US spends more on health care than any other nation, yet Americans live less than those in any developed nation. US spends almost  half of what the whole world spends in the military, yet it almost loses every war. US spends more on police and incarceration per capita than any other developed nation yet it has the highest homicide and crime rates. And yet USA has the best managed corporations, the most Nobel Prizes, the best universities, the most creative and recognized writers, movie makers, artists, Internet companies. What surprises me about US is the failure to recognize how broken defense, health care and the administration of justice are. Especially when everything else in the USA is so incredibly well managed. If US cut military and incarceration spending by 20% it could give affordable college, housing, and health care to all of those who need it. And it would be probably as safe as other developed nations who offer these protections to all their citizens. If you want to understand why European countries, Australia, Japan have populations who live longer, commit less crime, go much less frequently to jail and are on the average healthier and better educated, you just need to see how they allocate their government budgets. They spend proportionately less on the military, less on police, less on the legal system, less on health care, more on redistribution of income, more on education.

As parents we are supposed to teach our kids to be patient. But in my case one big learning from being a parent has been to learn to be patient myself. To enjoy being patient. Today in Miami I spent hours at the playground, playing with stuffed animals, throwing ball at the pool, following David and Mia around the garden playing hide an  seek and uselessly trying to explain that the whole point of hide and seek is not to shout “here I am daddy”.  If you are a CEO and a father you have to learn to switch pace from going at jet speed to crawling. And sometimes you want to stop way before they do. But you go on pretending to be an elephant or a horse or the king of the mermaids, you do it because they are happy and their happiness is your happiness. As some people are into slow food I know slow parenting works best. Especially when I watch Nina who is such a patient mom. Parenting is not about quality time, when parenting quantity is quality. I once read that 80% of great parenting is showing up. And it is.

 Most of what we store in the cloud is for contemporary consumption. But some files, like the pictures of my 1, 3 and 8 year olds I want around throughout their lives. In the past this meant preserving a photo album. Now their memories will be in data centers around the world facing significant threats over the next 100 years. Some of the threats are physical, but the most significant threat is cloud company bankruptcy. Like how can I be sure that Facebook will be alive for as long as my kids. That is why I would be more confident if cloud companies had cloud insurance. Should your favorite social network dissappear Prudential Insurance for example, would keep their data centers running your kids memories preserved. In the meantime I store at Facebook, Google, Flickr and Apple. Paranoid? No, I just want to make sure our family history doesn’t dissappear when somebody pulls a plug on a company that everyone loved 50 years before.

(Photo credit: Pentestmag)

What follows here is a warning, a thought, an unlikely outcome but one that the EU should be concerned about.

I worry about the Russian angle of the Greek crisis.

I think that the only opportunity the EU has to force the Greeks to keep the debt deal they agreed to before Syriza rose to power is to threaten to dry up the Greek banking system overnight. Trust in Greek banks by Greek citizens is currently evaporating. Greek banks are already experiencing a run. But my concern with this move is that it would make EU and especially Germany look cruel and insensitive and that  Putin may seize the moment, step in,  and provide the liquidity the Greek banks need to be solvent.  Emerge as a savior in the eyes of the Greek people.  He could do to the EU what he did to Ukraine, cut it in two with a piece of it that responds to him.  Moreover this move could cost Russia nothing, he could bring the euros in to make Greece solvent as a guarantee,  and then take them out in a few months. Because Greece can function if it doesn’t have to pay it’s gigantic debt. Greece can have an external and internal surplus very quickly.

The EU has a consensus driven voting system by which a single member state can block policy for all of the EU. Having one member state on Russia’s side would mean a great deal to Putin. The unanimity that is so needed in making EU policy would be broken by Greece. A Greece that votes as instructed by Putin would be an enormous problem for the EU and USA. And remember, there is no mechanism to expel an EU member. All of Greece could become Putin’s Trojan horse.

Likely? No, especially now that oil prices have collapsed.  Possible? Yes.

Search on Facebook recently went from useless to awesome. Try searching a person you care about linked to a city, place, verb or noun and see for yourself how relevant to you Facebook search results now are. Facebook search is what it should have been all along, a search about those you care about in relationship to you. As a result there is more of a reason to use Facebook as a diary, a memory repository. Today our one year old David went under water for the first time, I recorded a video, put in on Facebook. Before the new Facebook search it would have been hard to find it in, say, 2017. I would have had to go through the 2015 timeline. But now I will only search “David water”. Try that with Google. Facebook is now a great personal search engine.

These last few days I have been spending a significant amount of time at the Miami playgrounds with Mia (3) and David (1), I have been observing the life of those under 5. I have seen that little kids, are rarely compassionate, caring for others must be taught to them, they are not generous, as Mia says “Dad, sharing is hard”, they are not organized and tend to leave toys and clothes behind, they are not clean and properly disposing of litter is not obvious to them.  Sometimes little kids are even violent, today Mia got hit by a 2 year old boy, totally out of the blue. But of all the children’s shortcoming there is one evil that is lacking in them; little kids are not racist. Little kids are born selfish, rude, but they are not born hating other races, they are not born noticing other races, racism is taught to them. At the playgrounds of South Beach there is a big mix of races, but race, makes no difference, it’s not even part of the vocabulary that kids used to describe one another.  Makes you think, what is it that we do to them. And what could be different.

I used to complain that Facebook was a black hole of memories. That memories, moments, once posted, would never be found again. That scrolling your timeline forever was not a way to find anything.  Before say, if I searched for the name of our boat in Menorca, Benebella I would get totally random stuff. Now I get all the posts of mine and of my friends about Benebella.  Or if I search Gramofon, our cloud music player, I get all the posts of mine and my friends about the Gramofon. Still what Facebook search does not do, that Twitter does so well,  is to show me all the posts that anyone writes about the Gramofon or any search term.  This type of search is especially useful for companies.  Facebook could do this at least on all posts written in public mode. I hope that comes soon.  But at least now I can begin to find my own stuff on Facebook and that is great news.