I am back in Madrid after spending a week in the Bay Area and Seattle. The companies I met there were Google, our investor in the Bay Area and Microsoft and Starbucks in Seattle. From what I saw corporate America has decided to make food and drink one of the key competitive advantages in recruitment. First an article. Walking around Seattle I was surprised to see this headline in the local paper:

Under Pressure Microsoft Fights to Keep its Workers, Here´s a link to the full article.
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For how long is the pile of lies related to America´s role in Iraq going to continue generating a pile of dead bodies in Iraq? When is this cycle of horror and waste going to end?

America first invaded Iraq because Iraq was making WMD. That was a lie. Then America stayed in Iraq to fight the war on terror and that was a lie as well. There were no terrorists in Iraq before the American invasion. And now we are on to the third big lie, that America stays in Iraq in order to prevent a civil war.
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That when Bush and Blair invaded Iraq they really thought that they would be welcome as liberators by the Iraqi people. That global leaders know much less than we think they know.

That the next step after biotechnology will be biocomputing. I think that in the next 100 years we will grow intelligent tissue in labs and use it to perform tasks.

That the future of telecoms in urban centers will be made of fiber optics combined with very high throughput microcells.

That religion is the opium of the Republican Party.
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The Economist frequently commented that Silvio Berlusconi was not fit to run Italy. A corrupt media billionaire frequently avoiding criminal prosecution using statute of limitation and immunity rules did not seem like a good role model for the country. Moreover for those who used to argue that he may be corrupt but he was the only leader with the practical experience needed to fix the anemic state of the Italian economy there was little left to say when Italy became the worst performing of the large European economies. As a result Silvio Berlusconi lost the last elections. But last night Italy went to the other extreme, from the corrupt media tycoon Prime Minister to the reformed pro Soviet Communist President. Is choosing Giorgio Napolitano, an 81 year old communist who supported the Soviet Dictatorship wise? Personally I feel embarrassed about Europe now having a President who applauded the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the repression of Prague of 1968 and all the Soviet led horrors that we know were taking place around that time. How will Giorgio Napolitano interact with the fellow Presidents in the region, the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs, who bravely fought the Soviets for decades while he defended them? It seems to me that Europe has rightly condemned the horrors of the Nazi dictatorships but it has not really come to terms with the injustice of the Soviet Empire. People who supported a regime who would shoot emigrants at the Berlin Wall should not be given such a prominent role in contemporary society.

My friend Joshua Ramo wrote an article in Newsweek that manages to talk in poetic terms about the most non poetic of experiences, jet lag. In this article he introduces a concept of a person´s average speed.

we came up with the idea of calculating our average speeds. We took the number of miles we had flown in the year, divided it by the number of hours in a year and produced an average annual velocity.

Reading this I thought that a related measure could be a personal globalization index. The formula would be the same but only intercontinental flights would count.

Most large exporters of energy are LDCs (less democratic countries). Oil seems to do that to countries. Venezuela for example, a nation that had been a democracy for decades is now more and more an LDC. How does this happen? Easy, a democratically elected president gets control over growing oil revenues and buys himself political power. Fast forward to Argentina. Argentina is a modest energy exporter nowhere near the ranks of Venezuela. Argentina however is a very large agricultural commodity exporter. Now that energy importing democracies (EU, USA) are beginning to use food to fuel their cars, namely biodiesel, and now that the prices of some agricultural commodities are beginning to track the price of oil, will we see the same tendency to power concentration in Argentina? Will we see Argentina joining the ranks of the LDCs thanks to Kirchner´s ability to control a few exports? Hopefully not but the combination of the autocratic tendencies of Kirchner with a very high price of agricultural commodities concerns me. The temptation to buy votes using state resources becomes hard to resist. And at a global scale I have another concern with biodiesel. I used to wonder about how was it possible that Argentina, one of the largest food exporters in the world, and Brazil, another one, had starving children. The question then was, should a country with starving citizens export food to other countries? But now the moral dilemma is even worse. Should a country with starving citizens export food so others in rich countries feed…. their SUVs?

Last month I blogged about how the Blackberry became the Redberry in China. Basically what I said is that China Unicom decided that instead of making a deal with RIM, the company behind the Blackberry it would simply copy the Blackberry but make it more Chinese and launch the RedBerry. So what is the RedBerry? It´s a push e mail device that with Chinese servers and Chinese controls included that pays no royalties to RIM nor accepts any direction from this Canadian company. And what is the VaticanBerry? Well, the VaticanBerry seems to be the same solution applied to Catholicism. Catholicism has its own system of patents and trademarks. As opposed to other religions you can´t call yourself a Catholic if the Vatican does not want you to. The Vatican owns the brand, or does it? China went for its own bishops. Welcome to the VaticanBerry.

Hugo Chavez has recently been a very good OPEC member. He´s been keeping oil production down. But this reduction has not taken place because Hugo Chavez wants to be a good OPEC member. The paradox of authoritarian leaders who nationalize oil production is that oil production goes down simply because they are bad at running their own, inefficient state oil companies. And the price of oil goes up. Personally I don´t believe that oil multinationals are the solution either. The best way for a country to get the most for its citizens is to blend well regulated intervention by multinationals with a very good schooling of local energy professionals. Rushed decisions a la Chavez simply fail.

Global conflicts tend to start in small places over relatively small issues that somehow get out of hand when other countries divide themselves along different sides of the dispute in question. Unfortunately this is happening with Iran. Iran could be just another country that goes nuclear, like Pakistan, or Israel, but because of Iran´s aggresive foreign policy which directly clashes with America´s plans for the Middle East, the Iranian violation of the nuclear proliferation treaty is dangerously dividing the world in two. These two blocks could potentially be the two sides of WWIII. All the authoritarian countries are on one side, the democratic countries on the other. Democracies are strongly opposing Iran becoming a nuclear power. These include USA, the European Union, Japan, India and others. Authoritarian countries including most Muslim countries, Russia, China, and the authoritarian countries of Latin America, are with Iran. This division is dangerous for the world. How did we get to this point? The US invasion of Iraq combined with the respect that North Korea got out of developing nuclear weapons made it clear to Iran that if the Bush Administration was going to call them names (axis of evil) they better be evil….and smart. By destroying Iraq and ignoring North Korea America rewarded the nuclear power. As a result the Iranians want nuclear weapons and they want them now. The Bush administration seems to have a tragic ability for escalating conflict into war.