I am staying at the very fashionable Clift Hotel in San Francisco. But as I come out of this hotel I find hundreds of homeless people, many of them begging and I have a hard time enjoying my walks. I lived in NYC for many years and there were as many beggars in NYC as they are here or more but now that I have spent 12 years in Madrid where I am hardly every approached by a beggar I cannot but wonder why begging is so common in the large cities of America. Think of it. This is a country who spent half a trillion dollars invading Iraq, some say with the best of intentions, others are not so sure. But even if the intentions were good I find it very hard to understand how the people who run this country do not see more fit spending half a trillion dollars providing health care and in general treating the bottom 20% of the population better.  To me the richest countries in the world are not the countries in which the rich live better but the countries in which the bottom 20% lives better as if the botton 20% is not doing that badly then everyone else is doing very well.  Many people in America and some in Europe criticize taxation in Europe but taxation in Spain is similar to that of USA and because we don´t spend so much money in the military we have so much more to spend in more reasonable endeavors.

I finally got my Sansa Connect and I think that the Sansa, while not a great gadget as of now, it is certainly the start of something great. My short review of it is that the gadget itself is extraordinary, compact, inviting, but as it is available now the Sansa Connect is only great if you love Yahoo´s music platform as it is geared to work and promote that platform. I have been a user of Yahoo Music for a couple of years now and while I have my Martinvars1 radio there, what I like most on the internet is freedom of choice and to me the best Sansa Connect is one that has Yahoo Music and LastFM, and Pandora, and whoever else I like. Now having said this, I do think it is worthwhile to buy the Sansa Connect because the Yahoo Service has access to most music that is available and it is great to have an ipod like device that “contains” most music you would ever want to listen to.

I just had the incredible opportunity of being in a panel at The International Economic Forum of the Americas conference with Luc Montagnier and James Heckman. The panel was on innovation and economic development and the debate centered around patents and whether patents promote economic development or not.

Although the panel went on for around 2 hours the summary of it is that Luc Montaigner, the co discoverer of the AIDS virus, was for patents and James Heckman, the Nobel prize in Economics, against. While Luc Montaigner made a good case as to why patents are needed in the field of medicine, James Heckman made the best case I had ever heard as to why patents mostly hurt development. When it was my turn I sided with Heckman, elaborating on the open source movement and how I oppose all technology related patents outside of medicine.