Intellectual Happy Hour

Yeah, it's Friday night and rather than writing some well-thought out piece on some unique subject here are some articles I enjoyed this week:

For starters, it's really hard to believe this actually happened. I'm extraordinarily impressed with Colbert (a fellow Northwestern alum) for his thrilling, insulting, hilarious, & uncomfortable discourse in the company of his subjects. This dinner for the White House Correspondent's must have been one of the most awkward events in history.

Using one's voice to control a device has long been a dream of a lot of techies. It appears that Google has been making noise in this space with the announcement of a patent. Recognition is still clearly the biggest challenge in making voice truly a workable search solution and (from what I can gather) it seems that in this patent Google is more focused in the age old debate of ontology search. Watch this space - it should get a lot of attention in the next years.

Having spent most of my life living in emerging markets and a good chunk of my life working in emerging markets, I couldn't agree any more with this commentary on China. Washington DC, please let it be.

In the same train of thoughts, Kudlow also comments on the amazing fact that although oil prices have ballooned, we still are managing to experience a booming economy...

I've been working with VoIP companies now for about five years and it still just boggles my mind how drastically changing the landscape really is. This Skype article in the Washington Post reminded me of how my parents now even use VoIP. It continues to amaze me the sheer magnitude of deconstruction this telecoms industry still faces.

Karlgaard, once again, sythensizes a fantastic viewpoint on politics (and really business, in general).

This guys claims to analyze the real effects of the Laffer Curve in a two page thesis. He's completely clueless. Gilder summarizes it best by saying, "The fact is that countries with low or declining tax rates increase their government spending (the best measure of revenues) three times faster than do countries with high or rising tax rates. The reason is that the low tax countries grow six times faster than the high tax countries. The benefits of the tax cuts cascade through the entire economy and yield increased revenues at every level of government while massively increasing the size of the private sector measured by income or market cap." Done.