A lady of certain years by the time she became moderately famous, Angelina Belle Peyton was born in the last years of the 18th century in Sumner County, Tennessee. For a decade or so Tennessee would be the far western frontier, but by the time she was twenty and newly married to her first cousin, John Peyton, the frontier had moved west. Texas beckoned like a siren and eventually, the Peytons settled in San Felipe-on-the-Brazos, the de facto capitol of the American settlements in Texas. They would open an inn, and raise three children, before John died in 1834. She would continue running the inn in San Felipe on her own for another two years, until history intervened.
Entrepreneurship
A Multipolar World
India’s crude oil imports from Iran is facing a risk of potential disruption as increasing US and EU sanctions make it impossible for Indian ships to obtain insurance.
Greg Scoblete, The Compass Blog (Real Clear World):
I imagine if I were an Indian official, I’d be a bit peeved to learn that acting “responsibly” means privileging the interests of the United States over my own country. Nevertheless, Burns has a point. After all, India may rely on Iran for 12 percent of its oil imports, but look at what the United States has been willing to do for India:
Presidents Obama and Bush have met India more than halfway in offering concrete and highly visible commitments on issues India cares about. On his state visit to India in November 2010, for example, President Obama committed the U.S. for the very first time to support India’s candidacy for permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council.
I don’t know about you, but if the U.S. was asked to forgo 12 percent of its oil imports in exchange for another country’s endorsement for a seat on a multilateral forum, I’d make the trade. I mean, c’mon, 12 percent? The U.S. gets about that much from the Persian Gulf – and we barely pay that area any attention at all…
“The EU-India free trade agreement will be the single biggest trade agreement in the world, benefiting 1.7 billion people,” said president Barroso. “It would mean new opportunities for both Indian and European companies. It would mean a key driver for sustainable growth, job creation and innovation in India and Europe.”
The EU is India’s largest trading partner, accounting for about €86bn of trade in goods and services in 2010. Bilateral trade in goods rose by 20% between 2010 and 2011.”
Last year Israel supplied India with $1.6 billion worth of military equipment and is India’s second-largest defense supplier after Russia. Sales are only going to rise. Indian defense procurements from Israel in the period 2002-07 have touched the $5 billion mark.
And this doesn’t even get into the China-EU-US-Israel-Saudi Arabia wheels-within-wheels complications when it comes to arms deals, hoped for arms deals, trade deals, hoped for trade deals, energy politics, and the rest of it….
It’s not 1985, now is it? The past is a different country, a Russian (Soviet)-oriented Cold War country used to thinking in terms of “Kissengerian” alliances and blocs. An intellectual adjustment may be needed. It’s like 3-D chess out there….
Speaking of energy:
“Was Saudi Arabia involved?” (Asia Times Online.) If it makes you feel better, let me point out that Saudi petrodollars continue to fund all sorts of interesting educational activities on the subcontinent, in Africa, and elsewhere, along with Iranian monies. So that’s nice.
One of my Least-Favorite Politicians
…out of a wide range of potential choices, is Rep Jan Schakowsky (D-IL). I first became aware of this reprehensible individual after seeing the incredibly arrogant letter that she wrote to Kathleen Fasanella (of the blog Fashion Incubator) in response to Kathleen’s attempts to call attention to the harm being done to many small manufacturers by the ill-thought-out CPSIA legislation.
There are lots of reasons to dislike Schakowsky (see this, for example)—another such reason made its appearance Wednesday with her assertion, in an attempt to defend Obama’s suppression of the Keystone Pipeline project, that “Twenty thousand jobs is really not that many jobs, and investing in green technologies will produce that and more.”
Twenty thousand jobs is really not that many jobs?
There is of course a huge difference between a project funded with private money that will act to reduce America’s energy costs and increase its industrial competitiveness, and one funded with taxpayer money (much of it undoubtedly going to politically-well-connected corporations) which would quite likely act to increase America’s energy costs and thereby reduce its industrial competitivness. Perusal of Schakowsky’s bio reveals no experience at all working in the private sector, of course.
Whatever one thinks of the Pipeline and of various “alternative energy” options, surely it should be obvious to all that this CongressCreature’s cavalier dismissal of twenty thousand jobs should be considered unacceptable arrogance on the part of any American officeholder. It is a level of arrogance that, unfortunately, has become far too common among the government classes.
Assorted Links, or, I wish I could think up a better title for this post….
The US could be almost self-sufficent for energy by 2030, while the EU will be the most vulnerable region for energy security, BP said on Wednesday.
Growth in shale oil and gas production would mean the US needed few imports, while North America as a whole could be self-sufficient, BP forecast at its Global Energy Outlook 2030.
BP forecast that Eurasia could also become self-sufficient, based on the prediction that Europe would being a net importer of energy, and the former Soviet Union countries net exporters by a similar amount.
In practice, this would leave the EU the most vulnerable region for energy security.
Friends, I have no particular knowledge of this subject. If you have anything to add in comments, I’d love to hear it.
Ah, age. One of the most daring aspects of this novel is that Lively is concerned with the hearts and problems of older characters. Her major players are well past their youth, and a boyish up-and-coming historian (the snake in Lord Henry’s mansion) doesn’t become important until much of the novel has passed. “How much remains when youth is gone?” Lively seems to be asking. And the answer is, “An abundance.” Here middle and old age are times of blossoming identity and possibility, miraculous bursts of sunshine.
– The New York Times reviews Penelope Lively’s novel, How it All Began.
Even as a twenty-something, I was fascinated with literary representations of middle age. An odd one, that’s me.
The Idea that Bigness Automatically Wins in Business
…still seems to have a remarkable number of adherents.
Business Insider has an interview with a 32-year-old Brit who is cofounder of Huddle, a startup aiming to compete with Microsoft’s SharePoint. While I didn’t read the comment thread, up toward the beginning there are at least 3 comments from people mocking the idea that a startup would be able to succeed against a product which (a)comes from a very large company and (b)is successful and growing.
Well, let’s see. Up through the early 1980s, IBM’s position in the computer industry looked unassailable…indeed, IBM’s dominance was so complete that the computer industry had often been referred to as “IBM and the Seven Dwarfs.” Who would have guessed that a couple of startups called Intel and Microsoft were about to start grabbing market share from IBM in a big way?
Up through at least the 1970s, Sears Roebuck & Co. was a colossus of the American retail industry. Who would have guessed that Sears–along with many other large retailers–would have found itself losing out to a bunch of guys from Arkansas?
The steel industry was long dominated by the giant integrated steel companies, especially Bethlehem Steel and U.S. Steel. Both of these companies went bankrupt–but for smaller and more nimble firms such as Nucor, focused on mini-mills and continuous casting, the story was very different.
I haven’t looked at Huddle in any depth, and don’t have a considered opinion about their future. But I do know that many SharePoint users are less than happy with the product, and I do know that small and focused companies often have considerable advantages over larger and more complex companies. Sometimes these advantages, intelligently applied, will suffice to dramatically overcome the also-very-real advantages of the larger firm.
The belief that the-big-guy-always-wins seems surprisingly resistant to historical experience. J K Galbraith, in his book The New Industrial State, asserted that large firms would simply become larger and more vertically-integrated and would control demand through advertising, making themselves fairly unassailable. This was in 1967–in view of the history of the last 45 years, people today have much less excuse for such beliefs that Galbraith did
Why is the big-guy-wins theory still so widely held?