Microequity (as opposed to microcredit/microfinance) for sustainable development in the third world

I believe that microequity (a.k.a. venture philanthropy), a sub-class of investment crowdfunding, is sustainable and positively moral and ethical, in contrast to microfinance (i.e. microloans). Also, while donation-based crowdfunding may be seen as morally superior to even microequity, due to its 'altruistic' nature, it may well be that the long-run benefits of an involved and educated micro-investor are greater still! Overall, I heartily recommend a balanced portfolio approach, consisting of micro-equity and donations, to those interested in creating growth & doing good in the world in a morally-sound way.

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the World Cup draw -- an alternative proposal

The FIFA World Cup seeding and draw system has consistently produced groups of death and groups comprised mainly of teams that fail to invoke passion or imagination from fans around the world, except perhaps for such teams' own fans. The latest edition is no exception -- and may even be the worst ever on this measure. An outline of the draw system can be seen here . We have one group which contains Switzerland, Ecuador and Honduras and another consisting of Russia, Algeria and South Korea!! And, on top of this, we have at least three, if not four or more, groups of death. Depending on one's perspective, esp. given the recent rise of African powerhouses, all of the rest of the groups may even be considered Groups of Death!! This is a disservice to football fans around the world, not to mention the skilled and enterprising teams that worked hard to get here. To address this, I propose a simplified draw system : Randomize Pot 1 and assign to Groups Assign remaining Pots t...

Migrating from MS SQL Server to MongoDB

The following contains notes from various attempts at migrating 2.5GB of MS SQL Server data to MongoDB, on an 8 GB, quad-core, 64-bit Windows 7 Enterprise machine. [TERMINATED] http://mssql2mongo.codeplex.com/ : Simple to use. Exponential slowdown observed in migration. For a total of the 50 million records spanning two tables, the following migration times were observed: 1 second for the first 100,000 records, 30 minutes for 1,000,000, 20 hours for 16 million (after which I terminated the process). [DID NOT WORK] http://rubydoc.info/gems/mongify/ : A ruby-based approach. Use Ruby 1.9.3 (tiny_tds dependency causes problems with Ruby 2.0). Install DevKit before installing the mongify gem. Also, use ' sqlserver ' as the adapter in the .config file. Then, before running ' mongify check <config-file> ', install the gems activerecord-sqlserver-adapter and tiny_tds . At this stage, it fails. ' mongify translation <config-file> ' fails as well. ...

the resurgence of liberty

Political awareness and activism at the grassroots level is rising in the United States. The political spectrum in the United States is changing. Long seen as one-dimensional (left vs. right), there has been a strengthening and orthogonalization of at least one more axis -- that of liberty, and the lack thereof. Libertarianism is most certainly on the rise -- with a rising concern, across all demographics, for broader economic ( laissez-faire capitalism and Austrian economics ) and personal freedoms ( civil libertarianism ). While a majority of the new libertarians come from the right , there is also growing number of left-libertarians as well as a significant exodus of liberals and progressives toward classical libertarianism. Fiscal conservatism is a defining characteristic of the traditional right-wing. This ideology is generally hawkish on spending, budget deficits and taxes and moderate on business regulation and social safety-net programs, advocating for fiscal and mo...

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