liked this book a lot. It surely increased my awareness to the global warming and taught me to look at all perspectives (including the negative externalities) of different alternatives.

Some links:

• Here is an interview of Friedman by the funny man Colbert.
• An interview of Friedman by Fareed Zakaria.

This book is unique because it is made entirely of manga style cartoons and it has clear and simple career advice. Instead of listing down the key ideas, I will just embed a presentation by Garr which does a much better job of presenting the ideas (in the same manga style no less!)

This book is all about three lifelong principles:
1. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – Diversify your assets to maximize the chances of reaching your financial goals with minimum risk. (Asset Allocation)
2. There is no such thing as free lunch – Markets are efficient. If you find an investment with better returns, it comes with more risk. (Approximate market averages – indexing)
3. Save for rainy day – It’s important to save more than rely on unusual investment returns.

The author stresses the importance of these principles and then advises you to ignore the Wall Street and get on with your life!

Trivia:

• The coffeehouse Portfolio is part of Lazy portfolios and has been handily “beating the markets” (along with 90% of the mutual funds)
• Link to Bill’s blog

The strategy seems sound and is well supported by theory. (High ROA companies means, good earnings on slim assets. High Earnings yield means they are currently cheap. Using the book’s website you can very easily find the rankings and stocks that you need. The only problem I see with this strategy is implementation. Buying and selling 30 stocks every year (60 transactions) is not cheap (okay, I am an index fund person – 0.19% fund expenses). I could possibly use buyandhold.com or foliofn.com, but they are not cheap. Also the author might turn the website into a paysite (so you have to use something like moneycentral.com to screen your stocks. I will make a couple of mock portfolios to keep watching the strategy for sure.

I guess I am not a Malcom Gladwell person! This book was on my to-read list for a long time and though I liked the basic premise of the book, somehow I was disappointed by the presentation. I had the exact same reaction after I finished Blink. Anyway…

The other factual:

Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror

Excellent read and is highly recommended…

• A View from the TOP (Audio Book) by Zig Ziglar. A very good audio programme about achieving significance in all aspects of life – Health, Finance, Relationships, Spirituality. This may be the first time I encountered someone being so open about his religious beliefs in a self-help program.
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill – about creating a burning desire to achieve success and generating ideas.
• Digital Fortress by Dan Brown – I was fascinated by earlier two books by Dan Brown – Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code and this one deals with topics that are dearer to me – Security, Encryption, NSA. But I did not find it as gripping as the first two. I was particularly turned off by the concepts (e.g. mutation strings) that the author tries to create for the story to advance, such things just turn the brain off. (That makes me think that maybe I enjoyed the first two books because I do not have any knowledge about the topics of Pope, Illuminati, Christian history)
• Deception Point – by Dan Brown. This was even more boring about a new discovery by NASA, the politics, cover-ups, yawn…

Angels and Demons

and
The Da Vinci Code. I really liked the way the story is told. I wonder why any author cannot create such novels based on Indian Mythologies, Ramayan, Mahabharat ? Telling the story of someone trying to find out the Ashwatthama’s gem by getting clues from Bhagwadgeeta ?

1. Google should cut copyright holders in for a slice of any revenue that comes from this.
2. Google should have obtained permission before scanning the GBS books
3. Although Google only shows excerpts, wily hackers could eventually piece together enough excerpts to reproduce the entire GBS library and then post it on the Internet

He then goes and explains how each of the three points are invalid. As he rightly points out, the biggest threat as an author isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.

He has quotes Tim O’reilly, who says Piracy is progressive taxation. This appears in this article which is also a must read. That article was written in 2002 and was about legality of online file sharing.

If I were a copyright holder, (I mean a big copyright holder), my own stand would be to let google scan and index all my work (with possible penaulties if any evidence was found that people can hack google’s system to reconstruct the complete work). The publishing industry will definitely move online and I will gain more if people can find links to my work when they are searching for related content.

Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell is about snap judgements (the author terms this as thinslicing)that we make about things, people. It gives a lot of examples where people make judgements about certain objects (e.g. whether a statue is genuine or fake) or people (whether the teacher is good or not). In many cases the judgements are amazingly correct with no scientific logic behind the judgement, but in other cases they are plain wrong. Malcolm has also written about the topic in this New Yorker article. Though the book has a lot of fascinating examples, I found much of the material common-sense and as you would guess there is no positive or negative about these judgements.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is about various things that make you popular among people. As we all find out by experience, people that are most popular and/or make a lot of money are not necessarily geniuses, but they all have very good people skills. Some pieces of advice from the book: Never critisize, Praise (not flatter) people to give them importance, Make people want to do the things that you want them to do, Smile. Overall a good book with a nice conversational style (though the examples given are those of people way out in past – hey, the book was written in 1936!)

Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers by Seth Godin is about a new way of marketing where the marketer instead of interrupting the consumer, builds a long term relation with him. They offer some goodies in order to get permissions to send messages to the consumers and then they continue offering more and more baits to obtain more permissions. A very good read. Even though Seth works for Yahoo, it seems like their competitor is using his concepts in much more effective ways.

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done — by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan (Re-read).

Working with Emotional Intelligence — by Daniel Goleman – develops the ideas of Emotional Intelligence further and provides practical approach for implementing it. The concept of Emotional Intelligence (to me) is very obvious and I did not have much to take from this book.

Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers by Seth Godin

Currently reading: Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life — by David Allen.