Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Wanderers 2008.12.31

New Year's Eve 2008
:: dave, don and barbara ::
We were blessed with some exotic visitors this morning, including two first timers: Dr. Nic Tideman of Virginia Tech, an economist, and (only briefly) Don's son David, an HR guy for Flextronics, a vast Singapore-based company that makes components for Dell, HP, Microsoft, Apple, even 90% of Lego bricks until recently (plastic injection molding). Barbara joined us as well, Dr. DiNucci, Bill, Don, Patrick.

Rudyard Kipling's birthday was yesterday.

Dr. Tideman works in Economic Justice, which has to do with ownership, whether people have rights to themselves, the land, and so on. His theories have applicability in the Pacific Northwest, where ownership patterns are somewhat in flux. Henry George is one of his influences. Portland-based Jeff Smith is another Henry George fan.

Treating corporations as partnerships makes the most sense to him though he's still thinking through the liability issues. He's admittedly radical -- professors get to be that -- especially his ideas around money (bricks (not gold necessarily)) and banking.