Innovation

Posted on 7 June 2010 by Erik Hare | 13 Comments

It was just an innocent remark over a cup of coffee. “Erik, I always thought you were some kind of rebel.” I threw back my head and laughed in a compulsively rude fit of the moment. If I’m what passes for a “rebel”, this world is really in trouble (to put it the polite way).

Barataria has always been a big experiment – an attempt to prove that a few of the hard written rules about blogging were simply wrong. Longer pieces with some substance have an audience, even when presented in stark black and white. Pictures and multi-media aren’t necessary to sell them. It is not essential to be narrowly focused on one subject or area of expertise. Thank you all for proving that there is an audience for my humble work.

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Work to Live

Posted on 4 June 2010 by Erik Hare | 13 Comments

Most economists have come to believe that we are likely in for a solid decade of high unemployment and underemployment. There just doesn’t appear to be enough work to go around. That, by itself, is why I believe that this period of economic history will eventually become known as a Depression – it’s about an excess of capacity to produce stuff and services that has to be absorbed. Getting out of these doldrums is going to take fundamental changes in how we work that are probably best understood by how we got to where we are today. Predicting the future may be hard, but we can at least understand where we’ve been and go from there.

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Good to be Wrong

Posted on 2 June 2010 by Erik Hare | 16 Comments

If you make it your business to understand the world around you, as I do, it’s only fair to make a few predictions. Predicting what will happen and then going back and evaluating it later is the only real “reality check” that I have to see if I’m on the right path or going off on a long trip to nowhere. Naturally, I’m often wrong about things. Not just little things on a daily basis – that would be a tedious and long list. I’m talking about the big things that I think I understand but end up in one big “D’Oh!” moment.

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