Home » Articles posted by Erik Hare (Page 181)

Author Archives: Erik Hare

More Games, More Work

Posted on by | 8 Comments

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report has a simple title, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2014 to 2024”. If the whole thing sounds about as cut and dried as possible, you’d be completely wrong. After all, the is the US in 2014, a place where absolutely anything can become a political football. A nonpartisan report from a respected institution which is full of detail and hard to read makes a perfect game ball.

The last week has been nothing but back and forth on the topic of how many jobs are destroyed, er, left behind with glee because of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). Nevermind that the bulk of the report was indeed a warning about what will happen if we don’t straighten the budget out in the next decade. That’s hard work, however, and no one will look good on teevee talking about that. So let’s get to the garbage that filled the airwaves instead.

Continue reading →

Back to the Future

Posted on by | 11 Comments

If you want to know the future, ask the kids. It’s going to be their world one day and you can expect that it will be made in their image. Their attitudes, values, and goals will become what drives the economy once they kids of today become the parents and leaders tomorrow.

That’s why UBS asked Millenials (born 1982-1999, or currently 15-32 years old) about their financial and life goals. This is the generation that has been described as narcissistic, broke spenders among other things. If you believe that line, think again. The young people today are one of the most conservative generations yet financially, valuing happiness and security far more than a big pile of cash.

This describes our future, certainly, but more importantly it fits perfectly into the main reason why there are economic and business cycles in the first place.

Continue reading →

Something Like a Warning

Posted on by | 7 Comments

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released their projections for the next 10 years and you can tell they were written by economists. There is plenty of good news and bad news in the report, and the details become very hard to read. Deficits will go down, and the economy will grow – but interest on the debt already incurred is going to turn into a very large and crippling bill.

To make these projections, they start with current policy and trends and simply extrapolate forward. None of it is written in stone, and some of it is clearly a warning to create new policies. Let’s run down what we have in front of us and what has to be done.

Continue reading →

Kids Being Kids – Amazing

Posted on by | 12 Comments

The main challenge in this year’s FIRST Robotics Challenge is to scoop up a 2-foot yoga ball and shoot it into a goal 6 feet high. The machines that have to do this are designed and built by high school kids, including my son George. Many of them have never done anything like it before. It takes strategy, planning, and a lot of learning how to use power saws and drills. But the Great River School team 2491 No Mythic is hitting the challenge with great energy and determination. It’s also a lot of fun.

My role as a “mentor” is mainly to coach them along, but I also get my hands dirty. I also teach them really bad things like how to strip wires with their teeth. Through it all the robot is coming along. The pneumatic and electrical systems work well with the programming and no one has gotten hurt. It shows what kids can do when they simply get in and do it.

A study came out that says a little more about letting kids go off and do what might seem dangerous, even at an early age. It seems to fit with what I’ve seen at Robotics League.

Continue reading →

Cities and The Future

Posted on by | 7 Comments

It has been a long week.  This repeat from 2010 goes to the physical nature of economic restructuring and where it must come from – our cities.  The recent snow disaster in Atlanta (brilliantly discussed here) is more about infrastructure not keeping up than anything else.  So what do we need?  Let’s start with the basics of what a city is for, and how it will serve us.

Cities mark the landscape across this nation and all others.  Images of the handiwork of a culture often define the people who come to inherit the space and, in turns, mark it with their own generation’s values.  Yet they are so much more than static collections of icons – they are where people come together and live their lives right now.  They are always ultimately about the connections that make them alive.

Even the bricks and mortar or glass and steel is ultimately a connection across time to what made the city what it is today.  Though it’s the stuff that makes up a city which gets photographed and noticed, they are much more than that.

Continue reading →