2-27-18 Expert Guests for Your Show

1. Carl Schramm: When it Comes to Entrepreneurship, Age 40 is the New 20... and Always Has Been

2. Kerry Lutz: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again?) of Bitcoin
3. Jeff Ferry: How Facebook Can Help Rebuild U.S. Manufacturing

4. James Hirsen: How to Get Real News in a World of Fake News

5. Lowell Ponte: Will the Supreme Court Defund the Democrats?

When it Comes to Entrepreneurship, Age 40 is the New 20... and Always Has Been

By Carl Schramm

The truth is that the average entrepreneur is nearly 40 years old. There are more Baby Boomers (ages 53 to 71) starting businesses than Millennials (ages 20 to 36) and even more entrepreneurs in Generation X (ages 37 to 52). What’s more, your odds of starting a company that experiences scale growth, becoming really profitable, only increase with age. The “Mozart Myth” leads us to believe that if you haven’t started your first company in your twenties then you’re never going to be an entrepreneur. But age, financial security, and experience — most often at an established company — are far more likely predictors of an entrepreneurial career. It turns out that corporations are often far more effective in training entrepreneurs than are most business schools or incubators. [more...]

The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again?) of Bitcoin
By Kerry Lutz

This wasn’t supposed to happen. As this article is written, Bitcoin is trading around $11,200. It’s up from breaking the $6,000 barrier, but this could well be a dead cat bounce. That’s down from nearly $20,000 in mid-December. After all, everyone knows that Bitcoin only goes up.... just like the stock market and housing prices. What gives? What’s happened in cryptocurrencies was completely predictable. In fact, I wrote an article about this very scenario back on December 25, 2017. Bitcoin and all of its Johnny-come-lately followers are in for some more tough times ahead. If it retraces 80-90 percent of its gains the past year, that will put it in a range of $3,800-5,600. Such a pullback would not be out of the realm of experience. When a bubble pops, it’s look out below. [more...]

How Facebook Can Help Rebuild U.S. Manufacturing

By Jeff Ferry

How could Facebook regain public and political support? Here’s a simple proposal: the company is investing $14 billion this year on capital spending. That’s a huge sum of money (and double its 2017 spend). The vast majority of it goes on the data centers Facebook is building in the U.S. and worldwide. And the vast majority of that money goes to the servers, storage, and networking gear crammed, floor to ceiling, into those data centers. Today, virtually all that money is going to Asian-manufactured IT equipment, simply because all that equipment is manufactured over there and almost none of it here. What if Facebook said it would spend a quarter of its data center budget on U.S.-manufactured equipment? If Facebook committed to spend one quarter of its IT budget on U.S.-made product, and was followed by other Internet giants, the U.S. might soon have some 3 million people working on manufacturing the products that make the Internet hum. [more...]

How to Get Real News in a World of Fake News

By James Hirsen

Assuming that Google’s bias is extensive and is unlikely to be addressed, conservatives cannot sit idly by and continue to use the search site. In the business world, there are antitrust laws that exist to protect consumers from monopolies, which artificially raise prices and stifle innovation. Perhaps people who are seeking objectivity should consider using an alternative approach when conducting Internet searches. Considering the fact that Google and most other search engines track and mine personal information without an individual’s knowledge or consent, it becomes even more important to adopt an alternative approach. This brings us to some Google alternatives that may surprise the reader. [more...]

Will the Supreme Court Defund the Democrats?

By Lowell Ponte

This will be a central issue this week as the U.S. Supreme Court considers whether a government worker can be compelled to pay money to a public employee union. Although not strictly union dues, the “agency” fees required by such unions typically range from 50 percent to 100 percent of union dues. Most would agree that compelling a citizen to pay a hefty hunk of his or her wages to any political party would violate that person’s rights of free speech and freedom of association. The very point of civil service reform more than a century ago was to remove government jobs from the corrupt old political “spoils” system, named after the saying “To the winner go the spoils,” through which activists in either winning party were given government jobs to reward their partisan loyalty. When public workers are forced to pay unions that have used their coerced money to become the biggest funders of Democratic Party candidates, this violates their rights and corrupts our democratic republic. [more...]