Atanu Dey: “Climate changes. And so does technology. We humans are the only life-form on earth that in the present epoch have the power to affect the global climate for better or for worse. We can, and do, change the climate. Anthropogenic climate warming through emissions of greenhouse gasses may be a factor but humanity is not powerless to deal with the changes. We humans are problem creators undoubtedly but we are even better as problem solvers. I am persuaded toward optimism having examined the data and the analysis. Each one of us has to come to our own conclusions based on what we know. I rely on experts and their analysis, and I am entirely skeptical of news headlines.”
strategy+business has two recommendations on leadership: a 1960s book (The Lincoln Lords) and a 1990s movie (Other People’s Money). “Few words in business are used more often, with less clarity, than leadership. Do we know it when we see it? Should we judge it by results alone? Which qualities are essential, and which are incidental? Such questions are at the heart of The Lincoln Lords, a 1960 novel of uneven literary merit but considerable insight into just what it is—besides a title and perhaps a corner office—that makes a business executive a leader.” and “Firms have all kinds of stakeholders, and they’re all supposed to matter. But companies naturally tend to focus on their employees. The people who work in a company embody the place. They’re the ones you see every day, and they’re the ones you’re trying to motivate. Of course, no stakeholder is more important than the boss. The problem is that the boss typically isn’t the one who owns the joint. In the history of business, there is no better—or more deceptively breezy—exposition of this age-old conflict between agents and owners than the 1991 film Other People’s Money, based on Jerry Sterner’s witty play of the same name.”
Ronald Bailey: “The modern combination of liberal trial-and-error institutions – limited democracy, free markets, and liberal science – emerged in Western Europe and North America and have been spreading around the globe. Wherever the institutions of liberalism have been embraced, prosperity has followed in their wake.” [via CafeHayek] Donald Boudreaux: “Yet the same human imagination that is indispensable to modern prosperity – the imagination that innovates – has (as most things do) a downside. This imagination allows individuals to conjure in their heads beautiful worlds that are far superior to any reality, actual or possible. Unsatisfied with reality even when and where it is off-the-charts superior to any other reality ever experienced by humans, individuals obsessed with their imagined utopias insist that reality is hell that can be transformed into heaven if only enough coercion is used to bring the imagined heaven into earthly existence.”
WSJ: “Nearly a decade ago, executives at chemical company Albemarle shelled out $6 billion to buy a New Jersey lithium producer, betting demand for the silvery-white metal used in batteries was poised to take off. Turns out, they were right. Albemarle is now the world’s most valuable lithium producer, with a stock-market capitalization of almost $23 billion. It is also the third-biggest producer of lithium chemicals used to make lithium-ion batteries, behind SQM of Chile and China’s Ganfeng Lithium. All that makes the Charlotte, N.C.-based company, which started off in 1887 as a paper mill, a key cog in a tight global supply chain for battery metals used in electric cars, smartphones and other applications at a time when governments are pushing to electrify their economies.”
