I have wondered in previous posts why is it that America can be the wealthiest country in the world can also be the country with the most homeless people in the developed world.  This maybe an explanation.

The Alliance to End Homelessness, a public education nonprofit, based the findings of its report on numbers from Veterans Affairs and the Census Bureau. 2005 data estimated that 194,254 homeless people out of 744,313 on any given night were veterans.

I already mentioned how sad I think it is that USA, a country that has around 5% of the world´s population and is not seriously at risk,  should spend half of the money that is spent all over the world in the military.  But on top of that I think that there has to be something seriously wrong in the States if so many of those who have served their country end up sleeping on the streets begging to survive.  Other developed countries spend much less in the military, more on social services and have less homeless citizens.

I was reading an article on Techcrunch in which Michael Arrington criticizes Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose for having conversations with different parties for two years about selling Digg. Personally I think that Techcrunch is off on this one. There´s nothing wrong when you have come up with an amazing company, and Digg is one of those, to frequently talk to people about the possibility of selling it. Even Larry and Sergey were doing this in the early years of Google. What I dislike about the article on Techcrunch is a moralistic undertone, as if talking to potential investors or buyers is a bad thing for a start up. Personally I think it is essential. When I built Ya.com for example we started talking to potential investors and buyers from day one until we sold it to Deustche Telekom for 550 million euros. And sometimes these talks are just that, talks. My first company, Urban Capital, which I started in 1985, I never sold. But that does not mean that we did not talk to people over the years. Talking to potential buyers about your company is the only way to know how much is worth. There´s nothing wrong with that as we all need to make informed decisions. I find it hard to believe that Techcrunch blames Jay and Kevin for doing what all of us entrepreneurs, normally do.

This is a blog that is mostly about my ideas and not about unusual things that happen around the world but having breakfast this morning reading my favorite newspaper, the International Herald Tribune, I saw this news on the cover that rank tops in the weirdness index and felt like sharing it.  It is about how a drug that is used for date rape ended up as coating for a popular award winning toy.

Last night I had dinner with Louise Blouin Macbain, a very smart and attractive entrepreneur who founded LTB Holding, her venture in the art publishing world. During dinner we had a chance to talk about the many projects she is working on.

LTB promotes culture and art with 20 magazines, several annual publications and books, providing information to collectors, educators and academics. It also has a strong presence on the Web: Artinfo.com offers breaking news, profiles of artists, collectors, galleries, market trends and analysis. They recently launched Myartinfo.com, an online network for artists, galleries, collectors and art enthusiasts who join to chat, exhibit their work and share ideas with like-minded people.

Louise also launched the Louise T Blouin Foundation, a not for profit group working across the world to promote culture and creativity, investing in cultural exchange projects, research initiatives and multi ethnic art projects.

The Foundation also organizes the Global Creative Leadership Summit which brings together the most influential thought-leaders in business, technology, government, science and the arts to share ideas and best practices and form new partnerships for concrete problem solving on global issues.

Overall and impressive list of projects for this very talented woman.

I am sure that there´s tons of stuff written on the web about the pros and cons of pinging (notifications a la technorati) vs crawling (programs that scout the web for links a la google) or listening vs spying. Tonight we had dinner with Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia in Madrid and we spoke about some of these. In general pinging beats crawling in everything but thoroughness. Crawling finds all there is to find on the net, pinging finds what wants to be found. Jimmy described to me a problem that I was not aware of and that is that ajax pages are hard to crawl. I commented on a problem that he was not aware of and that is that Google is the biggest or one of the biggest consumers of electricity in the world and that is among other things because crawling is incredibly energy inefficient compared to pinging. In any case what was extremely interesting is the concept of an open source search engine. I really hope that Jimmy and his open sourcers make this one work. One of the worst jobs at Google is probably policing results to make sure they are not hacked as the monetary incentive to hack google results is huge. Wouldn´t it be great to have a community police force rather than some paid employees? This problem is more manageable than the problem of people who tried to hack Wikipedia. If the Wikipedia community dealt successfully with article hacking, search optimization hacking should also be policed more effectively by a community than by a few paid individuals. Wisdom of the crowds at work in search. Intriguing.  In the meantime I mentioned to Jimmy the little search engine that we put together at Fon called Unfolding News.  This engine combines crawled sources with pinged sources that are all fresh.

The dollar is on a free fall. It used to take 85c of a dollar to buy a euro. Now Americans have to cough up 1.45 dollars to buy one euro. For Europeans USA now is a bargain. For Americans coming to Europe is becoming horrendously expensive, especially London, America´s favorite foreign city with the pound at an all time high as well. At this point I think it´s fair to ask how can USA be a global super power when its citizens can´t afford leaving their home? While many in USA think that devaluation is good because it helps exporters my view is that if you can make a decent living with a very strong currency you are in a much better position than if you need a weak one because your companies are more competitive, more automated, more productive, and you can afford buying other companies around the world. To seek protection behind a weak currency is not the strategy of a super power, if anything it is the strategy of a wannabe power like China.

Having said this USA is USA, the number one economy in the world. When George W Bush announced that he was going to invade Iraq I thought that this go alone foreign policy was going to bring tremendous economic hardship to America and sold my dollars, moving my savings into Euros. Now however, as a Clinton victory seems to be on the horizon I think that the collapse of the dollar maybe coming to an end. For the US to have a decent currency again the country needs to go back to the balanced budgets of the Clinton era. Should that happen the dollar should recover to close to parity with the euro again. Military adventurism and absurd overreaction to minor international threats have made of America the world´s largest debtor by far. Spending half of the world´s military expenditures and go around the world begging (or printing papers and hoping that others will take them) is a foolish strategy that has to come to an end. The good news for the depressed dollar is that the Bush era is coming to an end.

My last name maybe Varsavsky but I live in Spain, a country of Fernandez, Perez, Dominguez, Martin (yes my name is much common as my last name here), in short a country in which probably 50% of the population shares 10 last names. And Spain is not alone in this. China and Korea for example are notorious for having very few last names that millions share. Why is this a problem? The obvious answer is the internet. On Facebook alone see what happens if you try to find a certain Carlos Garcia, or a Juan Fernandez, and the same is true in Google searches. Now being this the case isn´t it time that governments make it easy for people to change their last names? Will we see any Juan Fernandezz popping up soon? I don´t know but I am happy to be the only Martin Varsavsky in the world. I would be uncomfortable if there were thousands of people with my name.

In June when I visited Facebook and concluded that Facebook was going to be worth over $10bn many friends told me I was crazy.  The funny thing is that when I told this to Owen, Chris Kelly and other Facebook top managers they also laughed and told me I was out of it.  I guess after the Microsoft $240M investment  I wasn´t so out of it.  And I am not surprised that it was Microsoft who paid that “crazy” amount of money as my friends at Google have seen the social network fashions come and go and would have not paid that valuation.  Having said this Facebook plus $240M = serious damage.

I just came back from San Francisco. The Fon office in San Francisco is near Union Square one of the most commercial parts of San Fran but also an area that is populated by a lot of homeless people. Tonight, at dinner table in Madrid I was telling my 3 older children about this tragedy and how difficult it was for me to understand why USA, the richest country in the world, had such an enormous amount of homeless people. My kids themselves remembered being shocked about this phenomenon in their latest visit to NYC.  During dinner we all tried to figure out why large US cities had such vast homeless populations. We could only come up with two answers, one is that while Spain has an average income that is half of that of USA this income is much more evenly distributed and few people fall through the cracks. But the second one that we felt it was more important was family ties. It is very unlikely that a Spaniard would let a relative be homeless.  Even Spain´s junkies, and there are many of those, mostly live with their families.