“Action is purposive conduct. It is not simply behavior, but behavior begot by judgments of value, aiming at a definite end and guided by ideas concerning the suitability or unsuitability of definite means. . . . It is conscious behavior. It is choosing. It is volition; it is a display of the will.” Ludwig von Mises
As a former employee of P&G I am always proud to learn from the future of one of the greatest companies on Earth. P&G provides with hundreds of consumer goods to millions of human beings at competitive and wonderful prices. Indeed, companies like P&G are the result of team working leaders who create a better future by giving irreplaceable experiences to its consumers. In the following video, Melanie Healey (P&G Group President, North America) and Filippo Passerini (Group President, CIO, P&G) explain how success is about networked technology, big data analytics and 1-to-1 marketing.
As Passerini asserts, what we need right now is “business people that have passion for technology but (who don’t forget) that they are businesspeople”. Further, Healey elaborates on how global channels are currently working in global scale. As Healy explains, they create plans that “deliver strategies faster, cheaper and better” in order to create business plans in order to fulfill the business needs.
Indeed, in a globalized world opportunities appear logarithmically while strengths are developed by giving always an added value for consumers. Indeed, as philosophers like Ayn Rand and economist Ludwig von Mises so wonderfully elaborated as it is the philosophy of the entrepreneur what allows him to pursue successful projects. What gives the entrepreneur the ability to succeed are market signals, which are necessary to determine what people might want and how well it was provided. Even the smartest person can’t learn if a teacher uses black chalk on a blackboard in a dark room. No entrepreneur can succeed in isolation.
Entrepreneurs and successful men with values like them are what we need in the world! People ready to create something better and work hard!
Yesterday, April 22 many people gathered to celebrate “Earth Day” in order to call for a stop of human action and creativity in the process of transforming our planet. Fortunately, against these destructive minds and philosophy many men and women have been working to show why the transformation of the world is something good, positive and beneficial for all of us.
I invite you to watch this wonderful video titled “If I wanted America to fail”
Furthermore, I also invite you to read the essay written by Alex Epstein (Founder and Director of the Center for Industrial Progress) in which he elaborates why human transformation of Earth is the product of our success in being more efficient and productive. Because as Epstein wonderfully elaborates,
“It is only through technology–transforming the world around us for human purposes–that we eventually lessened that load. Technology, by creating a human environment in which our goals are easier to accomplish, buys us time–time to enjoy ourselves as we please, or time to create more technologies that will buy us even more time by improving our environment even more.” Read his essay here
The Spanish blog “Pasa la vida” shared these wonderful pictures of Earth in high resolution (11500 x11500) As mentioned by them, the pictures were taken by the satellite Suomi NPP with the instrument Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS).
Joel Cohen is the author of the 1996’s bestseller on Population studies titled “How Many People Can the Earth Support?“. I remember some of its content and that it was one of the first book acquisitions I did from Barnes & Noble (from those times in which you actually went to the bookstore!). Now, 15 years later we are confronted with his favorite topic: overpopulation and his fetish with calculations for possible saturation points. Here’s what he thinks even though so many people has been born since he wrote his book doing numbers of saturation points of the world:
Humanity took until year 1800 to reach its first billion people. We added 1 billion people in just the past 12 years. October 31, 2011 marks a milestone in global population: 7 billion humans. That’s according to projections by the United Nations. EarthSky interviewed demographer Joel Cohen, professor of populations and head of the Laboratory of Populations at the Rockefeller University and Columbia University in New York. He explained the top 10 population trends in a world with 7 billion inhabitants.
1. One billion people are hungry, and 1 billion are obese. Cohen said this is the most important thing people should know about the population milestone of 7 billion. Too too many people on Earth today live without knowing where their next meal will come from.
A billion people are chronically hungry. That means they wake up every day hungry. They don’t get enough calories to get through the day and do a day’s work like you and me. And many of them have been hungry since they were born. And their brains aren’t fully nourished, fully developed. And they’re having a very hard time learning and coping with life’s problems.
At the other extreme there are about a billion people that are really, seriously obese. And that’s partly a matter of not getting a good food supply also — not a food supply that’s balanced for their needs. Roughly two or three billion people — we don’t know precisely — are malnourished as opposed to undernourished. That means they’re not getting the trace vitamins that they need to have a balanced diet.
In a world with 7 billion, 1 billion are hungry, 1 billion are obese. (UN)
2. Three billion people live on two dollars a day. Cohen said:
That is abject poverty. You try to live on two dollars a day for long and you’ll start losing weight pretty fast. So roughly half the world is in desperate poverty.
3. One billion people live in slums. Cohen said:
Right now, about half the world lives in cities — let’s say 3.5 billion, slightly more. And of those, a billion are living in slums without adequate sanitation, electricity, water, security, legal protection, transport, and inadequate housing conditions. When it rains, it leaks. Maybe a mud floor. So we, the world, have not provided home or food, have not reached minimum standards that we ought to be providing for people.
One billion people today live in slums. Image Credit: United Nations
4. Over 200 million woman have unmet needs for contraception. He said:
That means that they don’t want to have an additional child, and yet they’re not able to use modern means of contraception. These problems are not only abroad. We have, I would say, a very serious population problem in the United States. According to the United States Centers for Disease Control, in 2001, approximately half of the pregnancies in the United States were unintended. That means that the woman, or the couple either did not want a pregnancy at that time or did not want a pregnancy at any time. And that is a very serious problem of human well-being related to the lack of control over people’s own reproduction.
5. Today, 1.5 billion people live in rich countries. Cohen explained:
6. Four billion people live in middle-income countries. Said Cohen:
These are the countries that have recently emerged from poverty with fast-growing economies. And I would put China, India, Brazil, many countries in Latin America in that realm of the middle-income. And that means on the order of Chile — let’s say 5,000 dollars a year income. That’s tremendous progress when you remember how recently China and India were really in desperate poverty. And many in those countries still are.
Four billion people live in middle-income countries like China. Image Credit: weirdchina
7. Economically at the bottom are 1.5 billion people. Cohen said:
Those people are living largely in sub-Saharan Africa, but in the new world also in Haiti, and in many of the provinces of South Asia in both Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Bangladesh. There are hundreds of millions of people in dire poverty — the bottom billion as one Oxford economist calls them. So that gives you sort of a geographical picture of where these 7 billion people are.
Seniors now outnumber toddlers.
8. Seniors now outnumber toddlers, and this trend will continue to increase. Cohen explained:
In the last decade, the world passed a very major milestone. And that is that for the first time in history, the number of people 60 years old or more exceeded the number of people 0-4 years old. Basically, for the first time, the grandparents outnumber the grandchildren. In the year 2000, there were about 10 percent of the world’s people were age 0-4, and about 10 percent were age 60+.
What we’re going into now is the era of aging. And by 2050, we anticipate that the number of people 60+ will be about 3.5 times the number of people age 0-4.
In the richer countries, like the United States and Europe, this process of aging is already pretty far advanced and will pose some serious questions and challenges for our retirement systems. In the poorer countries, which have a younger population because they’ve been growing faster — that means more children, so higher proportion of young people — aging will increase even faster than in the richer countries, which have already made a transition in part, the beginning of a transition to aging. So aging is one big thing that’s happened.
Two-thirds of people worldwide will live in cities by 2030, experts predict.
9. More than half of Earth’s inhabitants today live in cities, and two-thirds will live in cities by 2050. Cohen said:
In 2000, a little less than half of the world’s people lived in cities. Somewhere around 2007-2008, it became about 50-50. And by 2050, we expect about two-thirds of the world’s people to be living in cities. Now the increase in the number of city dwellers, between 2000 and 2050 is expected to be about three billion people, which was the total population of the Earth in 1960.
Virtually all of that additional three billion people will be added in the cities of the developing countries, not the rich countries. The rich cities will grow somewhat, but the really rapid growth will be in the poor or developing countries.
And if you do the arithmetic, 50 years between 2000 and 2050, roughly 50 weeks per year, 50 times 50 is 2500 weeks in that half century. And yet we’re going to add three billion people in the cities. Three billion is 3,000 million. It means that developing countries have to add urban infrastructure for a million people every five days from now to 2050. Now if that isn’t a building job, I don’t know what is. And hardly anybody is thinking about the design of the cities so that they can accommodate those additional three billion people in a constructive and useful way.
More than half of women today have fewer children than the number needed to replace themselves and their partner. Image Credit: United Nations
10. More than half of women today have fewer children than the number needed to replace themselves and their partner. Cohen said:
In 2003, for the first time in human history, more than half the women in the world lived in countries or provinces where the rate of reproduction was below the replacement level. That is, they were having fewer children than required to replace themselves in the next generation. This represents a tremendous change over the previous half century. The rate of growth of the world population fell by almost half, from 2.1 percent per year in 1950 to 1.1 percent per year in 2000. And we expect it to continue to decline if we continue to educate women, to provide modern contraception, and to improve the status of nutrition and education.
Bottom Line: Humanity took until year 1800 to reach its first billion people. We added 1 billion people in just the past 12 years. October 31, 2011 marks a milestone in global population: 7 billion humans. That’s according to projections by the United Nations. EarthSky interviewed demographer Joel Cohen, professor of populations and head of the Laboratory of Populations at the Rockefeller University and Columbia University in New York. He explained the top 10 population trends in a world with 7 billion inhabitants. Many continue to face issues of dire poverty. The population is aging. For the first time, more than half the world’s women live in countries or provinces where the rate of reproduction was below the replacement level.
professor of populations and head of the Laboratory of Populations at the Rockefeller University and Columbia University in New York.
Original Audio: On Halloween eve in 1938, the power of radio was on full display when a dramatization of the science-fiction novel “The War of the Worlds” scared the daylights out of many of CBS radio’s nighttime listeners.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem … those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars!
The broadcast news that Sunday night, Oct. 30, 1938, sounded real enough to the young man in Plainsboro. Up and down his block he banged on doors, shrieking: “The Martians have landed in Grovers Mill! It’s on the radio!”
Panic struck the youth choir rehearsing within the Plainsboro Presbyterian Church when they heard his message of doom. Grovers Mill was only a few miles south, and, if you believed the bulletins, the Martians with their death rays had already incinerated the place, killed thousands of humans and begun advancing north at a spectacular clip.
But Mabel “Lolly” Dey, a 16-year-old girl playing the piano, kept calm.
“I bowed my head and prayed and thought to myself, ‘If it has to be the end of the world, I couldn’t be in a better place,” Dey, now 76, recalled. “I’m in the house of the Lord.”
Like young Lolly Dey, as many as 2 million other people from coast to coast thought they were under attack from outer space.
If only they had checked carefully against their Sunday paper’s radio section.
“War of the Worlds” was a pure Halloween spoof, and the destruction of Grovers Mill was as fake as the alien beings with drooling faces and slimy tentacles. How the radio hoax got believed was largely due to the creative mischief of a single showman: Orson Welles.
At age 23, he was a bad boy of Broadway, prodigious in his drinking, eating and sleeping around. But he was also a “Boy Genius,” a director hailed for innovative stagings: “Macbeth” starring an all-black cast, “Julius Caesar” in modern dress.
His talent for radio drama was in demand, too, as the sinister voice of “The Shadow” on radio, and as the mastermind of CBS’ “Mercury Theater,” a Sunday night show featuring adaptations of classic plays and books.
Welles was fascinated with radio as a powerfully direct medium for entertainment and news. When Hitler threatened war in September 1938, Americans tuned in to hear the chilling news of English schoolchildren donning gas masks for war drills. Then the British prime minister declared he had achieved “peace in our time,” and everyone breathed easier. At least for a time.
By the fall of ’38, Mercury Theater was getting trounced in the ratings. Its competition at 8 p.m. Sunday was NBC’s ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his smart-aleck dummy, Charlie McCarthy. Welles needed an attention-grabber. He found it in “War of the Worlds.”
“War of the Worlds” was an H.G. Wells science fiction novel written 40 years earlier about a Martian invasion of England. It was exciting stuff, but Orson Welles wanted more urgency, more immediacy. He ordered his scriptwriters to update the setting to modern-day America and present it in a novel form — as a news broadcast.
Screenplay writer Howard Koch had only a week, and a $75 paycheck, to write the scenario. For realism, he placed the cosmic battle in what he thought of as the very prosaic state of New Jersey. On a road map, he dropped a pencil to determine the precise landing site: it fell on Grovers Mill, a hamlet in West Windsor Township.
At 7:58 p.m., Oct. 30, Welles slugged down a bottle of pineapple juice, mounted a podium in the center of his New York studio, clamped on a set of headphones, and gave his announcer the signal to start the show.
Maisy Curtis was just settling into the couch of her living room in Merchantville. She had kissed her fiance goodnight about 7:45 and saw him off as he drove back to his home in Hightstown, where he taught school. Now she, her mom and two sisters tuned into the radio and stopped the dial when they heard some breezy Spanish-style dance music.
Breaking into the music, an authoritative voice announced:
Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin … several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring in regular intervals on the planet Mars … moving towards the earth with tremendous velocity.
What did it mean? Well, here was “Professor Richard Pierson, famous Princeton astronomer,” a man with a voice very similar to Orson Welles, to explain it. Nothing to worry about, he said, since there’s no life on Mars.
But another bulletin crackled through, something about a meteorite landing with the force of an earthquake 20 miles north of Trenton. Live from the Wilmuth farm, there was reporter “Carl Phillips.”
The object doesn’t look very much like a meteor … It looks more like a huge cylinder … the metal casing is definitely extraterrestrial … Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed! Someone’s crawling out of the hollow top!
In her living room, Maisy Curtis’ father stirred uneasily. Someone mentioned something about Maisy’s boyfriend passing near Grovers Mill. Would this delay his trip home?
Driving with his girlfriend near Newark, a gas-station operator named Archie Burbank pulled over to listen, uncertain what it meant. And at Princeton, where there was no such person as a Prof. Pierson on the faculty, a group of geology students thought it sounded like the adventure of the lifetime — so they drove off for Grovers Mill, two miles away.
Something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a grey snake! Now it’s another one, and another. They look like tentacles to me … The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips … There’s a jet of flame! It’s coming this way!
For an excruciating few seconds, silence. Then, another bulletin: 40 people dead! All of Mercer and Middlesex counties under martial law!
Desperate phone calls poured into Trenton police. Overwhelmed dispatchers tried to calm the men and women on the other line, telling them there was no sign of emergency. One woman in Grovers Mill was inconsolable. “You can’t imagine the horror of it!” she shrieked. “It’s hell!”
The Associated Press flashed a bulletin to all member papers: Reports of an emergency in New Jersey are false.
Ladies and gentleman, I have a grave announcement to make. The battle which took place at Grovers Mill has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by an army in modern times.
One hundred and twenty known survivors. The rest strewn over the battle area from Grovers Mill to Plainsboro crushed and trampled to death under the metal feet of the monster, or burned to death by its heat ray.
The young geology students from Princeton arrived at Grovers Mill to see dark sky, twinkling stars and dead silence — in short, no sign of cosmic warfare.
But already, a makeshift posse of farmers with squirrel guns and shotguns were forming around the mill pond off Cranbury Road. One legend has them blasting away at what they thought was a craft from Mars, only to discover in daylight they had been shooting at a water tower.
“I was crying,” recalled Maisy Curtis. “I was frantic for my fiancee and I was hearing all about these strange invaders destroying everything. My father disappeared into the bedroom and came back with some rosary beads. We just knelt and prayed.”
In her church in Plainsboro, Lolly Dey was praying too, and pondering what was causing this great catastrophe. “I had been learning in high school about Hitler and his plans to take over the world,” she said. “And it just made sense that maybe these Martians were Hitler’s allies.”
The enemy now turns east, crossing Passaic River into the Jersey marshes. … Their apparent objective is to crush resistance, paralyze communication, and disorganize human society.
Warning! Poisonous black smoke pouring in from Jersey marshes!
Gas! Radio listeners who had followed the European crisis knew what to do: filter the air with a wet fabric. All over New York, damp towels hung from tenement windows. A woman in Pittsburgh tried to swallow poison and was stopped by her husband. “I’d rather die this way!” she screamed.
Near Newark, Archie Burbank and his girlfriend ran to a man’s house, asking to be let into his cellar. “I don’t have any cellar! Get away!” he yelled back. They drove to a gas station to fill up the tank and drive off as far as they could … then realized they might want to call the Newark Evening News for information. The man at the newspaper told them it was a radio play.
Welles was still directing from his center podium, furiously cueing actors and sound effects and trying to ignore the cops banging on the studio’s front door. CBS executive Taylor Davidson demanded he break into the program to calm down all the scared listeners.
“They’re scared?” Welles shot back. “Good! They’re supposed to be scared!”
No more defenses! Our army wiped out! This is the end now.
Seeing no sign of the apocalypse outside her church window, Lolly Dey walked the six houses back home. “I told my mom about the Martians,” Dey recalled. “But by then, she had the radio on too and we figured out it was all a show.”
Orson Welles and his crew sneaked out the back of their studio to avoid the crush of reporters and lawmen who wanted a word with them. The next day, however, he put on as ingenuous a face as possible and apologized. “We are deeply shocked and deeply regretful,” he said. Hadn’t he known about the panic he was creating? “Oh, no, no, no, no.”
The notoriety of “War of the Worlds” gave the boy genius the capital he needed to make his debut movie, “Citizen Kane” — an epic that was named the greatest American film of all time last year in an American Film Institute poll. Scriptwriter Howard Koch would write “Casablanca,” the No. 2 movie on the list.
For a long time, the people of Grovers Mill grumbled about “War of the Worlds” as a mean-spirited joke. With time, however, the legend of the Martian invasion grew more remote, humorous, and worthy of commemoration. For the 50th anniversary of the infamous broadcast in 1988, West Windsor erected a bronze plaque at Van Nest Park depicting Welles, his fictional aliens and a frightened family huddled around a radio set.
The guest speaker was Koch, who was hailed not as a hoaxer but as a sci-fi pioneer. Koch, in turn, gracefully said he did the men from Mars “an injustice” by depicting them as earth-destroyers.
“I believe,” he said, “if ever living beings arrive at Grovers Mill from another planet, they will have the wisdom to come in peace and friendship.”
More than half of women today have fewer children than the number needed to replace themselves and their partner. Image Credit: United Nations
Globalization & Capitalism 