The New Ideas Blog

Of course there are opportunities during a recession, including those listed below. In fact, many “lucky people” will prosper in these tough economic times. If you want to be one of them, you have to start to think like them.

To begin with, you might want to turn off the stream of bad news on the television. You get the picture, and there isn’t actually that much “usable” information that you can get from these sources. Believe me, you’ll hear about (more…)

I was reading Tim magazine the other day, and they had an article titled; “10 Ideas Changing The World Right Now.” They ranged from the “reinventing” of the highway system (about using the right-of-way for new trains and power lines) to “repurposing” of suburbs (for example, by making empty shopping malls into new town centers). The first on the list though, was about the following idea:

“Why Your Job is Your Most Valuable Asset”

It got me thinking about jobs (thinking about them is fine, but I wouldn’t want one). I even wrote a page about the topic for the site. You can find that here: New Job Ideas. The Time article had suggested that  people are beginning to cultivate their job skills and experience in the way they used to lavish attention on their retirement accounts and home equity loans. In other words they are (more…)

You may recall my recent post titled, “Public Lies,” which took a look at the fallacy of licensing as a necessary function of government. The advantages of licensing clearly are on the side of the industry licensed, not the public. This is why businesses band together to call for such regulation. While looking into this further I found some more statistics and stories that are very interesting.

As union membership has fallen over the years, licensing has become the method of choice for those seeking government force to protect them from competition. 43 million U.S. workers are now in licensed professions. In 1981 there were less than 100 occupations in the United States that were licensed (a recent article in Forbes Magazine estimated the number at 80). Now there are 1,100 occupations for which a license is needed. Contrary to what some might think, there has been no (more…)

The other day I was checking out some of the recent inventions involving bicycles in a magazine. I’ll tell you about a few of them in a moment. It occurred to me that there are almost endless ways to use bicycles and the related technologies to innovate and invent new devices. In fact, I have had many of my own ideas for inventions for or involving bikes, and I use bicycles for examples when explaining how to use certain problem solving techniques.

Anyhow, here is some of what I found (more…)

The very concept of retirement is flawed. It is based on several false premises. First is the premise that at a certain age you are no longer able to provide economic value. That is clearly nonsense as shown by the many millionaire entrepreneurs and business people in the sixties, seventies and eighties. Yes, we generally get weaker and lose some abilities as we age. But there are seventy-five year-old retirees playing tennis out there, and anyone who can still think and move two fingers can do what I’m doing for a living.

Another false premise is (more…)

Last year Adolf Merckle, one of Germany’s wealthiest men, had a net worth over 9 billion dollars. Then he lost a few billion, maybe even most of it (the world went from 1,125 billionaires last year to 793 this year). With a net worth of a few hundred million, or maybe only tens of millions, on January 5th, 2009 he wrote “I’m sorry” on a piece of paper and laid down in front of a train. His mangled body was found a couple hours later.

I titled this post “false ideas” for a reason. I suspect that many reading the above true story will think it doesn’t make sense to be depressed about (more…)