McKinsey agrees with DeSoto

McKinsey and Co. states that high corporate taxes and obstacles to entry and exit are pushing businesses into the informal marketplace and undermining "enterprise-level productivity."  This article focuses on business practices in Asia but clearly is model is applicable to the stagnation of Latin American development as well.

Tree Hunting

The phrase at the end of the clip reads:

    Pa-ri-zek /puh-ree-zeck/ n : a little stump.  You know, when you cut down a tree:     what you have left.

This is how a nice Czech girl once explained me the meaning of our last name.  It is only fitting for the abridged (in length and in frames-per-second) story I share with you here.  It is the story for the season and a story of the journey my family took this year in order to fill our living room with pine needles.

So, without further ado: seb_2004DecXmasTreeHunt.mov

It is only a specimen of the video’s original quality but byte-brevity is necessary from this remote land-line that I work.  Happy Holidays.

Foreshadowing January

I had my first nightmare about teaching economics last night.  It was my first class and it took me over a half an hour to take role.  I first handed the role sheet around and afterward, I decided to call it aloud.  Unexpectedly, everyone’s name was spelled something like ‘Ooogggcckkknnnn.’  How the heck do you pronounce that?  And then, regardless of whom i called on, another student would ask me a simple question I couldn’t answer and while I wasn’t answering the question I would lose the role sheet amongst the variety of torn papers I was holding.  As the role call drew out toward infinity, my fear of the lecture portion of class increased because I knew that I would have to explain a few things using the chalkboard and, go figure, the entire front of the room was barricaded with desks so I could not approach the board.

The prelude to teaching principles courses: what trauma.  I could only imagine what my nights would be like if I got a job in a truly savage job like commercial fishing in Alaska or a route as a US postal worker.