welcome to ethiopia

BAKO, ETHIOPIA -- In recent months, the Ethiopian government began marketing abroad one of the hottest commodities in an increasingly crowded and hungry world: farmland.
Why Attractive?" reads one glossy poster with photos of green fields and a map outlining swaths of the country available at bargain-basement prices. "Vast, fertile, irrigable land at low rent. Abundant water resources. Cheap labor. Warmest hospitality."
This impoverished and chronically food-insecure Horn of Africa nation is rapidly becoming one of the world's leading destinations for the booming business of land leasing, by which relatively rich countries and investment firms are securing 40-to-99-year contracts to farm vast tracts of land.
Governments across Southeast Asia, Latin America and especially Africa are seizing the chance to attract this new breed of investors, wining and dining executives and creating land-leasing agencies and land catalogues to showcase their offerings of earth. In Africa alone, experts estimate that about 50 million acres -- roughly the size of Nebraska -- have been leased in the past two years.

€ target 1.60

Dollar forecasters predict the world’s reserve currency will continue sliding even when the Federal Reserve begins to raise interest rates, which policy makers say is an “extended period” away.Standard Chartered Plc, Aletti Gestielle SGR, HSBC Holdings Plc and Scotia Capital Inc. say the dollar will depreciate as much as 7.1 percent versus the euro. 1.4950 + 7.1% = 1.6011.
About $12 trillion of fiscal and monetary stimulus, the world’s lowest borrowing costs and a record $4 trillion of government bond sales between 2009 and 2010 will weigh on the currency, they said. So will the nation’s 10.2 percent unemployment rate and signs that the economic recovery may falter, they said. “History tells us the dollar shouldn’t start rising on a sustained basis until 12 months after the Fed starts to lift rates,” said Callum Henderson, the Singapore-based global head of foreign-exchange strategy for Standard Chartered.

1109

We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

Gary Moore in Faithful Finances 101: From the Poverty of Fear and Greed to the Riches of Spiritual Investing (Templeton Foundation Press): “It does a fool no good to spend money on an education, because he has no common sense.” Strive for wisdom not education.

Politics have no relation to morals.
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow.
Ovid

Delegating authority to make decisions implies absolute confidence in those who get the power, says NBA great Bill Russell and co-author David Falkner in Russell Rules:

Entrepreneurs have a huge tolerance for failure because they see it as a process and not an event. Work as a Spiritual Practice by Lewis Richmond (Broadway) talks about Thomas Edison: "Edison tried thousands of combinations of materials before he was successful in inventing the light bulb. He didn't experience these disappointments as failures but as clues on the road to success."

The best marketing

has always been word-of-mouth.

When I had youth I had no money; now I have the money I have no time; and when I get the time, if I ever do, I shall have no health to enjoy life.
Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)

Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them.
Agatha Christie (1890-1976)

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

It is not good to have a rule of many.
Homer (900 BC-800 BC)

Habits change into character.
Ovid

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900

Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards.
Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)

Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.
Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

Abraham Lincoln

"You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves."

egging

- tr. verb meaning "to incite into action".

The bicycle kingdom is going electric

electric

I bet, he will fall!

marry us

crisis-cat

She doesn't dance!

Time to Cash Out: Why Paper Money Hurts the Economy

By David Wolman 05.22.09

Two years ago, Hasbro came out with an electronic version of Monopoly. Want to buy a house? Just put your debit card into the mag-stripe reader. Bing! No more pastel-colored cash tucked under the board. Turns out it wasn't Lehman Brothers but Parker Brothers that could smell the future. At least, that's what participants at this year's Digital Money Forum believe. In March, after a long day of talks with titles like "Currency 2.0" and "Going Live With Voice Payments," forum attendees at London's plush Charing Cross Hotel gathered for drinks—and, yes, a few rounds of Monopoly Electronic Banking Edition.
Unfortunately, the world's governments remain stuck in the past. To maintain our stock of hard currency, the US Treasury creates hundreds of billions of dollars worth of new bills and coins each year. And that ain't money for nothing: The cost to taxpayers in 2008 alone was $848 million, more than two-thirds of which was spent minting coins that many people regard as a nuisance. (The process also used up more than 14,823 tons of zinc, 23,879 tons of copper, and 2,514 tons of nickel.) In an era when books, movies, music, and newsprint are transmuting from atoms to bits, money remains irritatingly analog. Physical currency is a bulky, germ-smeared, carbon-intensive, expensive medium of exchange. Let's dump it.
Markets are already moving that way. Between 2003 and 2006, noncash payments in the US increased 4.6 percent annually, while the percentage of payments made using checks dropped 13.2 percent. Two years ago, card-based payments exceeded paper-based ones—cash, checks, food stamps—for the first time. Nearly 15 percent of all US online commerce goes through PayPal. Smartcard technologies like EagleCash and FreedomPay allow military personnel and college students to ignore paper money, and the institutions that run dining halls and PXs save a bundle by not having to manage bills and coins or pay transaction fees for credit cards. Small communities from British Columbia to the British Isles are experimenting with alternative currencies that allow residents to swap work hours, food, or other assets of value.
But walled-garden economies are a long way from a fully cashless society. As Wired first noted 15 years ago, to rely exclusively on an emoney system, we need a ubiquitous and secure network of places where people can transact electronically, and that system has to be as convenient as—and more efficient than—cash. The infrastructure didn't exist back then. But today that network is in place. In fact, it's already in your pocket. "The cell phone is the best point-of-sale terminal ever," says Mark Pickens, a microfinance analyst with the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor. Mobile phone penetration is 50 percent worldwide, and mobile money programs already enable millions of people to receive money from or "flash" it to other people, banks, and merchants. An added convenience is that cell phones can easily calculate exchange rates among the myriad currencies at play in our world. Imagine someday paying for a beer with frequent flier miles.
Opponents used to argue that killing cash would hurt low-income workers—for instance, by eliminating cash tips. But a modest increase in the minimum wage would offset that loss; government savings from not printing money could go toward lower taxes for employers. And let's not forget the transaction costs of paper currency, especially for the poor. If you're less well off, check-cashing fees and 10-mile bus rides to make payments or purchases are not trivial. Yes, panhandlers will be out of luck, but to use that as a reason for preserving a costly, outdated technology would be a sad admission, as if tossing spare change is the best we can do for the homeless.
Killing currency wouldn't be a trauma; it'd be euthanasia. We have the technology to move to a more efficient, convenient, freely flowing medium of exchange. Emoney is no longer just a matter of geeks playing games. Link