Millionaire Man

BitClout the ‘influencer stock market’ going for the Millions

2021-05-05T06:05:00.002-07:00

BitClout, a blockchain-based social network, lets users speculate on the social clout or influence of personalities. Such celebrities that have verified their accounts to claim their Creator Coins include Tiffany Trump, Jake Paul, Ashton Kutcher, Jordan “Wolf of Wall Street” Belfort, Cameron Winklevoss, Grant Cardone, and Tyler Winklevoss among others.

Its backers include prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists, including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Social Capital, North Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, TQ Ventures, Social Capital, Winklevoss Capital, Polychain, Digital Currency Group, and Pantera Capital, who have invested close to $100 million in the platform.

“They are truly the first tool we have as a society to trade ‘social clout’ as an asset. If people understand this, then the value of someone’s coin should be correlated to that person’s standing in society,” according to the white paper on BitClout.

Essentially, BitClout wants to work as a stock market in which, instead of companies, people invest in the reputations of individuals. There are two types of crypto assets available on the platform. The first is BitClout, its native cryptocurrency. The second is creator coins, which are unique crypto assets for each creator on the platform. Users invest in creator coins using BitClout.

The price of a creator’s coin depends on their ability to create value for their investors through their posts, other content, or actions in the real world. Consumers and fans can in turn speculate on the price of these digital assets.

For now, you can directly buy BitClout, which as on May 5 is worth about $170 a coin, only by transfering bitcoin to get BitClout but I can really say that by using the platform there is a sense of community that I have never experienced before.

In just over a month, bitcoins worth $227 million have flowed into the platform, with over 205,000 total users included myself and 1,600 users Verified with an impressive 20% growth in the last 10 days

BitClout's founders have remained anonymous. The CEO goes by “Diamondhands” on the platform. However, there is speculation that Nader Al-Naji, former founder of cryptocurrency startup Basis, is the man behind the platform. I would definitely recommend to use the platform play with it and enjoy the sense of community find me there as @Millionairedad And if you happen to try it follow me, comment and let me know. I will Invest in all the readers of this article.

Covid 19 and The Trillions: The Worst Economic Downturn In History

2020-04-17T13:29:00.000-07:00

It’s been a long time since I wrote in this blog, but recent events caused by an organized pandemic made me write and give my take on the current situation.

Our world has changed dramatically in the past three months. A rare disaster, a coronavirus pandemic, has resulted in a tragically large number of human lives being lost. As countries implement necessary quarantines and social distancing practices to contain the pandemic, the world has been put in a Great Lockdown. The magnitude and speed of collapse in activity that has followed is unlike anything experienced in our lifetimes.

This is a crisis like no other, and there is substantial uncertainty about its impact on people’s lives and livelihoods. A lot depends on the epidemiology of the virus, the effectiveness of containment measures, and the development of therapeutics and vaccines, all of which are hard to predict. In addition, many countries now face multiple crises—a health crisis, a financial crisis, a psychological crisis and a collapse in commodity prices, which interact in complex ways. Policymakers are providing unprecedented support to households, firms, and financial markets, and, while this is crucial for a strong recovery, there is considerable uncertainty about what the economic landscape will look like when we emerge from this lockdown.

Under the assumption that the pandemic and required containment peaks in the second quarter for most countries in the world, and recedes in the second half of this year, in the April we could project global growth in 2020 to fall to -3 percent. This is a downgrade of 6.3 percentage points from January 2020, a major revision over a very short period. This makes the Great Lockdown the worst recession since the Great Depression, and far worse than the Global Financial Crisis.

Assuming the pandemic fades in the second half of 2020 and that policy actions taken around the world are effective in preventing widespread firm bankruptcies, extended job losses, and system-wide financial strains, we could expect global growth in 2021 to rebound to 5.8 percent.

This recovery in 2021 is only partial as the level of economic activity is projected to remain below the level we had projected for 2021, before the virus hit. The cumulative loss to global GDP over 2020 and 2021 from the pandemic crisis could be around 9 trillion dollars, greater than the economies of Japan and Germany, combined.

This is a truly global crisis as no country is spared. Countries reliant on tourism, travel, hospitality, and entertainment for their growth are experiencing particularly large disruptions. Emerging market and developing economies face additional challenges with unprecedented reversals in capital flows as global risk appetite wanes, and currency pressures, while coping with weaker health systems, and more limited fiscal space to provide support. Moreover, several economies entered this crisis in a vulnerable state with sluggish growth and high debt levels.

For the first time since the Great Depression both advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies are in recession. For this year, growth in advanced economies is projected at -6.1 percent. Emerging market and developing economies with normal growth levels well above advanced economies are also projected to have negative growth rates of -1.0 percent in 2020, and -2.2 percent if you exclude China. Income per capita is projected to shrink for over 170 countries. Both advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies are expected to partially recover in 2021.

Alternative scenarios

What I have described is a baseline scenario but, given the extreme uncertainty around the duration and intensity of the health crisis, we also explore alternative, more adverse scenarios. The pandemic may not recede in the second half of this year, leading to longer duration of containment, worsening financial conditions, and further breakdowns of global supply chains. In such cases, global GDP would fall even further: an additional 3 percent in 2020 if the pandemic is more protracted this year, while, if the pandemic continues into 2021, it may fall next year by an additional 8 percent compared to our baseline scenario.

Exceptional and immediate policy actions

Flattening the spread of COVID-19 using lock downs allows health systems to cope with the disease, which then permits a resumption of economic activity. In this sense, there is no trade-off between saving lives and saving livelihoods. Countries should immediately spend generously on their health systems, perform widespread testing, and refrain from trade restrictions on medical supplies.

While the economy is shut down, policymakers will need to ensure that people are able to meet their needs and that businesses can pick up once the acute phases of the pandemic pass. The large, timely, and targeted, fiscal, monetary, and financial policies already taken by many policymakers—including credit guarantees, liquidity facilities, loan forbearance, expanded unemployment insurance, enhanced benefits, and tax relief—have been lifelines to households and businesses. This support should continue throughout the containment phase to minimize persistent scars that could emerge from subdued investment and job losses in this severe downturn.

Policymakers must also plan for the recovery. As containment measures come off, policies should shift swiftly to supporting demand, incentivizing firm hiring, and repairing balance sheets in the private and public sector to aid the recovery. Fiscal stimulus that is coordinated across countries with fiscal space will magnify the benefit for all economies. Moratoria on debt repayments and debt restructuring may need to be continued during the recovery phase.

Multilateral cooperation is vital to the health of the global recovery. To support needed spending in developing countries, bilateral creditors and international financial institutions should provide concessional financing, grants, and debt relief. The activation and establishment of swap lines between major central banks has helped ease shortages in international liquidity, and may need to be expanded to more economies. Collaborative effort is needed to ensure that the world does not de-globalize, so the recovery is not damaged by further losses to productivity.

There are some hopeful signs that this health crisis will end. Countries and leaders should succeed in containing the virus using social-distancing practices, testing, and contact tracing, and treatments and vaccines may develop sooner than expected.

In the meantime, we face tremendous uncertainty around what comes next. Commensurate with the scale and speed of the crisis, domestic and international policy responses need to be large, rapidly deployed, and speedily re-calibrated as new data becomes available. The courageous actions of doctors and nurses need to be matched by policymakers all over the world so we can jointly overcome this terrible crisis.

Bannon Takes On Europe, Populism and Cryptocurrency

2018-03-11T13:42:00.000-07:00

Stephen K. Bannon during the early weekend in Rome and Milan, explained his modest efforts to build a vast network of European populists to demolish the Continent’s political establishment.

“All I’m trying to be,” he said, “is the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement.” Only months ago, Mr. Bannon was forced out of the White House and Breitbart News, the alt-right news empire he helped make into a political force, for the sharp criticisms of President Trump’s children attributed to him in a book. “He’s lost his mind,” Mr. Trump said at the time.

But now Mr. Bannon, the architect of Mr. Trump’s populist campaign message and the president’s former chief strategist, has returned with an International Nationalist Populist mission.

On Saturday, he headlined the annual conference of France’s far-right National Front in the northern city of Lille, where he was introduced by its leader, Marine Le Pen. People with knowledge of Mr. Bannon’s itinerary suggested that he might meet on Sunday with the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, but Mr. Bannon declined to say whether or not he would, only saying that he admired Mr. Orban as a “hero” and “the most significant guy on the scene right now.”

In Zurich, Mr. Bannon had a “fascinating” meeting on Tuesday with leaders of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party.

But it is Italy, where populist forces smashed the country’s establishment by combining to win more than half the vote on Sunday, that Mr. Bannon has turned into his de facto headquarters.

He declined to name whom he had met, other than to describe them as a broad array of politicians, operatives and investors. Aside from the occasional coffee at Campo de’ Fiori or photo-op at Piazza Navona, Mr. Bannon has been holed up in hotel rooms, taking meeting after meeting.

In Rome, he stayed at the luxurious Rafael hotel, where Bettino Craxi, the face of Italy’s corrupt establishment and mentor to Silvio Berlusconi, was pelted with coins in 1993 by an angry mob as he departed the political scene.

In Milan, he sat in a room at the grand Principe di Savoia, opposite a copy of Titian’s portrait of the Duke of Mantua, a master of intrigue in Renaissance Italy and a longtime sufferer of syphilis, surrounded by red damask wallpaper. Jams were on a room service cart, and a copy of a book titled “Headlines All My Life” was on the desk.

Duke of Mantua

He sipped sparkling water and described a grand vision for a global populist future.

In the United States, Mr. Bannon said, he is working on a project to create a think tank to “weaponize” populist economic and social ideas.

He sees that work spreading to Europe, where a proliferation of populist websites in the image of Breitbart News, either owned by him or others, will spread those ideas, under his guidance. As a final component, he wants to train an army of populist foot soldiers in the language and tools of social media.

(Stephen K. Bannon took Zurich by storm Tuesday, addressing a sell-out crowd,” began Breitbart’s article on the speech.)

But Mr. Bannon, who said he was paying for the trip, said he was weighing whether to buy a name-brand outlet, like Newsweek or United Press International, or to start a new one, or to connect entrepreneurs with capital or invest himself.

“Whether I do it or a local entrepreneur does it,” he said, “there are going to be these populist nationalist news sites that pop up in the next year on line. That will only take these things to the next level.”

Finally and the only positive outcome of this trip might be that he has become fascinated with crypto currencies and how they can help populist movements, the subject of a speech he gave in Zurich this week.

In preparation for the speech, organized by Die Weltwoche, a conservative Swiss magazine, Mr. Bannon said he visited the town of Zug, known as Crypto Valley for its bustling cryptocurrency industry. He was impressed.

“If Brussels and the European Central Bank is worried about Italy going to the lira, their concerns should be that all these communities and states are going to crypto,” he said in Milan.

The Blockchain Breakout and The Millions

2017-12-26T14:36:00.000-08:00

During the past month we all realized why Bitcoin - the much-hyped “cryptocurrency” - is the pioneer in this space and how many more BCH, ETH, LTC among others are emerging victorious down the road.

The technology powering Bitcoin is not just changing the currency industry - it’s changing IT, healthcare, banking, cybersecurity, and nearly every other industry today.

I can tell you that major companies, like IBM and Walmart, and even an entire country (Belarus) are implementing this technology in their own businesses to completely transform the way they do business:

Reducing fraud
Accessing transaction and product details at lightning speeds
Securing payments and blocking hackers
…and much, much more

Now, I’m going to show you how you can invest in it right now and take advantage of what I call the “Blockchain Breakout”… without being a venture capitalist or a super-connected angel investor by simply sending you a personal invite to Coinbase a digital currency exchange headquartered in San Francisco, California. One of the best broker exchanges of Bitcoin (₿), Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum (Ξ), Litecoin (Ł) and other digital assets with fiat currencies in 32 countries, and bitcoin transactions and storage in 190 countries worldwide.

Here is my personal Invite: COINBASE and as soon as you use this referral you will get $10 of free Bitcoin, now bear in mind that during this season it might be possible that Bitcoin itself might be up to € 20,000 per Bitcoin so there is still a long way to profit but be cautious.

Did you know that the most exciting part of Bitcoin is not the currency itself?

The most exciting part of bitcoin is actually the technology behind the currency.

Bitcoin is run by a technology called “blockchain.”

Here’s how blockchain works:

Most people use a middleman to make transactions. The bank is an example of a middleman. If you want to buy something, you need to either get money from the bank or use a payment processor to run the transaction.

The blockchain technology allows consumers and suppliers to conduct these transactions directly, removing the need for a third party.

Now, here’s the key to the whole thing: blockchain provides a decentralized database, or “digital ledger”, of transactions that everyone can see. (here some interesting literature)

The network of computers that can see the transaction must all approve an exchange before it can be completed.

This network is essentially a chain of computers that must all approve an exchange before it can be verified and recorded.

And there’s no central database to hack.

But while this sounds complicated, it all happens much faster than you think: faster than wire transfers or any other banking transactions.

The technology can work for almost every type of transaction involving value, including money, goods and property.

Its potential uses are almost limitless and people like you or me control the price, the use, and the demand. So with this brief update I just have to say Enjoy the Christmas season and The New Year and see you in the other side.

Bitcoin and The Millions

2017-11-15T15:30:00.000-08:00

After all the ups and downs Bitcoin (btc) is proving that investing in digital currencies isn’t for the faint of heart. Lately and based in Budapest I see all the recent developments of btc, just 4 years ago I managed to secure some healthy positions when it was worth about 24€ per btc then mid July 2017 it went up to 2500€ per btc and during the last two months it went up to over 7000€ per btc.

After plunging as much as 29 percent from a record high following the cancellation of a technology upgrade on Nov. 8, the largest cryptocurrency came roaring back in early trading Monday before fluctuating between gains and losses.

“Crypto trading is not for the novice investor,” said John Spallanzani, chief macro strategist at GFI Securities LLC in New York.

While multiple reasons are being cited for the price volatility, one of the more viable is that some investors are switching to alternative coins. Bitcoin cash, an offshoot of bitcoin that includes many of the technical upgrades being debated by developers, has more than doubled in the same period, however I wouldn't suggest changing to other cryptocurrency alternatives since the only one I endorse and support is Bitcoin.

“We have seen similar steep falls in bitcoin throughout the year -- specifically in June and September -- but every time a considerable decline occurs, new investors jump in to experience the new asset class,” Hussein Sayed, chief market strategist at ForexTime Ltd., a currency broker that uses the brand FXTM, wrote in a note Monday.

While markets had been focusing on bitcoin’s more than 500 percent surge this year, bitcoin cash was gaining popularity because of its larger block size. That’s a characteristic that makes transactions cheaper and faster than the original but I don't believe it could take over not yet.

When a faction of the cryptocurrency community canceled plans to increase bitcoin’s block size on Wednesday -- a move that would have created another offshoot -- some supporters of bigger blocks rallied around bitcoin cash.

The resulting volatility has been extreme even by bitcoin’s wild standards and comes amid growing interest in cryptocurrencies among regulators, banks and fund managers. While skeptics have called its rapid advance a bubble, the asset has become too big for many on Wall Street to ignore. Even after shrinking as much as $38 billion since Nov. 8, bitcoin boasts a market value of about $110 billion.

Supporters of bitcoin’s technology upgrade “are now switching support to bitcoin cash,” said Mike Kayamori, head of Tokyo-based Quoine, the world’s second most-active bitcoin exchange over the past day. “There’s a panic about what’s happening. People shouldn’t panic. Just hold on to both coins until we see how it plays out.”

The cancellation of last week’s bitcoin upgrade has left users to choose between the two versions of the cryptocurrency. On one side is the original bitcoin, powered by so-called SegWit technology, which aims to improve its performance by moving unessential data off of its underlying blockchain which eventually will have to evolve to be able to improve the blockchain. On the other we have bitcoin cash which we don't know too much about it.

Proponents of bitcoin cash believe their approach is simpler and closer to the original goal of bitcoin, which was described primarily as a payment system in its white paper. Supporters of the original bitcoin say that vision is too limited, and that by improving the blockchain with SegWit technology, bitcoin can become a new digital-asset class that not only supports payments but countless other functions.

Upgrade Called Off

While bitcoin cash has been around for months, it saw limited support as the community awaited last week’s technology upgrade for the original bitcoin, which promised similar features. Now that the upgrade has been called off, businesses that use the cryptocurrency primarily as a payment method are expected to increase adoption of bitcoin cash.

While bitcoin cash surged over the weekend, it hasn’t been a straight line up. The cryptocurrency was trading at $1,300 at 4:45 p.m. in New York, down from a high of about $2,478 on Sunday, Coinmarketcap.com prices show.

Bitcoin has been similarly volatile; it initially rose after news that it would avoid another split, but the gains were short-lived. Its plunge earlier Monday to as low as $5,605 compares with an intraday record $7,882 on Nov. 8.

I believe Bitcoin will still dominate the world of cryptocurrency and if you are hesitant to buy it, then you could also opt for the alternative of Investing in the stock market with The Bitcoin Group SE a holding company focused on innovative and disruptive business models and technologies from the field of cryptocurrency and blockchain.

The Bitcoin Group SE holds 100% of the shares of the Bitcoin Deutschland AG that operates the only German authorised trading platform for the digital currency bitcoin under the domain Bitcoin.de. and it is currently trading at a discounted price of 76€ per share. So there you have it, either buying bitcoins or Investing on them might be a move that should be made and for now let's just forget about bitcoin cash.

Meanwhile I don't want to hear about any other ICO's not even Bitcoin for a while so secure positions and see you with the Millions.

Buffet and The $1 Million bet

2017-03-14T11:46:00.000-07:00

Protégé Partners has likely found itself on the losing end of a $1 million bet with Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett after a group of hedge funds it selected failed to beat a Vanguard Group index fund for almost a decade.

The outcome of the wager, which concludes at the end of this year, is the latest reminder of the momentum that low-cost passive investing has gained since the financial crisis. Investors have increasingly favored index funds, which track benchmarks, over paying higher fees to money managers who make active picks in the stock and bond markets.

Buffett, a billionaire investor and outspoken critic of fund managers who profit from high fees at the expense of their clients, bet in 2007 that a Vanguard S&P 500 index fund would beat five funds of hedge funds selected by Protégé Partners over the next 10 years. Buffett laid out evidence in his 2017 annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders that he’s set to win the wager as none of the funds outperformed the index fund from 2008 through 2016.

Jeffrey Tarrant, founder and CEO of Protégé Partners, an asset manager based in New York, didn’t immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

The $3 trillion hedge fund industry, which has been struggling to outperform stock and bond markets, could see assets shrink by as much as 30 percent in the next three years if performance continues to disappoint, according to a report this month from Boston Consulting Group. By contrast, Vanguard, whose name is synonymous with index funds, attracted more money from investors in 2016 than all mutual funds and exchange-traded funds combined, preliminary data from Morningstar earlier this month showed.

“Though there are thousands of professional investment managers who have amassed staggering fortunes by touting their stock-selecting prowess, only one man — Ted Seides — stepped up to my challenge,” Buffet said in his letter, signed Feb. 25. So If you also want to have an edge on Investing you could also use a Percentage Calculator.

Seides was then co-manager of Protégé Partners, a fund-of-funds firm that focuses on emerging hedge fund managers. The Oracle of Omaha said in his letter that the five funds Seides selected had invested their money in more than 100 hedge funds, which meant the results wouldn’t be “distorted” by the performance of a single manager.

“I hadn’t known Ted before our wager, but I like him and admire his willingness to put his money where his mouth was,” Buffett said. “He has been both straight-forward with me and meticulous in supplying all the data that both he and I have needed to monitor the bet.”

Seides, who left Protégé in 2015 and is now a managing partner at Hidden Brook Investments, said in an email that he couldn’t comment on the bet because technically it belongs to Protégé.

According to Buffett, the five funds-of-funds gained 2.2 percent on an compounded annual basis in the nine years through 2016. “That means $1 million invested in those funds would have gained $220,000,” he said. “The index fund would meanwhile have gained $854,000.”

Under terms of the wager, the winnings will go to a charity. Buffet said the performance of the funds of hedge funds leaves “no doubt that Girls Inc. of Omaha, the charitable beneficiary I designated to get any bet winnings I earned, will be the organization eagerly opening the mail next January.”

"Black Edge" Biggest Insider-Trading Scandal in Wall Street

2017-02-23T12:43:00.000-08:00

Every trader needs an edge, but not all edges are created equal. Recently I got in contact with Sheelah Kolhatkar, and agreed to write an article on her latest book. It is a must read! it gives a clear perspective on the use of Information while trading and we all know that in the Investing and trading scene, one of the most powerful edges is information. At SAC Capital, Jason Karp color coded information to teach his analysts "what was safe and what might be illegal." The white edge was "readily available information" - completely safe but not worth much. The gray edge might be (and probably was) material, nonpublic information. At SAC, the only way to be sure it wouldn't get the firm into trouble was to talk to its legal counsel, something few traders were eager to do. So gray slid into white. Black edge information was obviously illegal. Karp warned his analysts: "If you do one thing wrong, you're in jail and your life is ruined. There is no trade that's ever worth it." So check your Investment goals carefully with this ACalculator and the end of the second post for more Info

And yet. As one trader, asked if he knew of any fund that didn't traffic in inside information, answered: "No, they would never survive." The author adds: "In this way, black edge is like doping in elite-level cycling or steroids in professional baseball. Once the top cyclists and home-run hitters started doing it, you either went along with them or you lost."

Agreement with Sheelah to write this post.

Sheelah Kolhatkar's Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street (Random House, 2017) chronicles the government's ultimately disappointing effort to build a case of insider trading against the legendary Steven A. Cohen of SAC Capital. The story, extensively reported at the time, transfixed the hedge fund world and financial news junkies. A lot of people were cheering for the government.

Kolhatkar, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of the widely discussed article "What If Women Ran Wall Street?", worked as a risk arbitrage analyst at two hedge funds before becoming a journalist. For this book, she relied not only on published press sources but on "hundreds of interviews with more than two hundred people, as well as voluminous court transcripts, exhibits, deposition testimony, SEC interview notes, notes taken by FBI agents during witness interviews …, diary entries, written correspondence, and other documents." Predictably, Cohen refused to be interviewed.

Hacker One gets $40 Million in Funding

2017-02-08T13:19:00.000-08:00

It is definitely a good time of the year to start thinking vulnerabilities on different web platforms, I just started a new project within regards of publishers and advertisements within this blog, and the information I managed to get is impressive so now while trying to avoid spying software at all cost I will also do a total clean up and at the same time maximize every single opportunity for publishers and advertisers this idea came right on hand since Hacker One was very busy last year finding vulnerabilities in some of the most sensitive software used by the United States military. The Department of Defense selected HackerOne to run the US federal government’s first bug bounty challenge, Hack the Pentagon.

Over the course of a month, hackers working with the company found 138 vulnerabilities. The challenge cost $150,000 to run and saved the DoD over $1 million, according to former defense secretary Ash Carter.

Next up the DoD also awarded HackerOne a $3 million contract to Hack the US Army. Between November 30th and December 21st, participating security researchers discovered 118 vulnerabilities, the first of which was found in just five minutes.

HackerOne is one of several startups, such as Synack and Bugcrowd, that organize bug bounties and vulnerability disclosures for companies. These bug bounties work by organizing security researchers to find vulnerabilities for HackerOne’s customers; the hackers in turn receive a cash reward from the company.

Today HackerOne announced a Series C financing round of $40 million, which was led by Dragoneer Investment Group. The company will use the funds “to invest further in technology development, expand market reach, and continue to strengthen the world’s largest and most diverse hacker community,” according to a press release. Among HackerOne’s other customers are Adobe, Yahoo, Uber, GitHub, Twitter, Slack, Nintendo, General Motors, Airbnb, and Qualcomm.

“Together we hit harder and the results speak for themselves,” HackerOne CEO Marten Mickos said in a press release. “There’s no such thing as perfect software and bug bounty programs are the most efficient and cost-effective solution for finding security vulnerabilities in live software. With support from Dragoneer we are in the best position to rapidly scale and empower the world to build a safer internet.”

The company currently has more than 100,000 hackers registered to hunt bugs on the platform. So far, they have resolved over 37,000 security vulnerabilities for more than 700 customers. HackerOne’s payouts for hackers are also rather high. So far, the company has awarded over $13 million in bug bounties, $7 million of which was awarded in 2016, according to a press release.

A 2016 study by the Ponemon Institute found that the average consolidated total cost of a data breach is $4 million, while the average cost of a breach in the US is $7 million. Bug bounty programs such as HackerOne have their skeptics, though, with security analysts and even founders of bug bounty startups saying that these programs are by no means a silver bullet for cyber-security issues.

It is now time to see the real results for the future, so if you have a profitable idea on this issue or if you want to publish some valuable information drop me a line or two. Meanwhile let's all be safe!

New Year +New Job = New Life and the Millions

2017-01-16T03:56:00.000-08:00

The start of a new year is an ideal time to look for a new job – you're fresh with enthusiasm from making New Year's resolutions and you're ready to make changes to improve your life. If you're in a job that just isn't doing it for you, let me tell you something this is the time to stop and get the best job you can get, this is the time to do it, seize this opportunity to focus more clearly on where you'd like to head career-wise this 2017 and extricate yourself from the old ways.

1-Be Positive about your abilities and the available jobs. While the economic times are not the best, your worth shouldn't be; you're a valuable asset to any company and this is how you need to think about yourself. Whatever the downturns in the economy, there are still jobs for the right person in your field, and this year it's going to be you. If you've been hunting around for a time, use the vibe of 2017 to reinvigorate your search and to get back into the swing of searching further afield with eagerness. It is important to keep in mind that your attitude and posture will impact the way that a potential employer feels about you, so if you're not feeling positive, this will come across in the interview.

• Do things that maintain your confidence up: write a blog, exercise, join social events, market yourself. The gratitude and the positive feedback will help to maintain your morale high and can continue to show your interest in what you're doing, as well as your continued updated experience.

• If you're feeling low after a period of searching and not getting far, this is a good time to regroup and think about ways to bolster your confidence. If you're concerned that you may be suffering from a very low dip in self-esteem, get your full energy friends around and consider talking to your close friends and relatives overcome this fallen resilience.

If you're just feeling flat, use this time to spruce up your image by getting a new haircut, buying something new to wear to interviews, or changing something about your clothes, fashion style, or makeup that represents the slightly older, slightly wiser you this year.

2-Look back over your previous job-hunting effectiveness for the past year. If you've been job-hunting for a while, this may suggest that it's time to reassess your approach and you need to inject new strategies into your job-hunting. Even if you haven't been looking until spurred by a New Year's resolution, the following tips are a good steer:

• Think about unsuccessful applications and interviews. Try to pinpoint what you did or didn't do that probably lost you the opportunity and a make a decision to remedy that part of your job-hunting.

• Go through your CV. Look at how to improve it and how to represent yourself in a stronger light. What areas are you underselling yourself in? Just as some people exaggerate their values, quite a few more people make the opposite mistake of downplaying their skills and accomplishments.

Think about what you have done so far and look for transferable skills and experiences that you can offer a new employer – this will help you to step out of the rut of staying within your same job type and will open up many more job possibilities. Stick to the truth, use concrete examples to back up your transferable skills and move yourself beyond your current or previous job description.

• Have someone else read through your CV to pick up on mistakes and to check that it is making sense in the most concise way possible. If possible, have someone familiar with the industry you're aiming at working in read through your CV to see if it would make their radar pick up. It is important not to be defensive about needing help from other people to prepare yourself as best as possible for the job market; find people you can trust and who resonate with you and you'll receive invaluable guidance.

3-Consider whether you need to brush up your professional or technical skills. This might be a great time of year to enrol in courses that build on or extend your existing knowledge, as a way to improve your job prospects. If you're already working, look for courses offered within your organization. If not, there are many opportunities offered through, summits, classes, and other courses that can boost your existing skills, all these could only add up to your college degree. Sometimes it's the smaller but more specific skills that can set you apart from the other equally qualified people seeking the same job, and if having an up-to-date first aid certificate or computing skill can boost your chances, then give the course some consideration.

4-Start looking for suitable positions. The broader your potential job pool, the better chances you'll have at finding a new job this new year. Don't be shy at selecting as many relevant jobs as possible that match your skill set and are realistically doable for you.

• Think beyond where you live. While this might be a scary thought initially, if you are prepared to relocate from where you currently live, you widen the potential job pool even more, especially if you're prepared to move to a place that is a hub for the skills you've got. Even overseas might prove a promising option if you're keen and able to move this far.

• Network more. Networking is important for socializing, and drop the stress, at the moment I´m also running this Social Networking Club of Helsinki feel free to join it could also help you to relax and meet new and successful people but it can also help you into finding your new dream job, and normally people are more inclined to feel positively about someone they've met and connected with positively than only knowing a cover letter and CV. Don't overdo the job hunting around them though; simply be positive, interesting and interested in them, and try to keep in touch with them after meeting.

Take great care with your cover letter. One-size-fits-all cover letters are the least likely to get you the job; personalize the cover letter to the job in question every single time. Make sure the cover letter is addressed to the person who will be reading it, clearly point out how you meet the requirements outlined in the job description and keep it short.

5-Prepare well for Interviews. Common interview mistakes include dressing down, not knowing much (or anything!) about the place you'd like to work for, and poor interview mannerisms. If you have problems with interviews, it is possible to get coaching (contact me) but if that's not an affordable option, at least read as much as possible about interview techniques, and even better, have a friend or family member role play interview situations with your, using a range of normal to tricky questions. This will help to build your confidence, as well as getting you habituated to being interviewed and answering questions quickly but well.

• Anticipate the key questions such as telling the interviewer your strengths and weaknesses what you bring to the job, what interests you about the company and position, your willingness to work extra hours/travel/relocate, the ways in which your previous experience is relevant, and being asked if you have any questions. For some industries and jobs, it is also important to have a realistic but fair idea of what salary you believe is appropriate.

6-Be Patient. While this is your New Year's resolution, changing or getting a new job can take time and much of the year may pass before you find a new job. Provided you're expecting it to take time, you're less likely to fret and more likely to persist, which is important in ensuring that you don't lose sight of what you really want from your resolution to get a new job.

• Plan a timeline. While you're still feeling enthusiastic and full of renewed vigor about the New Year, making a plan for the coming year's job search is useful because it can determine your goals for job-hunting this year and it will serve as a reminder of where you're headed should you find yourself feeling off course later during the year.

So let´s go out there and let´s get the Best Job we can for this 2017 because we only live once, we can make it happen! share your ideas, tips or suggestions on the comments. And if you have the best job out there check my profile and let me know!

Economists from Finland and Britain win Nobel Economics Prize 2016

2016-10-10T13:58:00.000-07:00

Finnish-born Bengt Holmstrom and British Oliver Hart won the Nobel Economics Prize on Monday for work that addresses a host of questions from how best to reward executives to whether schools should be privately owned.

Their findings on contract theory have implications in such areas as corporate governance, bankruptcy law and political constitutions, said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which announced the 8 million Swedish crown ($928,000) prize.

"This theory has really been incredibly important, not just for economics, but also for other social sciences," said Per Stromberg, a member of the prize committee and professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. Contract theory considers, for example, whether managers should get paid bonuses or stock options, or whether teachers or healthcare workers should be paid fixed rates or by performance-based criteria.

Holmstrom, a 67-year-old professor of economics and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he had been friends with Hart for decades and was thrilled to be sharing the award with him. "He's my closest intellectual friend here and a personal friend also. And he has been important for my thinking and I hope I have been important for his thinking," he told Reuters Television at his home in Boston. Holmstrom has studied the setting of contracts for workers from teachers to corporate bosses. He concluded that in high-risk industries, pay should lean toward a fixed salary, while in more stable sectors pay should be more biased toward performance rewards.

Asked at a Cambridge, Massachusetts, news conference about the current high level of executive pay, Holmstrom said, “It is somehow demand and supply working its magic.” Asked at a Cambridge, Massachusetts, news conference about the current high level of executive pay, Holmstrom said, “It is somehow demand and supply working its magic.”

But he said he was concerned about the state of income distribution and the unhappiness of many workers about stagnant wages and incomes. “I’d much rather live in a society where this wasn’t happening,” he said. “But I’m not prepared to speak about the question about how to repair it” because it would mean tinkering with complex markets.

Hart, an economics professor at Harvard University, has focused on understanding which companies should merge and with what mix of financing, and when institutions such as schools, prisons and hospitals should be privately or publicly owned.

The nine academics who won Nobel prizes this year in medicine, physics, chemistry and economics included five Britons, a Frenchman, a Dutchman, a Japanese and a Finn.

Slush 2016 Music & Tech in Helsinki

2016-09-28T14:29:00.000-07:00

I remember last year´s Slush event in Helsinki back then I had the pleasure to meet Andreas Liffgarden and Rasheed Richmond top tech and music influence's, we had a brief conversation last year and we all came to the conclusion that it was only a matter of time in which Tech and Music eventually would collide to create...Magic... it seems that it might be happening soon at Slush 2016 a two-day music and technology conference in Helsinki.

Slush Helsinki 2016 welcomes 1,500 music and tech influences to Helsinki, and most importantly, encourages honest discussion of building the future of the music industry together. Slush wants to help entrepreneurs in the music industry to bridge the gap between tech, music and entrepreneurship. “Technology both interests and frightens music people, yet many find that there are opportunities embedded in it. Since we have had requests from both music and tech influencers for this type of a catered program, it is easy, and not to mention relevant, to bring the discussion to Slush,” says Nicolas Dolenc, President and Executive Producer at Slush.Slush Music, brings together startups, innovative technologies, new platforms and plenty of entrepreneurial artists.

“Entrepreneurs of the music industry are the center of the event. Slush Music aims to be a place where you can discuss these things together, find the best parts of both music and tech worlds and maybe discover common ways to reach the future.”

Slush Music is a two-day music and technology conference, on Nov 30–Dec 1 in Helsinki. Day 1 at Cable Factory offers Slush Music attendees an exclusive platform to discuss the most striking topics in the music industry, including direct investment in music, block chain technology, tracking music ownership and live vs. VR streaming. On Day 2, the Slush Music crowd will blend in with the rest of Slush attendees at the Exhibition and Convention Center of Helsinki, and they will find five stages filled with tech experts sparking a dialogue on the future, and up to 15,000 people to connect with.

Among the announced speakers are Benji Rogers, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer at PledgeMusic, Sam Lake, Creative Director at Remedy Entertainment, Chris Thur, Co-founder and CEO at Yousician, Andreas Liffgarden, Co-founder of Soundtrack your Brand, Julie Knibbe, Head of Product Strategy at Deezer, and Samu Haber, Artist at Sunrise Avenue and Manager at Comusic Ltd.

The main partner of Slush Music is Finnish Composers’ Copyright Society Teosto. Other announced partners include Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, Sony Music, Sennheiser, Radiot.fi, Nordic Music Export Office, Music Finland, Genelec and Bauer Media.

Held during the darkest time of the year, Slush has always been characterized by a unique energy and enthusiasm, and Slush Music will not be an exception. The revolutionary event will be a music festival without any musical showcases – the creativity, desire to succeed and entrepreneurial aspects will sing for themselves, turning the event into a phenomenon every music industry professional should make sure to track. Make sure you attend this year's Event and I might find you there. You can register for the Event here: slush.org/music

SLUSH 2015 "WELCOME TO THE NORTH"

2015-11-10T15:03:00.000-08:00

Slush is the focal point for startups and tech talent to meet with top-tier international investors, executives and media. This year, Slush brings together 15.000 attendees and more than 1600 startups for the two-day event. 800 investors arrived to Helsinki to meet startups in nearly 4000 pre booked meetings.

Slush is a non-profit event organized by a community of entrepreneurs, investors, students and music festival organizers. Although Slush has grown from a 300-person event to become one of the leading events of its kind in the world, the philosophy behind remains the same: to help the next generation of great, world-conquering companies forward.

Starting Wednesday 11.11.2015. the event brings together 15 000 people.

Slush was almost sold out already two days before the Event. If you are lucky you might get some tickets available for 12.11.2015 Thursday via this Link: Thursday Tickets

In total this year 15 000 people are expected to Slush 2015 in Helsinki , 1700 growth companies and 250 venture capital funds.

"It has been staggering to see that, especially international interest in Slush has grown even further. Yet more impressive is the fact that nowhere in the world has never been such a large number of early -stage technology companies with so many Investors ," Slush CEO Riku Mäkelä commented on the event release.

From the 1700 growth companies, 80% would like to recruit new talent. We know one thing for sure Slush has succeeded in one of its key objectives, namely to recruit the world's largest investors in the technology sector.

"This year, venture capital funds are greater than ever."

with 50% growth in the number of potential investment destinations with Money to be invested.

"Slush has incoming funds right now as an active investment activities, around 20 to 30 billion €"

However, startups and investors meeting area is two times bigger than in the previous year. Now at 200 meeting tables can accommodate up to seven thousand half-hour meeting, but even that is not enough.

I guess this is one of those events that we all should attend, I already have my own Invite to one of the most exclusive after Party after Slush. Don´t miss the opportunity.

If you want to know more about the Event press HERE and keep in touch.

Ferrari Ready to "RACE" in the NYSE with $1 billion IPO

2015-10-16T04:02:00.000-07:00

RACE will be the ticker symbol that Ferrari will use when it debuts on the New York Stock Exchange with a $10 billion valuation within the next few months.

Parent company Fiat Chrysler Automobile (FCAM) said Monday it plans to set a price of $48 to $52 per Ferrari share and intends to sell about 10% of the company in the initial public offering. With such a cheap price all Investors should be ready to Invest up to $1 billion The company hopes to raise just about $1 billion from investors.

After the IPO, Fiat Chrysler shareholders will be given the remaining Ferrari shares to split the luxury car manufacturer from its parent company. Fiat Chrysler also owns the Maserati, Jeep and Dodge brands. Ferrari makes some of the most exclusive cars in the world and has historically capped production at 7,000 vehicles per year to ensure demand always outstrips supply.

Some customers wait years for the delivery of their new vehicle. This strategy has made the Ferrari brand one of the most valuable in the world. However, Ferrari has begun slightly expanding its production -- delivering 7,255 cars last year -- to ensure its waiting list doesn't get too long.

Ferrari reported 2.8 billion euros ($3.3 billion) in sales last year, resulting in a profit of 265 million euros ($302 million). The son of Ferrari's founder -- Piero Ferrari -- is expected to maintain his 10% stake in the firm. So get ready to join Ferrari into another new "RACE" now in the Stock Market. If you would like to know more details about this Initial Public Offering drop me a line Here.

Making Millions with the Rich Jerk

2015-10-09T03:29:00.000-07:00

A guy I haven’t talked to in a long time recently reach out to my blog out of the blue and asked me to help him re-launch his formerly infamous brand. He told me that he just realized he wasn’t making any Millions lately and he needed to put himself back on the map something like Dan Bilzerian, but to another level...

Now I normally don´t endorse companies in which I don´t get any direct benefit Intellectual nor monetary, however in this case I´m willing to share part of the idea if you drop me a line (macedo1@hotmail.com)

His website has been offline for the last 7 years. And he asked me to promote his fantastic Million idea now the main reason for this is that I realized I haven´t post anything since the big disappointment of Paquiao vs Mayweather I agreed to help get his business back online however bare in mind that this is not congruent with my upstanding reputation.

The Interesting Idea is that he managed to get into his promotional reckless video some celebrities: Gary Busey, Dennis Rodman and Ron Jeremy if you want some info on how to join drop me an e mail and I will gladly send you all additional details. Meanwhile enjoy the Video and the sunny Autumn now if you want to make some cash on the net press here: Make Money on the Net.

Mayweather-Pacquiao The $400 Million Fiasco of the Century

2015-05-04T13:17:00.001-07:00

Let’s finally be honest here, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao's battle on May 2 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas was everything but epic. The Fight of the Century will be remembered as the Fiasco of the Century.

This fight let boxing fans feeling gouged, and excluded.

lest´s just remember how screwed up everything was, it was a bad fight, it did more harm than good for boxing.

Mayweather-Pacquiao was destined to be the highest-grossing fight ever, potentially generating between $300 million and $400 million. It wasn’t expected to be the greediest and most unorganized. As fight week arrived on Monday, a sport that was carried in recent years by hardcore fans and Internet bloggers has turned its back on those very supporters in the chase for every dollar.

If waiting until the week before the fight to put 500 tickets on sale to the general public weren’t insulting enough, hotel rooms in Las Vegas, going for $400 to $900 a night and up. Closed-circuit tickets, unless well connected through a hotel host, cost $300 to $400. Try getting a last-minute flight, if you were lucky enough to get a fight ticket, and the cost from Newark is more than $900.

Confirmations of media credentials weren't issued until the last week and offered no promise the holder would be seated in the arena for the fight.

And the traditional Grand Arrival ceremony on Tuesday was lame full of screams and noise instead of a real quality promotion because, according to his promoter, Bob Arum, “We can do without all the hoopla.”

Though the unprecedented $10 charge for Friday’s weigh-in is being earmarked for charity, the secondary market for those tickets reached triple figures. Presumably, the Grand Garden Arena was sold out on Saturday night with those who can afford tickets averaging $10,000.

Mayweather and Pacquiao delivered a lame boring bout, with no need for discussion of a rematch. Since it was a boring exhibition of shadow boxing, and the judging appeared biased (assuming Paquiao won the bout), it let fans angry, unfulfilled and feeling cheated.

“We all waited for something good, something that’s final, something that makes the wait worthwhile, it didn´t happen” longtime boxing analyst Larry Merchant said.

Perhaps it was inevitable Mayweather-Pacquiao was a rocky production. Mayweather waited until February to agree to the bout, leaving less than three months to plan an event that normally would have taken five months to prepare. The parties don’t exactly get along. Rivals HBO and Showtime are partnering on the pay-per-view production.

Pacquiao’s promoter, Top Rank, and the MGM Grand aren’t on good terms stemming from the casino’s promotion of a Mayweather bout when Pacquiao was fighting Tim Bradley.

Arum and Mayweather’s adviser, Al Haymon, aren't exactly friends, and Mayweather Promotions acted as the lead promoter in its first mega-event. Unsigned contracts and squabbles over ticket allotments have led to endless finger-pointing, with blame assigned to Arum, Haymon or the MGM, depending on whom you choose to believe.

“It’s a tough collection of issues,” said Ken Hershman, president of HBO Sports.

In many ways, this is uncharted territory. The late announcement of the fight, the limited number of tickets, a $300 charge for closed-circuit viewing, and a $100 pay-per-view price point tested the market for a real and final disappointment.

Boxing fans just realized it wasn't money well spent, and probably Mayweather and Pacquiao are just laughing together behind closed doors.

As for me I would stick for some real MMA by watching the UFC and some cards that are more real than all the money made in this lame boxing match.

Björn Wahlroos:From left to right to make Millions

2015-01-12T02:44:00.000-08:00

Björn Wahlroos may be the most important business executive in Finland. I had the opportunitty to talk and learn form the Chairman of three of the biggest companies in the Nordic region – Nordea, the bank, Sampo, the financial services group, and UPM-Kymmene, the paper producer – the dapper 60-year-old is renowned in his homeland almost as much for his sharp tongue as for his business expertise.

Widely known as Nalle – similar to bear in English – his life has followed an extraordinary trajectory. “I think it’s a great story” he says.

Describing himself as a “high-school communist”, Mr Wahlroos is now Finland’s arch-capitalist. “I’d laugh myself crazy if my kids would come with some sort of leftist idea. ‘I don’t think you can be that bloody stupid’,” he says.

Mr Wahlroos has a home in south-western town of Salo in Finland. The 5,000-acre estate dates back to the 14th century and the manor house was built in 1790 by Count Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt, the viceroy of Finland under Tsar Alexander I.

“You have to remember this is the chap who is doing second year in college; he’s 20 years old,” he says, describing his teenage brush with the politics of the far left. “He’s had a fascinating four years with revolution . . . And all of a sudden [my friends and I] realised that everybody around us was turning Stalinist.

“The world got pretty nasty in 1972/73. The contours became much sharper and as [they did] of course all of a sudden you realise you may be standing on the wrong side of the contour.”

Mr Wahlroos, who comes from the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, began his working life as a professor. After completing an undergraduate degree, a masters and then a doctorate in economics, he began teaching at Brown University and Kellogg School of Management in the US. Not for the first time in his career,

his timing was almost perfect – working as a professor of microeconomics at a time in which there was a
“big conflict between markets and planning that became the big thing in the late 70s”.

He says proudly that in teaching evaluations at Kellogg he outscored Phil Kotler, the well-known professor of marketing. “That’s the one thing I always like to remind myself of,” Mr Wahlroos says.

He credits his father’s interest in books and academic study as one of the factors that inspired him to go into the world of letters. He is quick to add, however, that while academia “was fascinating”, it was “also a way of avoiding, postponing a decision”.

But then came a “kind of Mario Puzo thing . . . an offer which you couldn’t refuse” and an abrupt career shift. The chairman of Union Bank of Finland offered him a junior board seat. “That’s luck again,” Mr Wahlroos says. “I got into banking in 1985 when we are deregulating all the financial markets and as a consequence, of course, I had a marvellous time.”

While the most recent global financial crisis has been widely blamed on deregulation, he is unapologetic about its effects. Indeed, he says “it was way too late . . . The earlier you do it and the more skilfully you do it the smaller are the side-effects. We [in the Nordics] had a lot of side-effects but so did everybody else.”

Soon the Nordic region had been plunged into a deep financial crisis with Finland, Norway and Sweden all having banking shocks. But 20 years later, says Mr Wahlroos, it was interesting to see those three countries avoid a banking crisis. Denmark, which missed the 1990s variant, suffered this time round. “There’s a very strong learning curve argument there . . . The financial crisis in the early 1990s taught Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian bankers, central bankers and politicians a whole lot, and quite obviously that message was not quite as strongly received in Denmark."

But Finland’s position today is far from healthy, with Nokia and the paper industry, its two industrial heavyweights, struggling.

“They’re actually very closely related,” Mr Wahlroos says, “because the iPad hit Nokia and the iPad hit the pulp and paper industry. So we have a big job ahead of us. We’ve started on that journey but I don’t see enough sense of urgency.”

The day after the Microsoft deal to buy Nokia’s handset business was announced, he described it as a “necessary and well-executed transaction”.

Finland is just emerging from its second recession since the financial crisis and has been a poster child for austerity in the eurozone. Some, particularly outside the country, have wondered if it should abandon debt reduction and embrace higher government spending. Should the country move towards Keynesian stimulus policies?

“I think that argument is nonsense; it’s been nonsense ever since 1936. Actually, believe it or not, I reread [Keynes’] General Theory just about three months ago and I suggest everybody do it because it’s an incredibly bad book,” says Mr Wahlroos, hastily pointing out he means badly argued, not badly written.

Perhaps it should not be surprising. As a former academic, he peppers his conversation with historical allusions. He points to James Callaghan, the UK prime minister who told a conference of his Labour party in 1976 that the idea that government spending was a way out of a recession was no longer feasible. Mr Wahlroos argues that it is “absurd” to think you can spend your way out of a crisis.

Later, while discussing financial regulation, he throws in a reference to the battle of Culloden in 1746, when, he says, “the Pope reinforced the ban on charging interest”.

Almost apologetically, he concludes: “This is very theoretical but I used to be a professor in this. I’m sorry about the enthusiasm.”

Talk eventually returns to his career. In 1992, at the height of the Nordic crisis, he took the investment bank of UBF private and turned Mandatum, the new company, into the region’s leading mergers and acquisition adviser.

In 2001, he merged Mandatum with Sampo, becoming both chief executive and a big owner in the latter. Mr Wahlroos says “in terms of management style [this was] the biggest challenge”.

His predecessor had created a matrix organisation – “in order not to fire anyone. So I came in and within two months I had fired, well, at least half of the executives.”

Does that not make it odd that he is known as Nalle? “My nickname is Nalle, which means bear” in both Swedish and Finnish, he says. But with a glint in his eye, he adds: “I don’t have the delusion that I’m broadly viewed as a teddy bear.”

When finally asked what is the secret? He answered emphatically: There is No secret!!!

The Physicist, The Bikini Model and The Millions

2014-11-22T04:05:00.000-08:00

In November 2011, Paul Frampton, a theoretical particle physicist, met Denise Milani, a Czech bikini model, on the online dating site Mate1.com. She was gorgeous — dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a supposedly natural DDD breast size. In some photos, she looked tauntingly steamy; in others, she offered a warm smile. Soon, Frampton and Milani were chatting online nearly every day. Frampton would return home from campus — he’d been a professor in the physics and astronomy department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 30 years — and his computer would buzz. “Are you there, honey?” They’d chat on Yahoo Messenger for a while, and then he’d go into the other room to take care of something. A half-hour later, there was the familiar buzz. It was always Milani. “What are you doing now?”

Frampton had been very lonely since his divorce three years earlier; now it seemed those days were over. Milani told him she was longing to change her life. She was tired, she said, of being a “glamour model,” of posing in her bikini on the beach while men ogled her. She wanted to settle down, have children. But she worried what he thought of her. “Do you think you could ever be proud of someone like me?” Of course he could, he assured her.

Frampton tried to get Milani to talk on the phone, but she always demurred. When she finally agreed to meet him in person, she asked him to come to La Paz, Bolivia, where she was doing a photo shoot. On Jan. 7, 2012, Frampton set out for Bolivia via Toronto and Santiago, Chile. At 68, he dreamed of finding a wife to bear him children — and what a wife. He pictured introducing her to his colleagues. One thing worried him, though. She had told him that men hit on her all the time. How did that acclaim affect her? Did it go to her head? But he remembered how comforting it felt to be chatting with her, like having a companion in the next room. And he knew she loved him. She’d said so many times

Frampton didn’t plan on a long trip. He needed to be back to teach. So he left his car at the airport. Soon, he hoped, he’d be returning with Milani on his arm. The first thing that went wrong was that the e-ticket Milani sent Frampton for the Toronto-Santiago leg of his journey turned out to be invalid, leaving him stranded in the Toronto airport for a full day. Frampton finally arrived in La Paz four days after he set out. He hoped to meet Milani the next morning, but by then she had been called away to another photo shoot in Brussels.

She promised to send him a ticket to join her there, so Frampton, who had checked into the Eva Palace Hotel, worked on a physics paper while he waited for it to arrive. He and Milani kept in regular contact. A ticket to Buenos Aires eventually came, with the promise that another ticket to Brussels was on the way. All Milani asked was that Frampton do her a favor: bring her a bag that she had left in La Paz

While in Bolivia, Frampton corresponded with an old friend, John Dixon, a physicist and lawyer who lives in Ontario. When Frampton explained what he was up to, Dixon became alarmed. His warnings to Frampton were unequivocal, Dixon told me not long ago, still clearly upset: “I said: ‘Well, inside that suitcase sewn into the lining will be cocaine. You’re in big trouble.’ Paul said, ‘I’ll be careful, I’ll make sure there isn’t cocaine in there and if there is, I’ll ask them to remove it.’ I thought they were probably going to kidnap him and torture him to get his money. I didn’t know he didn’t have money. I said, ‘Well, you’re going to be killed, Paul, so whom should I contact when you disappear?’ And he said, ‘You can contact my brother and my former wife.’ ” Frampton later told me that he shrugged off Dixon’s warnings about drugs as melodramatic, adding that he rarely pays attention to the opinions of others.

On the evening of Jan. 20, nine days after he arrived in Bolivia, a man Frampton describes as Hispanic but whom he didn’t get a good look at handed him a bag out on the dark street in front of his hotel. Frampton was expecting to be given an Hermès or a Louis Vuitton, but the bag was an utterly commonplace black cloth suitcase with wheels. Once he was back in his room, he opened it. It was empty. He wrote to Milani, asking why this particular suitcase was so important. She told him it had “sentimental value.” The next morning, he filled it with his dirty laundry and headed to the airport.

Frampton flew from La Paz to Buenos Aires, crossing the border without incident. He says that he spent the next 40 hours in Ezeiza airport, without sleeping, mainly “doing physics” and checking his e-mail regularly in hopes that an e-ticket to Brussels would arrive. But by the time the ticket materialized, Frampton had gotten a friend to send him a ticket to Raleigh. He had been gone for 15 days and was ready to go home. Because there was always the chance that Milani would come to North Carolina and want her bag, he checked two bags, his and hers, and went to the gate. Soon he heard his name called over the loudspeaker. He thought it must be for an upgrade to first class, but when he arrived at the airline counter, he was greeted by several policemen. Asked to identify his luggage — “That’s my bag,” he said, “the other one’s not my bag, but I checked it in” — he waited while the police tested the contents of a package found in the “Milani” suitcase. Within hours, he was under arrest.

I first met Frampton this past fall in the prison warden’s office in Devoto, one of the few remaining old-style jails in Buenos Aires, so dilapidated that its windows stick open and rain leaks through the roof. It was September, the beginning of spring in the Southern Hemisphere, but there was still a chill in the air, and the prison heating system was down as usual.

“Hey Professor, have you won the Nobel yet?” a guard shouted as Frampton walked by. He was wearing a red Adidas tracksuit (“Adidas seems to have a franchise in Devoto,” he said), running shoes and a tattered Barbour coat to keep warm. “This is the coat the royal family wears, it’s for hunting,” Frampton, who grew up in Britain, pointed out. “See, it has this pocket in the back where you can put a dead bird.” Frampton had been in Devoto for eight months, awaiting trial on charges of transporting two kilos of cocaine into the country. He was housed not in a single cell but in a group pavilion with 80 men accused of drug dealing or smuggling, most of them from other Latin American countries. Frampton had had almost no experience with drugs in his life, apart from the occasional drink and a nicotine addiction (he’d given up smoking two years before). Now he was living with people who were not only well versed in the intricacies of the drug trade but regular users of marijuana and cocaine. The pavilion was often illuminated at night by little flames held under spoons, as inmates cooked paco, a cocaine paste similar to crack that is often made with kerosene and sulfuric acid. But there were good things about not being in a private cell, too. A number of the prisoners on the pavilion had their own TVs. On Sunday mornings, Frampton would turn on the classical-music station, Arpeggio, so he could listen for a few hours before others got up and switched the channel back to music videos. Whenever his case was reported on local news channels, pictures of Denise Milani would flash across the TV screen, eliciting catcalls and applause from the other prisoners.

“I’m a bit of a celebrity in here,” Frampton said. From the moment of his arrest he had maintained that he was the victim of a scam — even if it didn’t occur to him right away that the Milani with whom he was corresponding was not the real Milani — and he projected a sense that all that had happened to him was a mistake that would soon be resolved. Perfectly congenial, he kept punctuating my questions about his present predicament with “And after this, we’ll get to physics, right?”

Finally, eyes burning with schoolboy enthusiasm, interrupted now and then by a spasmodic cough — he has a lung condition, which the smoke-filled prison air worsened — he talked me through what he called his “14 groundbreaking discoveries,” which he had written out for me on a piece of notepaper. Frampton closed our interview half-seriously, half-impishly, with another kind of calculation: “I’ve co-authored with three Nobel laureates. Only 11 theoretical physicists have done that. Six out of those 11 have won Nobel Prizes themselves. Following this logic, I have a 55 percent chance of getting the Nobel.”

How Frampton, who holds an endowed chair at the University of North Carolina and has been an adviser to the Department of Energy, ended up in Devoto appears at first to be a classic tale: a brilliant man of science gets into trouble as soon as he tries to navigate the real world. Since his arrest, he has certainly cultivated this notion, burnishing his wacky-scientist profile with lines like “That’s my naïveté” and “My mind works in a strange way.”

Those who know him well also portray him as a kind of idiot savant, someone who could have been easily duped by whoever was posing as Milani. “Women came later in Paul’s life,” says Richard Czerniawski, a chemist who was a student with Frampton at Oxford University and now lives in Buenos Aires. Frampton was married for the first time at age 50, to Anne-Marie Frampton, then 52, a Frenchwoman living in the United States, who calls herself a physics groupie: “I couldn’t completely follow everything Paul said, because of the mathematics, of course, but either I could understand the words, or I could just listen to the music, the music of physics.” The pair divorced in 2008 but are still on good terms. Anne-Marie describes her ex-husband as a very good scientist with the emotional age of a 3-year-old. “I was flabbergasted, flabbergasted but not surprised,” she said, referring to the call she received from Frampton from Devoto prison. “Paul is a very experienced traveler, but that sentence, ‘Don’t take any luggage that doesn’t belong to you,’ he doesn’t even hear that. He’s in another world, an alternate universe.”

One story about his search for a new wife certainly bolstered this view. Shortly after his divorce, Frampton, then 64, expressed concern about finding a wife between the ages of 18 and 35, which Frampton understood to be the period when women are most fertile. One particularly promising candidate was a young Chinese woman. After an extended e-mail correspondence, Frampton arranged to see her during a trip to China to visit another eminent scientist, but they met for only an hour, and “it didn’t go anywhere.” The next important contender appears to have been Milani. “He told me to look her up on the Internet,” Dixon recalled. “I thought he was out of his mind, and I told him that. ‘You’re not talking to the real girl. Why would a young woman like that be interested in an old guy like you?’ But he really believed that he had a pretty young woman who wanted to marry him.” When I later asked Frampton what made him think that Milani was interested, he replied, “Well, I have been accused of having a huge ego.”

Over the course of three and a half months, Frampton called my house 42 times from jail. He’d call to report the latest news. A “brilliant” op-ed he published in a Raleigh newspaper about the U.N.C. provost’s “illegal” action — cutting off his salary without any due process — had succeeded in getting the provost fired. (The provost had granted Frampton 60 days of paid leave, then suspended his salary until he could resume his duties as a faculty member. Frampton sued the university, unsuccessfully, for his wages.) He was particularly pleased about the provost’s dismissal, because the severance of his salary had had real repercussions. Apparently without savings, he was unable to afford a private lawyer and had to rely on an overburdened Argentine public defender. He’d given up his health insurance and risked losing his car and apartment in Chapel Hill. In Argentina, he scrambled to get the money he needed to buy himself decent food in prison and telephone cards, of which he might have as many as 30 in his pocket.

It turned out that the provost was stepping down voluntarily in June 2013 and would remain as a faculty member. Frampton didn’t seem sheepish about having linked the provost’s fate to his own. He was excited about something else now. The president of Harvard, he’d heard, had been given a memo about his case in hopes that she’d mention it to Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, during Kirchner’s visit to the university. “I think I’ve never been discussed by two such important people in my life,” Frampton reflected. (Harvard’s president never received any memo about Frampton, and she and Kirchner never did discuss his case.) Or he’d report, ever hopefully, that he’d be out on house arrest any day. (His Argentine public attorney, Ignacio Anitua, had requested that his client be placed on house arrest, given his age and his pulmonary ailment, but the request was still wending its way through official channels.) He asked me to bring him Gruyère, blue cheese, curry powder, chili pepper, notebooks, reading glasses and telephone cards, and he expressed frustration about the slow progress of his case. He was especially exasperated that the text messages on his confiscated cellphone from Jan. 20, the day of the bag exchange, had still not been handed over to his defense lawyer by the police, despite repeated requests. “It’s clear from those messages that it was not my bag,” he said. “That should be sufficient to exonerate me.” (His public defender told me that the text messages were actually in his file but would never be enough to prove his innocence.)

One Monday, Frampton called three times. The first time was at 3 p.m. He was animated and talked at length about the “volatile situation” at the university, which had yet to reinstate his salary, despite letters of support from the Nobel laureate Sheldon Lee Glashow and from John C. Taylor, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Cambridge, among others. “Research institutions throughout the country are in jeopardy if a tenured professor of 30 years has his salary suddenly revoked without any due process,” Frampton said. “This means that the jobs of tens of thousands of tenured professors are at risk.”

Second call, 6 p.m.: Frampton reported that he was a month into his prison stay before his fellow prisoners managed to convince him that the woman he thought he’d been in touch with all this time had probably been a man impersonating her. The real Denise Milani was never accused of having a role in the drug smuggling and has no connection to Frampton. “The only real connection we have is through the international media,” Frampton admitted. Milani, who was interviewed for The Daily Mail, expressed alarm about having her name associated with drug smugglers, fear for herself, her 12-year-old son and “sympathy” for the professor. “I feel sympathy for her, too,” Frampton said. (Despite repeated attempts, Milani could not be reached for comment.)

Third call, 8 p.m.: “There could be retribution. I could be assassinated.” He spoke about how he had overheard the dealers and smugglers he was now living with talking about what happens to drug mules who lose the stash. He said people had told him someone must have been watching him move around at the airport, so they knew what he looked like. “These thoughts keep me up at night.”

Frampton is prone to seeing himself as the center of the action whatever the milieu. When he was growing up in Worcestershire, England, in what he describes as a “lower-middle-class family,” his mother encouraged him to report his stellar grades to all the neighbors, a practice that may have led the young Frampton to confuse worldly laurels with love. At 18, he enrolled at Brasenose College, Oxford, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1968. He received a number of offers for postdocs, including one at Princeton and another at the University of Chicago. His advisers suggested he go to Chicago to work with the Japanese physicist Yoichiro Nambu. Nambu was an intellectual giant in the field, but Frampton’s advisers may have had other reasons for steering Frampton his way. Nambu, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in 2008, has, Frampton told me, “astonishingly no ego.”

As Frampton tells it, his life is one unbroken line of impressive grades, advanced degrees and innumerable citations of his work in cosmology and physics. There is certainly much truth to this. “He has always been very inventive in thinking of new ideas extending and going beyond the standard model of particle physics,” says Prof. Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. But then there is Frampton’s tendency to transfer his professional accomplishments to his personal life. In what a fellow physicist described as a “very vain, very inappropriate” talk delivered on the 80th birthday of Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics, Frampton veered into autobiography, recounting how his ability to multiply numbers in his head at 4 led him to see himself as “cleverer than Newton.” This line became a refrain throughout the talk. Interspersed with the calculations and hypotheses were his Oxford grades, which, he said, showed that he, like Newton, was in the top 1 percentile for intelligence. Frampton insists that he was merely joking and that his sense of humor was misinterpreted as self-regard. Yet in many of my conversations with him, he seemed to cling to the idea of his own exceptionalism. During our first meeting, when I asked him what attracted him to Milani, he said, “Not to offend present company,” referring to me and the representative from the penitentiary service, “but, to start with, she’s in the top 1 percentile of how women look.” And in an e-mail to Milani — or, rather, the fake Milani — Frampton wrote, “As these days tick by, and I think about it a lot, the more I realize that we are the perfect couple in all respects.”

The strategy of Frampton’s defense team was to present Frampton as a brilliant man out of touch with day-to-day life. They called in a psychologist, who pronounced him unusually gullible without, however, diagnosing a mental illness. The judges sent their own doctor, who declared Frampton normal. A total of three psychological evaluations were presented at the trial, and two agreed that he had the traits of a narcissistic personality — an overblown and unrealistic image of himself. One concluded that it did not constitute a pathology, while the other suggested that there were pathological aspects to his narcissism that led to gaps in his understanding of reality.

Fidel Schaposnik, a physics professor at the National University of La Plata, which, along with the University of Buenos Aires, had offered Frampton a visiting professorship to help get him released from Devoto while he awaited trial, said of Frampton: “He’s a typical person trained at Oxford. He knows he’s part of an elite and can’t imagine such things would happen to him.” Indeed, Frampton sees academia’s denizens as creative misfits who deserve special protection. “People who are socially inept can nevertheless be the most creative people,” he told me one afternoon on the telephone. “It’s very important that they can’t be fired. This is the genius of tenure.”

There had been a case similar to Frampton’s in the past year, that of a New Zealander named Sharon Armstrong. Like Frampton, Armstrong, a former executive at the Maori Language Commission, said she met her lover on an Internet dating site and, after months of online contact, made a plan to meet him abroad, passing through Buenos Aires on her way to London to pick up some important paper contracts for him. She was caught carrying a bag with five kilos of cocaine. After the two were mentioned together in a number of articles, Armstrong contacted Frampton. The judges in her case — she received a sentence of 4 years 10 months — were also going to be the judges in his.

According to Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, if Frampton and Armstrong were unaware of their involvement, they would be the exception. He had never heard of a case in which a virtual “honey trap” had been used to dupe someone into being an unwitting drug mule. “When it comes to drug trafficking, we rarely see someone duped or used as part of a ruse,” he said. “It is very typical for those arrested to claim no knowledge or involvement.” The prosecutor in Frampton’s case, Mario Villar — 80 percent of his cases involve drug smuggling — concurred. It is highly improbable, he said, that a person is unaware that he or she is carrying drugs. Frampton acknowledged that this was undoubtedly true — most of the time. Of the other 79 prisoners on his pavilion, he thought none were innocent. “Some people will say they’re innocent, but when I talk to them further, it becomes clear that they were somehow involved. I think people like me are less than 1 percent.”

Three weeks before his trial, Frampton hired private lawyers. When I asked how he was able to afford them, he first said he’d rather not tell me, then claimed that friends in Argentina were footing the bill. The new lawyers picked up where his public defenders left off, yet at a significantly accelerated pace. On Oct. 30, I spoke to Frampton as he was driving away from Devoto, accompanied by his friend, Czerniawski, who had agreed to take Frampton in on house arrest. Giddily, he said that the first thing he wanted to do was to sleep in, impossible in prison because every morning at 7:30 they do the roll call.

The following day at midday, I met Frampton at the Czerniawskis’ three-bedroom apartment, just blocks away from the Argentine Parliament. Dressed in a dark blue pinstriped suit and a tie covered with tiny red-beaked penguins, Frampton was finishing lunch with Czerniawski’s wife, Silvia, and their two daughters. “See,” he said, “I’m Paul Frampton again.” Czerniawski was at work. When I asked Frampton if he had slept in, he said he spent half the night on the Internet, reading through all the latest discoveries in his field, checking to see what his “competitors” had been working on, and beginning to answer the thousands of e-mails he received. He reported that he had more citations than ever. The conversation turned to his long-awaited release to house arrest. How had the new lawyers achieved so quickly what his public attorney had been requesting for more than four months? “They say they drink maté with the judges,” Frampton answered cryptically. Later he added, “A little bird told me that if I get off, I’ll never know why.”

He showed me his latest calculations, pages of beautifully rendered symbols with not a word in sight except for “Nestor Kirchner,” the former president and deceased husband of current president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, written in the margin. “I’m trying to connect the God particle, the Higgs boson, with dark energy — you know, the thing that makes the universe accelerate. This sounds a bit egomaniacal, but to understand dark energy, I think we have to be open-minded about Einstein’s general relativity.”

This time, he was the one who brought the conversation back around to drug smuggling, showing palpable anxiety about the outcome of his trial. He told me uneasily that his lawyers had reported that nearly all drug-smuggling cases that came to trial ended in guilty verdicts.

As I was leaving, he stepped out with me into the hallway. “Can I do this?” he asked, wondering if he was violating his house arrest. He got into the elevator, a wrought-iron cage that offered a view of the stairs as it descended, and repeated, “Can I do this?” He accompanied me down another long hall to the entrance and gave me a kiss on the cheek goodbye, peering out at the street as the door closed.

Two weeks later, on Nov. 12, Frampton’s trial began in a small wood-paneled courtroom, where he sat before three judges. On exhibit in front of the judges was a collapsed black cloth suitcase with wheels wrapped in yellow cellophane.

Frampton’s long-held defense — that he was duped because he had a childlike understanding of the ways of the world — began to unravel. The prosecutor opened his cross-examination of Frampton by citing a text message retrieved from Frampton’s confiscated cellphone. “On Jan. 22 at 9:46 a.m.,” he said, “you wrote from Ezeiza airport to the person you understood to be Denise Milani: ‘Was worried only about sniffer dogs but more.’ ” As his interrogation of Frampton continued, he read other text messages sent from Frampton’s phone. One at 9:52 a.m.: “Need to know if your loyalty is with the bad guy-agent & bolivian friends — or good guy, your husband?” And another at 9:56 a.m.: “SIRU” — the Hotel Siru, where they were planning to meet in Brussels — “IS AMBUSH.” 10:14 a.m.: “Your naivety is bad for me, us. This is millions. NO SIRU, OK?” At 11:19 a.m., Frampton sent Milani an e-mail: “This stuff is worth nothing in Bolivia, but $Ms in Europe. You meet me at the airport and we do not go near the hotel the ‘agent’ suggested. Stay at another hotel.” At 11:47 a.m., there was another text message: “Monday arrival changed. You must not tell the coca-goons.” At 12:16 p.m., he wrote: “WHY ARE YOU IGNORING ME? AT THIS LAST MOMENT. WE DID NOT DECIDE HOW TO MEET TOMORROW IN BRUSSELS AND KEEP COCA & LIVES. AT SIRU WE MAY LOSE BOTH!!” At 1:06: “We may do cool 1,000,000.”

Frampton explained to the judges that these messages were jokes. He’d made them up because of Dixon’s earlier warnings about drugs. “I was trying to keep Denise amused. I had already decided to fly back to North Carolina.” But even taking Frampton’s peculiar brand of humor into account, it was hard to understand why he would have taken the joke so far. He sent 30 messages like this, with specific details that made it seem as if he were referring to a real situation, a considered plan, not fabricating a story on the spot. Or did he think that whoever was behind the man who came to the hotel with the suitcase might hurt Milani if he didn’t agree to take the bag? While for much of his life Frampton seems to have had little interest in money, he may well have seen his actions as a strategy to prove to Milani once and for all that he was indeed the husband of her dreams — a knight slaying dragons.

The defense worked to show that far from hatching some elaborate plot, Frampton was unconcerned about the contents of the bag. Footage from airport security cameras showed him getting up from a cafe table and wandering off, leaving his open laptop and his two bags — his own white one and Milani’s black one — unattended for up to 25 minutes at a time, gazing in shop windows, talking to security personnel, standing at an airline counter, returning to his abandoned luggage and then, an hour or so later, repeating the operation. Would anyone, even a wacky scientist, behave this way if he knew he was transporting two kilos of cocaine?

And if Frampton’s behavior was innocent, it still called for an explanation. Who leaves his bags unattended in an airport? Frampton, apparently. “I’ve seen him in airports,” his ex-wife said, “He leaves all his bags and goes for half an hour somewhere else.”

The prosecution continued to press its case, producing a piece of paper on which Frampton had written:

“1 gram 200 dollars

2,000 grams 400,000 dollars.”

The amount of cocaine found in the bag Frampton was carrying was 1,980 grams. When asked why he’d been making this calculation, Frampton said: “My mind works in a strange way.” That evening, Frampton told me on the telephone, “I made those calculations in the airport office after having been arrested,” a fact that his defense team stressed the following day, noting Frampton’s tendency to make random calculations. They asked him to explain another notation on the same piece of paper that read “5 standard deviations 99.99994%.” “The criterion for the discovery of the Higgs boson had to be 5 standard deviations, which means it’s extremely unlikely to be a statistical fluctuation,” Frampton explained. He was “calculating the probability that Denise Milani would become my second wife, which was almost a certainty.” Pursuing this line of questioning, his lawyer asked whether Frampton was also calculating the weight of one of the judges.

“I’m embarrassed to admit it, but yes,” Frampton answered. “I calculated that he must weigh 100 kilos.”

“You calculated badly, as badly as you did about your second marriage,” the judge responded. “I’m 124 kilos.”

On the third and last day of the trial, the defense exhibited love letters Frampton had written to Denise Milani that they recovered from his Gmail account. They were full of tenderness, vividly imagining their life together in Chapel Hill. She wouldn’t need to work at first; she could accompany him to the office, make friends at the gym, the cafeteria and the supermarket; they’d take walks on the beach, and soon their little baby would arrive. Eventually she could get a contract with Victoria’s Secret. A response from Milani exhibited matching tenderness: “You’re the best thing that’s happened in my cursed life.” But the judges were apparently unmoved by these declarations of love. As Frampton’s former defense lawyer said, “The only thing that matters as far as the law is concerned is whether Frampton knew there were drugs in the bag. Whether he did it for money or a woman doesn’t matter.”

On Nov. 19, Frampton was sentenced to 4 years 8 months for drug smuggling.

After the trial, Frampton said his lawyers had forbidden him to speak to me, fearing that he might say something “stupid.” But three weeks later, this injunction was lifted, and I went to visit him again at the Czerniawskis’, where he remains under house arrest. With credit for the time he has already spent in custody, Frampton is expected to be released in May 2014. (Under Argentine law, a foreigner must serve half his sentence but can then be expelled from the country, and the penalty is then considered discharged.) It was a hot summer day, and he was dressed casually this time, in a light blue polo shirt, white shorts, black socks and black sneakers. He was still insisting on his innocence, but a new wariness had crept into his manner. He asked me several questions about myself, as if trying to gauge with each word which version of Paul Frampton I believed. He reported that U.N.C. would not make any decisions about his position on the faculty until it heard the results of his appeal, which could be months away. (U.N.C. confirmed that Frampton still has his position but that his current salary is $0.) His lawyers were using the same strategy they had previously, but introducing further evidence, like the complete record of his Yahoo Messenger chats with Milani, which he felt sure would exonerate him. “It shows unambiguously,” he said later, “that the only reason I went to South America was to meet Denise Milani.” For his part, Frampton had been working on two papers simultaneously. “So I can rest assured that I’m not like Oscar Wilde,” he said. While in Devoto, he checked out a copy of Oscar Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Gray,” destined for English-language learners, from the prison library. He read in the preface that after Wilde’s stay in prison, he gave up writing. “That really affected me. He lost his confidence.”

The night before, Frampton told me, he watched the Nobel Prize ceremony live in Stockholm. He described to me how the king of Sweden presented the prizes in a concert hall, adding that he had been there once himself. His greatest dream was “to have a prediction verified by experimentation.” This, he explained, was how you win the Nobel as a theoretical particle physicist. “That would bring an enormous sense of fulfillment, quite apart from the Nobel Prize,” he said. “ ‘I predicted a particle that’s actually in the universe.’ Wouldn’t that be a rush? Much better than other ways of getting a lot of dopamine.” Later in the conversation, he reflected: “I’ve written 450 papers, an absurd number. A typical professor writes 100 in his career. I don’t regret my work in physics, but I have made sacrifices.” When asked what kind of sacrifices, he responded as if the answer were obvious, “Well, I don’t have a family.”

One of Frampton’s last e-mails to Denise Milani was written on a pirated cellphone a month into his stay inside Devoto prison: “I only think of cuddling all day and having sex all night with Denise Milani. How can you prove that you are Denise Milani?”

E-stonia The New Tax Haven to make Millions

2014-11-15T04:29:00.000-08:00

With the Idea of making one Million euros in less than 5 years here is an important approach if you want to escape the high taxes from the well developed countries an idea to boost the Baltic economy by attracting foreign virtual Investors.

Imagine if you could simply live somewhere else, digitally. Imagine if it didn’t involve Second Life-style role play. It’s already happening. Later this year, Estonia will become the world’s first country to offer foreigners e-residency. Some 6,000 people filed early-bird applications within the first 24 hours.

“We look at this as a government start-up”, explains Taavi Kotka, the country’s deputy secretary-general for communications and state information systems and the architect of the e-residency law, which was passed by parliament last month. His fellow citizens, Kotka explains, consider Estonia a hassle-free country where it’s easy to interact with the government. Now this small country with a population of 1.3 million wants to extend this hassle-free service to non-residents, who, starting later this year, can gain e-residency for the modest government fee of €50 simply by presenting themselves at a police station. They’ll receive an ID card equipped with a chip and security certificates, with which they can sign documents, launch and manage companies and conduct banking transactions.

An act of altruism by a country famed for its digital infrastructure? Hardly. “Estonia has around 30,000 active companies, and we’d like to grow that figure by at least 10,000,” says Kotka, himself a former entrepreneur. “While Ireland and Switzerland focus on large companies, we’d like to attract startups and other small to medium enterprises.”

But, until recently, Estonia wasn’t sure how to stand out as an investment destination. “Estonia has had no specific foreign investment strategy,” says Oliver Väärtnõu, CEO of the Estonian software firm Cybernetica. “We didn’t know what kind of companies we wanted to attract. Thanks to the IT industry and startups, and basically by chance, technology has become our foreign investment niche.”

Indeed, when Kotka joined the government three years ago, he spent a lot of time thinking about Estonia’s potential assets. “It’s small, it’s cold,” he says. “Nobody wants to come here.” But the country’s digital infrastructure is so advanced that residents have long used e-IDs for both banking and online shopping. They pay taxes and vote by smartphone; children learn computer programming in primary school. President Tomas Hendrik Ilves likes to refer to his country as ‘E-stonia’.

Until now, only physical residents have been eligible for e-IDs, but the new law changes that. Even though the first IDs won’t be given out until later this year, more than 6,000 people applied within the first 24 hours of early-bird registration. And fun though it might be for private use, the e-residency is primarily intended to benefit companies as individuals can sign documents from anywhere in the world. “Instead of constantly filing paperwork, you can focus on your customers,” says Kotka. “If you can save €30,000 on an accountant you free up a lot of money you can spend on growing your company.”

Estonia, the Ireland of startups? Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn is not so sure. “I’d be surprised if the e-residency attracted a lot of startups, because the usual startup bottlenecks are finding good co-founders and getting investment, neither of which the e-residency influences much,” he says. “That said, this is a new and bold experiment, so it’s likely that we’ll see some interesting use cases, some of which will be useful for startups.”

Daniel Ha, Comment platform Disqus’s co-founder and CEO, calls the e-residency “quite amazing”. “Residency and place of business are now absolutely different things,” he says, from the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. “An e-residency allows smaller companies like ours to consider substantial work in areas that we otherwise couldn’t reach. That’s very cool. I’m not sure that means I’ll be looking at Estonia any time soon, but I’m glad that this is a real initiative happening right now.” Ha touches on the e-residency’s obvious challenge: Estonian e-residents will be able to conduct business – even launch companies – far from Estonian soil, foregoing a physical presence. Still, business student and startup entrepreneur Kristo Petersen is certain that the e-residency will benefit local companies, saying that he’ll offer the e-resident firms digital infrastructure consulting services.

And whether or not foreign investment turns it into a Baltic Tiger or the New Switzerland, Estonia has already made a splash by introducing the e-residency. Journalists are reporting on it; entrepreneurs are taking note of the innovative country. By contrast, almost no one is talking about setting up shop in Macedonia, with a population of 2 million. “Obviously it’s very difficult for a small country to be globally noticed, and e-solutions are certainly one way of making yourself big,” says Mait Palts, director-general of the Estonian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, adding: “Hopefully e-residency will not only engage new e-residents but also physically attract new entrepreneurs and talent to Estonia.”

Estonia’s digital IDs also touch on a critical issue: information security in a globalized world. Signed documents are the cornerstone of business operations worldwide, but the process of signing and verifying is a cumbersome, time-consuming and often unreliable one.

Tiit Elenurm, head of the Estonian Business School’s entrepreneurship department, calls e-IDs a peek into the future. “The law opens a new frontier for digital operations,” he says. “This is something Estonia can do because people trust our government. That’s not the case in many countries.” When sending written material, Elenurm always uses digital stamps connected to his e-ID; that way, everybody will know that he’s the author – and nobody can claim the work as their own. Indeed, Elenurm is alarmed at the careless way in which credit cards without PIN codes are used in some countries, calling his own credit card the least secure item in his wallet. In 2013, 13.1 million people were victims of identity fraud.

The e-residency has political overtones as well. During Soviet rule, which ended 23 years ago, the many Estonians who took refuge abroad – including President Ilves’s family, who lived in Sweden and America – made sure to maintain their Estonian identity.

“We Estonians have shown that we can survive in the cloud,” explains Kotka. “You don’t have to live in Estonia to be part of our country.” Every virtual Estonian makes the country a bit stronger vis-a-vis its former occupier.

Virgin Galactics: 200 Million Project to Wait.

2014-11-02T01:19:00.000-07:00

SpaceShipTwo, a suborbital space plane designed for space tourism and operated by Virgin Galactic, crashed Friday during a test flight in California's Mojave Desert.

California Highway Patrol first confirmed one fatality, according to local NBC TV affiliate KGET, which also reported that the co-pilot with major injuries has been transported by emergency helicopter to a nearby hospital. Virgin Galactic confirmed the status of the co-pilot in a press conference, adding that the two pilots on board the aircraft were trained and employed by Scaled Composites, the company's aerospace partner.

According to a tweet from the Associated Press, a witness said the plane exploded in midair after its rockets ignited. That ignition is a key stage of SpaceShipTwo's self-flight process, where it detaches from the larger WhiteKnightTwo aircraft that ferries it to cruise altitude. WhiteKnightTwo landed safely, Virgin confirmed on Twitter earlier today.

It's unknown what caused the accident. Officials with the National Transportation Safety Board are expected to begin an investigation into the cause of the accident, which could take up to a year.

"Space is hard and today was a tough day," said George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic's CEO, in the company's press conference. "But we believe we owe it to the folks who were flying these vehicles as well as the folks who have been working so hard on them to understand this and to move forward."

Virgin Galactic is the space tourism company owned by billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Group. Its goal is to operate a fleet of space planes, like SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo, that will carry passengers into suborbital space for as much a $250,000 a person.

SpaceShipTwo was unveiled in 2009 and completed its first self-powered flight in 2013. SpaceShipTwo was originally developed as part of a joint venture between Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites. Virgin became the sole owner of that venture, called The Spaceship Company, in 2012.

SpaceShipTwo, designed to carry two pilots and six passengers, has completed 54 test flights in the last five years, the latest being a controlled "glide flight" last August to test stability during descent. The last powered flight of SpaceShipTwo occurred in January of this year, as Virgin Galactic was changing the aircraft's rubber-based solid fuel that caused engine instabilities to a new, better-performing thermoplastic-based solid fuel developed by Scaled Composites. This unfortunate flight was the first to use the new fuel while the aircraft was in the air.

Branson has said this year that he hopes to be on the first commercial flight either later this year or sometime in early 2015. More than 700 people have booked a flight with Virgin Galactic, including high-profile names like Leonardo DiCaprio and Stephen Hawking. It's unclear how the SpaceShipTwo crash will affect the company's commercial operations which definitely will put this 200 Million project to Wait.

Today's SpaceShipTwo crash follows another space-launch accident earlier this week. On Tuesday, Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Antares rocket lifted off from NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility carrying an unmanned Cygnus spacecraft with 5,000 pounds of supplies bound for the International Space Station.

Peña Nieto: Time Cover, Barack Obama:In Mexico, Joaquin Guzman:Arrested

2014-02-23T02:36:00.000-08:00

This month has been particularly special in regards of Mexican International Politics due to 2 different events that took place during February to my eyes these 2 events are intrinsically related and somehow explain the overall outcome: The capture of the biggest drug lord in History Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

Enrique Peña Nieto, recently on the cover of Time Magazine, represented as Mexico's 'saviour.' However, reports have emerged that suggest the Mexican President may have paid Time Magazine's parent company, in order to appear on the magazine cover. A report from the government's General Direction for Communication Standards indicates that Peña Nieto's government paid Time Warner almost $50,000 in October 2013.

The report, titled 'Information Concerning the Execution and Programming of Campaigns and Social Communication of The Federal Government In the Fiscal Year 2013' shows two payments made to Warner: one for $480,000.43 pesos and the second for $96,000.35 pesos, totaling $576,000 pesos, or $43,000 US dollars. The report does not specify what the funds were used for, however, given the outrage the magazine cover has sparked in Mexico it has given rise to speculation that Enrique Peña Nieto paid his way to the front. Under the banner of "saving Mexico" on the cover of its February 24 International edition. Many who first saw this cover responded with "is this a Joke?" when people realized it wasn´t , it unleashed a backlash in Mexico and from Mexicans throughout the world toward Time and the cover´s story´s author, Michael Crowley.

So the real question was Can President Peña Nieto and his team really turn Mexico around?

Even by the standards of a country wracked by armed struggle against drug cartels, the arrival of the leader of the world’s last superpower: President Barak Obama is cause for heightened security.

As Barack Obama swept into the Mexican industrial city of Toluca my city, last week in his 10-ton armoured limo, an estimated 5,000 police were stationed on every street corner for miles around.

Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto waited nervously in the foyer of the state governor’s palace, hoping foreign praise for his economic reforms can help win over a sceptical domestic audience and put security fears aside.

The program is part of an attempt at deepening commercial and cultural exchanges 20 years after the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed. Economic analysts say the agreement unleashed previously unimaginable flows of goods among the three countries opened the Mexican economy, but that it needs to updated and better work out issues such as border delays and facilitating the movement of people and products, In reality there were no particular gains over that visit except for the agreement on a couple of issues pending on the International Agenda. However these two events are the anticipation for what was about to happen next, Would it be necessary for the Mexican President to legitimize the Cover and the visit by the following actions: The Capture of the biggest drug lord in History.

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the world's biggest drug trafficker and Mexico's most-wanted fugitive, was captured Saturday in a joint U.S.-Mexican operation after more than a decade on the run, officials of both countries announced.

Guzman was arrested by agents who burst into the seaside condominium in the Sinaloa resort of Mazatlan where he had moved just two days earlier.

His capture was a huge symbolic blow to Mexican drug trafficking, a world in which he had reached folk hero status, and an important victory for the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto.

How Guzman's removal will affect the drug trade is less clear. His Sinaloa cartel, Mexico's oldest, richest and most powerful marijuana and opium organization, has already expanded to more than 50 countries in the Americas, Europe and Africa, and is likely to continue without him.

This is the biggest blow to drug trafficking by the Mexican government in many, many years. It will, at least for a while, affect the flow of drugs to the U.S., and perhaps also the violence in Mexico.

Is Distance Learning for You? Ready to Make Millions?

2014-02-02T14:51:00.000-08:00

Recently I was contacted by Nick Christensen, the content editor of the University of Liverpool on his search for Industry thought leaders in business and career advancement, Nick found my site Millionaire Man to be impressive therefore we agreed a mutual cooperation and here it is... his first guest post to my blog please Enjoy:

For years you've thought about something different. A different career, a different path. Or perhaps you're just finishing high school and trying to figure out what you should do next. Unfortunately, you don't have the opportunity to attend a traditional college or university full-time due to other commitments. In that case, an online degree can give you the advantage you need to improve your career. However, online degrees aren't for everyone.

Typical Students May Struggle

An online education isn't a short cut. In fact, in some cases, it takes students more time to complete an online course than it does to complete an in-class course. The reason? Online classes require a lot of reading and writing – both of which take more time than listening and speaking.

However, despite the additional work required, there are some benefits. Students may get more individualized attention, as they'll be communicating directly with educators through email and forum posts. You also get to set your own schedule, which is great if you need to learn after work hours.

Before pursuing an online degree, you need to ask yourself three questions.

Are you disciplined?

One of the major differences between an online education and a traditional education is that you won't be held accountable by anyone but yourself. Yes, you may face deadlines, but as there isn't likely to be a strict class schedule, you'll have to schedule your own class time. When you have an essay due, you need to be able to skip going out with friends. It's not always easy to say no, and if you know you have problems with discipline, earning a degree online is going to be very difficult.

Can you manage your time?

Time management is a crucial skill for all students to learn, but particularly online students. In a classroom setting, your teacher will tell you how to manage your time – which parts of the textbook you need to review, what you'll need to study for upcoming tests. You may not have that information when you take courses online.

In addition, if you take multiple courses at the same time, you'll need to know how to prioritize. Do you spend your Saturday night studying for a test on Monday or working on an essay?

Have you done your research?

A lot of people fantasize about what an online degree entails. However, not all schools are created equal. Before jumping in, you should know the cost of the program, whether there is accreditation, whether potential employers respect the school, and how the online classes work. You need to research several different programs before deciding which one to select. If you haven't researched at least three different options, you haven't done enough research.

Earning an online degree is a unique opportunity. However, before blindly following the path, make sure you're online learning is right for you.

For more information about pursuing an online degree from the University of Liverpool, click here.

Author Bio

Nick is on the blog outreach team at Liverpool University Online. Check us out on Facebook here.

Freakonomics: The Millions Revised

2013-11-22T12:57:00.000-08:00

As the darkness comes and covers our days in Helsinki the purpose is still here, 1 Million Euros in less than 5 years "everything happens", ups and downs, sadness and happiness collide just to show us that we are still alive so alive... I was recently contacted to write a review on the whole idea of Freakonomics. I have some glimpse of when I first read the book but I believe it is absolutely necessary in this times of darkness to revise it again not to make the same mistakes of the past.

The non-fiction publishing phenomenon known as Freakonomics has passed its eighth anniversary. The original book, which used ideas from statistics and economics to explore real-world problems, was an instant best-seller.

By 2013, it had sold more than five million copies worldwide, and it has sprouted a franchise, which includes a best-selling sequel,SuperFreakonomics; an occasional column in the New York Times Magazine; a popular blog; and a documentary film.

The word “freakonomics” has come to stand for a light-hearted and contrarian, yet rigorous and quantitative, way of looking at the world.

The faces of Freakonomics are Steven D. Levitt, an award-winning professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and Stephen J. Dubner, a widely published New York–based journalist. Levitt is celebrated for using data and statistics to solve an array of problems not typically associated with economics.

Dubner has perfected the formula for conveying the excitement of Levitt’s research—and of the growing body of work by his collaborators and followers. On the heels of Freakonomics, the pop-economics or pop-statistics genre has attracted a surge of interest, with more authors adopting an anecdotal, narrative style.

As the authors of statistics-themed books for general audiences, we can attest that Levitt and Dubner’s success is not easily attained. And, we recognize the challenge of creating interest in the subject without resorting to cliché-examples such as baseball averages, movie grosses and political polls.

The other side of this challenge, though, is presenting ideas in interesting ways without oversimplifying them or misleading ideas. Me and others have noted a discouraging tendency in the Freakonomics body of work to present speculative or even erroneous claims with an air of certainty. Considering such problems yields useful lessons for those who wish to popularize statistical ideas.

I hope you enjoy this film with a nice calm November Rain.

Freakonomics- El Lado Oculto de la Economía from Global Publi Cash on Vimeo.

Jack Dorsey: Twitter IPO and Square Payments after the Billions

2013-10-16T13:52:00.000-07:00

Jack Dorsey may shy from being called the Steve Jobs of his generation, but there's no question he's on one hell of a hot streak, developing his latest creation Square Payments recently, and as the yellow of the fall is covering all the streets of Europe I might warn you to put those hard earned extra € into the next big IPO "Twitter" you will certainly more than double your money.

Square, the mobile-payments startup that's landed $340 million in venture capital, just moved into sprawling new offices in San Francisco after doubling its head count in less than a year. The new digs sit -- coincidentally, Dorsey insists -- a block from those of Twitter, which he cofounded in 2006 and whose looming IPO figures to make Dorsey his second billion dollars in the past 13 months.

The 36-year-old declined to say much about Twitter, citing federal "quiet period" rules that precede an initial public offering of stock. But asked how it felt to have invented two products whose users number into the hundreds of millions worldwide, the entrepeneur allowed himself a moment of introspection.

"If you're climbing on the mountain, it doesn't look that massive to you," he said from the glass-and-wood accented Market Street headquarters into which CEO Dorsey and most of Square's 600 other employees moved last week.

Twitter made news of its own last week with its long-rumored IPO filing, which revealed the microblogging service has more than 200 million active monthly users. Square, meanwhile, claims to process $15 billion annually in credit card transactions -- not including a deal cut last year to handle all of Starbucks' card payments. Today while having my morning coffee at Starbuck´s I was just thinking this guy is going to make STAR BUCKS!!!

But, on Dorsey's words, "we don't feel we're at even 1 percent of our potential with either company."

Dorsey, a bachelor who grew up in a blue-collar St. Louis family, owns 5 percent of Twitter and a reported one-third of Square. Each of those holdings is worth at least $1 billion, according to the estimated valuations of both companies.

To his admirers, though, Dorsey's accomplishments aren't measured in dollars, but in influence and vision.

The parallels to Apple's (AAPL) cofounder are obvious: Both men were forced out of startups they launched, only to return and help lead them to new heights. Both men, after being ousted, started second companies that became powerhouses in their own rights (Pixar, in Jobs' case).

And both men became famous for a relentless focus on simple, elegant design: Even the pillars that support the new office's ceiling have been rounded to resemble Square's namesake plastic reader, which lets anyone accept credit cards via smartphone or tablet.

One way in which Dorsey differs from his role model: "He doesn't lose his temper," said Maja Henderson, who was Dorsey's executive assistant in Square's early days and now rides herd on the company's design and construction efforts. Those include the 150,000-square-foot headquarters, where employees avail themselves of such perks as in-house chiropractic care and unlimited vacation.

Henderson acknowledged that few "Squares" take much time off, although she said Dorsey "has gotten a lot better" about breaking away from work after a stretch in which he split 80 hours each week between Twitter and Square.

The Twitter creation myth has various versions, but the fundamental story is that Dorsey was working at a San Francisco podcasting startup, Odeo, in 2006 when he and several others cooked up a 140-character instant messaging system for mobile phones. Twitter spun out of Odeo with Dorsey as CEO, only to see a shake-up when co-founder and investor Evan Williams moved him aside amid much mutual finger-pointing.

Williams, in turn, was replaced in 2010 by Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo, who brought Dorsey back in a product development role. Costolo said then that "having the inventor in the room" helped solve arguments about what the service should be.

With those debates more or less decided, Dorsey these days focuses most of his time on Square. He still spends Thursday afternoons at Twitter, where he's executive chairman and holds a weekly lunch with Costolo.

Steve Wilson, an analyst at Constellation Research, noted that Twitter essentially created a new category of communication before anyone realized it was needed. With Square, on the other hand, Dorsey identified a huge and lucrative problem with an existing market. In the United States alone, credit card payments are expected to hit $31 billion a year by 2016, according to an estimate by industry newsletter The Nilson Report.

"Amazing that no one thought to jump in before" to bring small merchants into that ecosystem, Wilson said. While he and others call Square a tempting acquisition target for a major financial services player, Dorsey insists he's building for the long haul.

To be sure, Square faces plenty of competition, from entrenched payments giants like Verifone andeBay's (EBAY) PayPal unit to startups like Clinkle -- which drew gasps around Silicon Valley in June by raising a $25 million "seed" round from titans including early Facebook investor Jim Breyer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. And here is my main idea we haven't even preceived the real potential of all these tech companies and start ups namely: Facebook,Twitter and Square to name a few.

"Square is primarily a credit card reader for your iPhone or Android device. To me, that's really not mobile payments," said Lucas Duplan, the 22-year-old who founded Clinkle last year with a bevy of other young Stanford University programmers.

Dorsey acknowledges that Square Wallet, which his company rolled out in 2011 to let consumers buy things via smartphone, has struggled for widespread acceptance despite two rebrandings. But he's content to focus on building services for small merchants, confident that the consumers eventually will follow.

"Jack holds true to his vision of empowering local business," said Mary Meeker, of Kleiner PerkinsCaufield and Byers, who sits on Square's board along with fellow venture capital star Vinod Khoslaand former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

Dorsey and Henderson applied that same sense of vision to their new offices, which take up parts of four floors in a dowdy former Bank of America data center. The theme is one of a miniature city, with conference rooms named for famous streets and a grand "boulevard" the length of two football fields.

But Dorsey said the headquarters is more than a pretty place. Much thought went into breaking the open floor plan into clusters, to preserve the camaraderie of a small company.

And in discussing the finished product, Dorsey said something that might sum up his entire approach to design: "It's not just about how it looks," he said. "It's about how it works."

Jack Dorsey's Square mobile payments company offers a growing suite of products:

Square Reader: Lets anyone accept credit cards via a smartphone or tablet for a 2.75 percent transaction fee.
Square Register: Helps merchants track payments, manage inventory and share menu information with customers.
Square Wallet: Allows consumers to pay at local businesses automatically via smartphone.
Square Market: Newest addition is an eBay-like marketplace that lets Square Register users set up online storefronts.

On Jack Dorsey's

Age: 36
Born: St. Louis
Education: Dropped out of New York University to launch his first Silicon Valley company in 2000.
Lives: San Francisco
Making history: In March 2006, Dorsey sent the world's first tweet: "just setting up my twitter."
Human touch: Takes every new Square employee on a walking tour of San Francisco.

Five More Reasons Not to Look for a Job and Make Millions

2013-09-17T10:02:00.000-07:00

Now that we are entering into Fall, and with the purpose of making 5 Million Euros in less than 5 years, we have to focus on the idea of making ourselves valuable in many different ways, making new connections and developing new ideas, therefore this guest blog is related to our main subject. Written by Larry Klein he contacted me and proposed the paradigm of why people should not look for a job anymore.

Larry is a personal finance blogger, member of Yakezie challenge, CPA (inactive), retired financial advisor and Harvard MB.I hope you enjoy this reading as much as I did.

Looking for a job has been unproductive for you and for good reason. I have written on this issue a number of times on my own blog and here are yet more reasons why looking for a job is an

activity left over from the last century and won’t be productive this year, next year or in 10 years.

1. You are one of 300 resumes for one open position. The odds are way against you so why waste your time. You are likely someone that also buys lottery tickets figuring that someone has got to win. Good luck to you.

2. A robot will likely replace your job or has already done so. If you don’t watch Sixty Minutes, youshould. A recent episode explains how so many jobs have already been replaced by robots and

way more to come. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57601121/are-robotshurting-

job-growth.

People who are unskilled are now also unneeded. Sorry, but if you could not figure out why you had to learn geometry on ninth grade (it was to learn how to think) and now youhave no skills and no ability to think and need a job where someone shows you what to do, you

are out of luck.

3. Looking for a job is backwards. You are trying to find someone who needs a worker and thenyou will fit yourself to the position. That is backwards. The way to make money is to figure out

what people value, what they will happily pay for and then learn how to provide it.That is called making yourself of value. Note that learning something does not necessarily mean going

to school. Some of the most successful people are self-taught.

4. You place yourself in a continuous position of dependence. If the job disappears or the company goes out of business, you are back in the same place.Don’t look for a job—figure out how to earn income that is independent of some company or someone giving you anything. Make yourself valuable so that people want what you offer. I pay the woman who cleans my house $160 for 5 hours of work. She has worked for us for 30 years and I hate to think she might ever retire. She has no education, speaks only some English but is valuable.

5. Looking for a job is just laziness.Up until the year 1900 or so, there were no jobs. People farmed their land, learned a trade or took up a profession. These people sold their talents and skills to other people in town. Looking for a job is finding someone who has already done the hard work or creating excess work so that you can simply show up and get paid.The good times are over there is no excess work.

A few months ago, I saw an interview on CNBC with Jack Welch, the ex-chairman of General Electric. He said that one of GEs business was hurt so badly in the recession, that its revenues would not recover until 2014. However, that division would achieve its pre-recession revenues with 14,000 people instead of the 23,000 employed pre-recession. The point—if you are just "labor," this economy has little need for that. What the economy needs is skills, talent, ability to innovate, leaders who motivate, create and move an idea from inception to fruition.

Fast food workers can strike all they want but the reality is, none of the above is required to work in fast food service. Reality is just that, like it or not, fair or not. You can piss and moan or use this post as a description of the new reality our reality so go out there and make yourself valuable.

Larry Klein is publisher of the Wealthy Producer Blog, is among the 1% and has not has not had a job in 33 years. Fire and Passion that is all we need Enjoy!

Cannes Millionaire Heist: Armed thief steals jewels worth €40 Million

2013-07-29T09:34:00.001-07:00

After a couple of months celebrating life and enjoying the pleasures of traveling The French Riviera was amazing, However part of my soul is with my family in Mexico supporting mentally an unpleassant event that should pass away as fast as it came, so be it for the ethernal energy to solve all issues regarding my beloved and good hearted family.

Now after coming back from a trip that seemed more like a dream in which luxury showed me different aspects of reality and in the search of 5 Million euros in less than 5 years here comes the lates story while in Cannes,

Thief stuffs suitcase with Leviev gems in daylight raid at luxury Carlton hotel in French resort, a single thief armed with a gun and considerable sang, froid made off with jewellery and watches worth an estimated of€40m (£35m) from a luxury hotel in Cannes on Sunday, in what was reported to be France's second biggest jewel robbery.

The man, wearing a mask and gloves and carrying a briefcase, strolled into a diamond exhibition at the Carlton hotel just before midday, threatened staff and visitors and filled the case with jewels and diamond-encrusted watches before walking out. "It was all over very quickly. There was no violence," a French police officer said. The thief entered the hotel alone, but police said they believed he had an accomplice waiting outside. It is the third significant jewel theft from hotels in the Cannes area in just over two months.

During the Cannes film festival in May, thieves stole more than £660,000 worth of jewellery belonging to the exclusive Swiss jeweller and watchmaker Chopard. The gems were to have been loaned to A-list film stars and celebrities attending the festival, and were in a safe in a room at the Suite Novotel in Cannes. The thieves removed the whole safe in the middle of the night without forcing the room's door or using a keycard, according to police.

A week later a necklace reportedly worth €1.9m by the Swiss jeweller De Grisogono vanished after a celebrity party at the five-star Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in the resort town of Cap d'Antibes. Police are investigating whether the raids were the work of the same gang. "Thieves see Cannes as rich pickings," said a police officer with the crime squad in Nice, which is investigating the raid. "A full and urgent operation is under way to catch the culprit and recover these jewels." Another police officer told the Nice Matin newspaper: "

The raid took place in broad daylight at a time when hundreds of tourists were enjoying the sunshine. It could not have been more daring. The thief took advantage of the crowds and the fact it was Sunday and the atmosphere was relaxed." Police refused to say whether they were linking the raid with the escape of a member of the notorious Pink Panther gang from a Swiss jail on Thursday.

Milan Poparic fled with another inmate from Orbe prison, in the western Swiss state of Vaud, after his accomplices rammed a prison gate and overpowered guards with bursts from their AK-47 automatic rifles. Police said he was the third member of the Pink Panthers to have escaped in as many months. Interpol believes that the group has been targeting luxury watch, gem and jewellery stores in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the United States since 1999 and has netted more than €330m.

The stolen diamonds had been on show since 20 July and were supposed to remain at the Carlton until the end of August in an exhibition called Extraordinary Diamonds, organised by the prestigious Leviev diamond house owned by the Russian-born Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev. Leviev, 57, who is described as a diamond dealer, businessman and philanthropist, owns diamond mines in Russia and Africa and is a major competitor to the African diamond giant De Beers.

The father-of-nine has a £35m home in Hampstead and last year was involved in a high-profile high court battle against a former business partner, Arkady Gaydamak, which he won. Staff at the Carlton, situated on the exclusive Promenade de la Croisette, said they had been told not to give any information about the raid.

Police unions criticised the practice of jewellery companies holding exhibitions in luxury hotels, saying they could not provide the necessary security to prevent thefts. In August 1994, a security guard was shot at the Carlton as he tried to stop thieves making off with gems in a similar exhibition. Europe's top heists

• Harry Winston's jewellery store, in the chic Avenue Montaigne in Paris, December 2008, $107m (£70m)haul. The biggest heist in French history. Just before closing time before Christmas, four men – three disguised as women with long blonde hair, sunglasses and scarves – were buzzed into the shop. Once in they set off a grenade in the shop and made off with gems, jewellery and watches. Police said they believed the thieves, who reportedly had Slavic accents, were Serbian members of the Pink Panther gang.

• Schiphol Aairport, Amsterdam, February 2005. Thieves stole diamonds worth an estimated $118m which were never recovered, although police arrested several suspects.

• Antwerp Diamond Centre, Antwerp, Belgium, February 2003, $100m haul.

• Graff Diamonds store, London, August 2009, $65m haul.

• Carlton hotel, Cannes, August 1994, $60m haul. The thieves were never caught. Kim Willsher