… is that half an hour from the city you have wilderness. That you don´t have in Milano, Paris, London, Barcelona and other cities. Madrid is an island of people in a sea of nature. Population density around Madrid is the lowest of the big cities in Europe. These pictures were taken today as I left work for 3 hours to go riding.

Madrid has another advantage that it is better known. While London has 65 sunny days per year, we have 290. And I don´t know about you but I never get tired of sunny days.

Today we paid a visit to the New Museum. Among the different exhibits I was impressed by one that takes place in 2048 the year in which the Jews are thrown out of Israel by the Palestinians. I was not allowed to take pictures of the exhibit but I found this link. What the exhibits captures is a small portion of this imaginary event that takes place in the Netherlands as some refuges arrive there. On my part I sincerely hope that way before 2048 Israel has its country, the Palestinians their country along the lines of the Oslo treaty and both nations live in peace.

In the meantime here are some pictures that I took in the last 24 hours. In them you see a part of the exchibit in the New Museum that I was allowed to photograph, a very ironic exhibit on Urban China. I did find the condom underwear particularly clever.

Last night in NYC I had dinner with people from the financial world who corroborated what I am experiencing myself and that is that while governments around the world are pumping money into banks, banks are not lending it or are lending it at shark loan rates. I heard stories of well leased real estate properties with great cash flow in Manhattan that can´t be financed for rates lower than 6.5%. This is the same thing that is happening to me and my partners in a 120,000 square feet building we own in Tribeca and are trying to refinance. Banks are asking for draconian spreads in order to rebuild their inefficient structures. In the meantime cheap government funds are not passed on to the economy and the economy is starving for credit. Given this situation I think that governments around the world, and I say around the world because this is not only a US government problem, should disintermidiate banks and start lending directly to corporate borrowers. Only faced with this competition I believe that banks will change their predatory behavior and adjust. Lowering the salaries of the top bankers it´s not enough. Banks have to reestablish credit.

In this video I show how the Fonera 2.0 works. We are still working on it but the product is getting to be ready to be launched. In life I have always try to make products or offer services that I would like to use. This Fonera, other than the normal Fonera functions does a lot of cool things like connecting 3G to WiFi, offering you a WiFi hard drive, upload videos to Youtube, download torrents (always download content whose rights you own por favor) and many other functions.

I visited the Perito Moreno glacier in the Argentine Patagonia in 1987 and was shocked at the beauty of the place. As I frequently read that glaciers were disappearing I thought that I could tell my kids as they grow up “I was around when glaciers still existed”. But now I see that I OD on Gore cause the story seems to be more complicated than this. According to a recent study Perito Moreno is not only shrinking but it´s growing at a rate of 3 meters a day! Knowing that my rabid eco readers cannot spit at me as they did to Arrington , at least not as they read this, I am going to risk a comment here. I travel the world and the only places that I have seen that humanity had made quasi inhabitable where Kathmandu and Beijing and that was because of the worst pollution that I have ever experienced. I don´t doubt that we are throwing the most pollution to the atmosphere than we ever did. What I doubt is that we truly know what the consequences of doing this are and especially if they are all bad. Since most land mass is in cold places namely Canada, Greenland and Russia, is it all bad if we do experience some global warming? Can´t biomass increase? Can´t we migrate as we have historically done to formerly colder places should sea level rise? I have no doubt that some consequences of global warming will be bad, but maybe because I am an absurdly optimistic person I can also see how some maybe good.

It´s ok if you spit at your screen now, I know my comments can be disgusting to some. And btw, do visit Perito Moreno, who knows, maybe this magnificent glacier first grows first and then disappears.