Category: Business
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✍️ ROYAL NOTES
A British king helping America celebrate its liberation from a British king. Only in America. Pomp and ceremony over blood and guts. Glitz over gas prices. The ancient Romans had a name for it — panem et circenses — bread and games to distract a restless public. Some things don’t change. They just change costumes.…
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“THE NOTE”
ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT AT THE WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS’ DINNER A man in a tuxedo leaned in, holding a small piece of paper with the quiet gravity of something that didn’t belong at dinner. To the left, a face began telling the story in real time — curiosity giving way to confusion, then shock, then a hand…
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TRUMP’S BLUFF AND BLINK – AND THE SANDBOX RULES OF POWER
Power is not learned in boardrooms or war rooms. It is learned in a sandbox. As a child in Belgrade, I saw how bullies operate — intimidation, noise, and tests of will. Push back, and the dynamic changes. Years later, I saw the same patterns among corporate giants, political leaders, and now on the global…
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“IT IS ENGLISH”
In 1985, during a visit to Hitachi, I asked why Japan—despite its engineering excellence—lagged in software. The answer was disarmingly simple: “It is English.” That moment revealed a deeper truth about the future of computing. Returning home, I proposed a radical idea: digitize everything and make it searchable. It seemed obvious. It was. Yet nearly…
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FROM “EUROTOPIA” TO BERLIN
A trip from Vienna to Berlin revealed more than urban decay—it exposed a deeper systemic drift. What appears as small signs of disorder may in fact be symptoms of something larger: institutions that have grown too complex, too removed from the people they serve. Drawing on firsthand experience—from corporate America to 1980s Germany—this column traces…
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AN UNWITTING CAR PURCHASE: HOW HEART WON OVER MIND
From Audi Love to Audi Letdown: A Lesson in Globalized Failure “I didn’t buy a car—I bought a myth. And it broke down in a Costco parking lot.” What began as an impulsive detour—a Mercedes errand that ended with an Audi in my driveway—quickly turned into something far more revealing than a car purchase. Within…
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RETURNING TO THE BLEEDING EDGE
A simple experiment took me back to a place I first encountered in the 1980s — the “bleeding edge” of technology. This time, it was AI. A five-second silent video, generated from a poetic prompt, proved visually impressive but incomplete. It had no sound, no authorship, no meaning. So I added my own — music,…
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FROM THE “ROARING TWENTIES” TO THE “WARRING TWENTIES”
A century ago, the Roaring Twenties erupted in music, dance, and social release after the first industrial world war. People believed that progress, technology, and shared culture might finally civilize power. Today, we find ourselves in another set of Twenties — not roaring, but warring. Conflicts multiply, technology accelerates, and violence no longer interrupts life…
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“BIG BROTHER” IS WATCHING YOU –
Big Brother is watching you — or so they tell us. But today’s surveillance state has an inconvenient flaw: it often can’t see, can’t think, and can’t function. In the name of “security,” citizens are herded into biometric rituals, forced to prove their existence to malfunctioning algorithms that mistake incompetence for authority. A simple task…
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SEWER DISASTER AWAITS US AT HOME
A routine plumbing issue turned into a full-blown crisis when we learned that a major sewer blockage lay buried deep beneath our front yard. The timing could not have been worse: I was immobilized following knee surgery, and our home suddenly became unusable. This is not a tale of inconvenience, but a reminder of how…
Truth in Media 