In 2008 the entire world was beginning to panic as our global financial systems teetered ever so close to total meltdown. Major banks were either failing or near failure, and the entire house of cards seemed to be one 10-of-Clubs away from becoming a meaningless flat stack in the middle of the table.

There was a growing distrust of banks, Wall Street, and our entire monetary system. We had allowed the wrong powerbrokers to gain control and business and industry were collapsing all around us. Visions of the Great Depression and its soup lines were haunting us, like a reoccurring nightmare, causing us to rethink our every move.

Many ideas were percolating in the background, but for one, the timing was perfect. Indeed, it is during the worst of times that we, as humans, often do our best work.

So it was in this collapsing chaos where people were grasping desperately for even the slightest ray of hope when on November 1st in 2008 a mysterious paper appeared on an obscure cryptography listserv describing details for a new digital currency called bitcoin.

It was from this seemingly innocent birthing chamber that this piece of monetary-replacement technology would begin its three-year rollercoaster journey, a journey with great lessons for our future.

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Warren Buffett owns many things, but so far owning his own country is not one of them.

In 2008 I gave a talk to an audience of 1,200 at the “Leaders in Dubai Business Forum” along with a dozen other global thought leaders that included best-selling writer Tom Peters, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, and many more.

Most of the speakers were addressing our depressingly screwed-up economy. I decided to take a different approach and presented my thoughts on emerging new systems for governmental power.

One idea, in particular, raised more than a few eyebrows among the Dubai group: selling islands as autonomous countries.

Dubai had been on the cutting edge of island-building technology, building Palm Island, along with a series of other artificial costal islands, selling them as high-end luxury homes and resort properties.

I suggested that creating new land could lead to the creation of real estate that is unattached and unaffiliated with any existing nationstate or indigenous group — land that could be sold for much more money as an autonomous country. I still see this as a distinct possibility today.

However, looking at the desperate state of countries in Europe today, it may now be cheaper to buy an existing country than to start a new one.

So could Warren Buffett buy Italy, or Greece, or Portugal? The answer may surprise you.

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“There is no future in any job. The future lies in
the person who holds the job.” – George W. Crane

One of my primary complaints with higher education is that they tend to prepare students for jobs of the past. The way a Midwesterner would phrase it, “they are constantly shooting behind the duck.”

Similarly, whenever a column is written about the best paying jobs of the future, jobs like civil engineers, registered nurses, and computer system analysts, they are all jobs that currently exist today.

Yes, many of these jobs will still exist in the future, but every one of them will morph and change as technology and communication systems make their impact.

As an example, technology research firm IDC predicts the amount of data businesses will have access to will grow 50-fold over the next decade. As data becomes cheaper, faster, and more pervasive, the nature of our work begins to change as well.

The first wave of baby boomers has now turned 65. As this generation greys, their needs will change. Their growing numbers and increasing medical needs will require a different kind of health care professionals to take care of them.

As a rule of thumb, 60% of the jobs 10 years from now haven’t been invented yet. With that in mind, I’ve decided to pull together a list of 55 jobs that will be in high demand in the future.

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Anyone driving down a typical stretch of highway in the U.S. will encounter an endless barrage of traffic signs designed to dampen our aggressiveness, forcing drivers to drive slower.

At the time, our speeds in the digital world are never fast enough. In fact a 2010 study done by Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah at the University of Nebraska concluded that the amount of time an average person is willing to wait for a web page to load has decreased to just 2 seconds.

However, our online patience has been parsed into far tinier increments than we humans can consciously comprehend. Tests done by Amazon in 2007 showed that every 100-millisecond delay in load time translated into a 1% decrease in sales.

Speed sells. At the same time, delays will cannibalize sales, erode customer loyalty, stifle brand awareness, and smother a myriad of other enterprise building attributes.

So it should only be logical that dampening the speed of a website – using a slow link – may become an effective weapon in the hands of the puppet masters who wish to control the purse stings of online companies.

Going one step further, the same type of radar guns used to hand out speeding tickets in the physical world will soon be used to hand out “slowing tickets” online.

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