Investing in something has the meaning that you get something back in return for your money. If you purchase a hybrid car what you get in return is the intangible profit of a less polluted atmosphere.

I think we should consider ourselves not just as consumers who buy something but as consumers who choose to buy something over something else because we know this purchase is a kind of investment and support for new technologies that are more environment-friendly over others. (read more)

Some airlines (Delta, United, Virgin etc) are rushing to offer Wi-Fi internet connections in economy. Most people cite cramped space on the tray table as the major problem for laptop use in a flight but I think privacy is a more serious problem. Text chatting with my girlfriend or friends, I wouldn't want the guys sitting next to me reading what I write. We are all curious creatures by nature and easily tempted to read into everything that gets displayed on someone else's computer screen. (read more)

Did you hear they make $150 million a year hijacking tankers and fish boats? My Jack Sparrow, that's a lot of money. The mistake they do is that they don't invest any money at all in pirate movies. A pirate gets bad publicity on the news and good publicity in the movies. All they have to do is invest a couple of million in Hollywood to make more pirate movies. That's it! Or hire costume consultants from Hollywood to dress them in traditional pirate attire. People will see them more sympathetically on the news this way. The rest of the money can stay buried under Somali sand :)

Porn sells well all over the world. I bet whoever invents the software that can strip all actors/actresses playing in non-porn movies off their clothes and show them naked will make millions. Shall I bother mentioning the benefits that come with the software? No need to re-shoot movies. Just take any non-porn movie you want, activate the software on your pc and watch them naked. After you make your first couple of millions selling the software, celebrities will sue you and try to stop you. That's when you render it open-source and become adored by billions more who will get free access to it. Relax kid, it was just a joke :)))))

How unusual can you think as an investor, entrepreneur or collector? Forget stocks, bonds, art, real estate and gold for a moment. What about brick and mortar that is not about construction but destruction! Did you know that following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 a brisk trade emerged in the West for pieces of the Wall which sold as souvenir paperweight at prices as high as high-grade silver ore? (read more)

If you drop a $100 bill in the street anywhere in the US almost everyone will pick it up. Almost. Certainly more people than if you drop the equivalent of a $100 in a foreign currency. Not everyone will pick it up even though it's money convertible into dollars and has value. It's an interesting question I post to people I interview: value or money? When I pose the question without the example most people say value for money but as they leave my office very few people pick up the value of $100 in foreign currency I had deliberately left at the exit. When it's $100 in dollars I tend to lose money most of the time. My value for money pays off when people pick up the foreign currency bill, these are usually the ones I like to hire!

The Israeli government warned that terrorism groups are using Facebook and other social networking sites to recruit Israeli citizens as spies and asked its citizens to beware.

If you receive a message from someone you don't know asking you to pass classified information for payment, he could be a terrorist. This is so stupid. And so easy to make tons of money from the terrorists without undermining national security. Agree to the deal, request that the money gets deposited to your account and do a Google search to find info related to the one they ask you, then write it up and email it. You get the money and secret service can track the source of the payment too. Top secret classified info cannot be confirmed right away by any terrorist, if they had the ability to do that they wouldn't be asking it from you in the first place. This is a stupid way to advertise Facebook but even if it was true it's potentially profitable, so why not, what the heck!

They take more space in the wallet and make it heavier, it's also easy to drop them and lose them and more expensive to mint.

Not all graduates whose education costs $30,000 or more a year will land high-paying jobs and fully repay the student loans fast and get out of debt. I see two ways of creating a system of debt-free graduates. The government fully repays the loan upon graduation if the starting salary is below a certain range and adjusts income tax a little higher for the individual in that income bracket. Or the government doesn't repay the loan but doesn't collect taxes either until the loan is fully repaid.

My reasoning for starting a new bank is that creditworthy customers would rather trust that their money is held with a bank that is 100% free of toxic assets and that it won't go bust. People tell me I must be crazy to want to start a new bank because a) no one trusts banks any more and b) no one has money any more. I don't think b is true and a happens because existing banks have a lot of bad loans/investments in their books. A new bank that has none of it can earn the trust of creditworthy customers. It seems good business to me to want to start a new bank despite the turmoil in global finance.