March 2010 – Page 4 – BloodhoundBlog

March 3, 2010

Computer “expert” insists, in 1995, that, “No online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Technology “expert” Clifford Stoll precisely 15 years ago in Newsweek:

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.

Wicked stupid, huh? It gets better:

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

It’s interesting to me to note that the predictions Stoll is denouncing were Read more

March 2, 2010

SplendorQuest: Should we celebrate John Galt Day on June 1st?

I wrote this coming on four years ago, one of my last posts to PresenceOfMind.net, my philosophical/political/literary home on the web. The planned strike of our undocumented friends has come and gone, but the underlying idea — a strike against the looters on June 1st — still resonates with me. What say you? Is this something worth pursuing? –GSS

Francisco looked silently out at the darkness. The fire of the mills was dying down. There was only a faint tinge of red left on the edge of the earth, just enough to outline the scraps of clouds ripped by the tortured battle of the storm in the sky. Dim shapes kept sweeping through space and vanishing, shapes which were branches, but looked as if they were the fury of the wind made visible.

“It’s a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected on that plain,” said Francisco D’Anconia. “This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man.” –Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

The photo above is the Sonoran Desert, a vast unpopulated wasteland in the midst of which is Metropolitan Phoenix, home to three million children of Cain.

Contrary to popular opinion, the desert was not designed by Walt Disney, and it will kill you with a blithe indifference if you make even one small mistake. If you have never been to the desert, you do not have a referent for solitude. Far more than the serenity that comes from a fundamental awareness of your own aloneness, true solitude must carry with it at least a tinge of fear. When you experience a silence so total that you can hear the footfalls of a tiny lizard fifty yards away, you also come to realize that no one, no one, no one will hear you if you shout for help. Twist an ankle and you die. Lose the path and you die. Misjudge the weather and you die. Set you hand where you should not — and you die.

And yet I can go to the desert on a lark, armed as a child of Cain with nothing but two bottles of water, a tank Read more

March 2, 2010

Dawn In America- Part 3-Can We Educate the Masses (For Profit?)

by Brian Brady

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Information can be a glow in the darkness. Traditional higher education models are losing market share to cheaper education delivery systems. Young people now have the opportunity to learn the very same principles for free that are taught to the people they may eventually hire to run their businesses. I think this free market trend will eventually overtake the traditional post-secondary education models. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a fully-funded college education available, competitive with some of the best traditional colleges, in the not-too-distant future.

I can see a future where the ultimate end-users of that education (private industry), see the benefit to developing accredited curricula, and offering them to current and potential employees, at a greatly reduced cost (maybe for free). I’m not just talking about an MBA from “Mutual of Omaha University“. Think “University of the American Way“, delivering bachelor’s degrees to the masses- graduates might receive checks from the alumni association rather than sending checks to it.

Education via extension isn’t a new idea. This ACC school has been granting degrees, to off-campus students, since the 1940s. Online education is now a pop culture phenomenon. If this educational delivery system grows like I think it will, how can the real estate brokerage or mortgage lending communities profit?

The idea that education can get cheaper (moving towards free) and more readily available will be an irreversible trend. No longer can we hide behind the phrase “proprietary information” or “specialized knowledge”. Consumers may educate themselves about how to get a VA condo complex approved and find that my “specific knowledge”, while helpful, doesn’t permit me to charge a one point premium to my lesser educated competitors. My specific expertise DOES drastically reduce my marketing costs, allowing me to retain more profit than my competitors.

Information can be exported inexpensively. Imagine holding a webinar online, explaining the benefits of owning a Costa Rican vacation property, to German pharmaceutical executives. Then, imagine holding a different webinar, to a group of retired Americans in Costa Rica, about investing in mortgages so that those Germans could borrow their money and buy from those properties. Would that add Read more

March 2, 2010