Curating the Internet: Business, leadership, and management micro-summaries for October 6, 2019

remlaps-lite (76)in #rsslog • 5 years ago

Innovation as the antidote to corruption; A "furniture farm" that shapes trees into furniture; Bitcoin is still 2019's best performing asset; For salary and employment rates, Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering is America's best college major; and a Steem essay on the platform's governance

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Innovation is the antidote to corruption - In this TED talk, Efosa Ojomo discusses the nature of corruption in the developing world and argues that innovation, not institutional reform, is the way to defeat corruption. Prosperity, he suggests, accompanies innovation, and that makes effective institutional reform possible. Much of aid to the developing world, on the other hand, goes towards misguided attempts at institutional reform without first boosting the prerequisite level of innovation. As an example, to buttress his argument, he points to the blossoming mobile phone industry in sub-Saharan Africa. Corruption, he says, arises from scarcity, so the way to fix the problem of corruption is to use innovation to reduce scarcity - especially of basic human needs - and replace it with prosperity.

English Couple Is Growing Chairs, Lamps, and Tables at Their ‘Furniture Farm’ in Derbyshire - At the Derbyshire Furniture Farm, Gavin and Alice Munro are creating furniture by manipulating the ways that trees grow, and shaping them into things like one of a kind tables, lamps, and chairs. Gavin describes the process as tree sculpting or Zen 3D printing. They began growing for this purpose ten years ago, and their chair sales are currently booked through 2030. They aim to be sustainable, but the process is likely not suitable for mass production, because - for example - growing a chair takes six to nine years of growth, along with another year of drying. Items range in price from about $3,000 to about $15,000.

Here is a video:

Bitcoin Is 2019’s Best-Performing Asset, Even After Recent Price Downturn - Bitcoin has more than doubled in 2019, which is far ahead of the 31% gained by tech stocks that Goldman Sachs ranked as the best performing asset class. According to the article, the investment is still speculative and risk-prone, but many internal indicators (such as hash rate) suggest a positive outlook.

This is America’s No. 1 college major for salary and job availability - I hate click-bait headlines. Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering. Followed by Nuclear Engineering, Pharmaceutical Sciences, Genetics, and Electrical Engineering. Salaries in the top-5 range from $90,000 to $100,000 and unemployment ranges from 1.2% to 2.7%.

STEEM STEEM governance: An open future question? - Another violation of my soft, "No posts about Steem" rule. @bengy muses about Steem's future governance. Specifically, he notes that the EOS block producers are often big exchanges, with little vested interest in the technology, and he wonders if the same thing will happen with Steem. Folks in the comments point out that Steem's 13 week power-down window may be the reason why the top witnesses are still people who are invested in the platform's well-being. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @bengy.)

In order to help make Steem the go to place for timely information on diverse topics, I invite you to discuss any of these links in the comments and/or your own response post.

Beneficiaries

Burn Steem/SBD - @null - 5%
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Fundraising for the Rustin Golden Knights Marching Band - @rgkmb-unofficial - 10%
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