A loyal reader in McLean sent me a link to this article by Alec MacGillis in last Thursday’s Washington Post. It begins:
To hear some activists and local officials in Virginia tell it, the key to slowing rampant growth is to follow the lead of many Maryland counties: Ban development where roads and schools are crowded.
But here is what
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My conversation with Til Hazel took place, appropriately enough, in the parking lot of a brand new shopping center just off Highway 7 (the Harry Byrd Highway) in Loudoun County. I was there working on my column in this week’s Time about the staggering mass prosperity of Loudoun and neighboring Fairfax County, and while the column ended …
For fans of my post on the Bush budget a few days back (I’m talking to you, Ezra), it’s going multimedia this weekend as I talk about the topic on CNN’s In the Money (1 p.m. ET Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday).
My second Time column is now online. Here’s how it starts:
When the Census Bureau announced last August that northern Virginia’s Loudoun County had become the nation’s most affluent, with a median household income of $98,483, it was something of a shock to locals. Loudoun is far from exclusive: a third of its 255,000 residents arrived in
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So I’m down in North Carolina, at something called the Duke MBA Marketing Conference. There are some cool speakers, most entertaining among them Bob Young, who co-founded Red Hat and founded and now runs publisher (for want of a better word) Lulu. But the real stars are the Doritos kids–the ones from that Super Bowl ad.
Michelle Adams, …
Okay, here’s my big problem with the budget that the Bush administration submitted to Congress yesterday. (No, I didn’t read all of it, but I did check out a few highlights.) It makes a big deal about getting rid of the federal deficit by 2012. But guess what: George Bush will have been out of office for three years by then–and the …
I had a nice e-mail conversation with Ed Thorp last week. Some of it was reproduced in my Time column, but I thought the world’s legions of Thorp fans might want more.
For those who don’t know the man, he’s a math professor (he spent most of his career at UC Irvine), who figured out in the early 1960s how to beat the house at blackjack …
My first Curious Capitalist column, “Hedge Funds Head for Mediocrity,” is in the edition of Time that hits newsstands tomorrow. It’s also online right now, but I must say it looks much prettier on paper (worth every one of those 495 pennies). Here’s how it starts:
In 1962, a government study of mutual funds revealed that they were, on
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As Bill Gates makes the rounds promoting Microsoft’s new operating system and everybody yawns, it’s worth recalling just how scary and important his company seemed a decade ago.
Just to pluck a few examples from the 1990s pages of Fortune: Microsoft was going to extend its dominance from desktops to handhelds. It was going to take over …
I’ve always thought index funds were pretty cool. On average, stock mutual funds do worse than unmanaged indexes like the S&P 500 and Russell 1000. So if you buy a fund that only trails the index by a teeny bit, as most index funds are able to do because of their super-low fees, you’re already doing better than most investors.
But when …
Every time bad news breaks for U.S. automakers, journalists and other observers offer one of two main explanations. One is that Detroit doesn’t make very good cars, or at least doesn’t make them efficiently enough. The other is that American automakers are so burdened by the retiree health care and pension commitments that they made when …
My post the other day about the Webcomic Achewood (it was actually about newspaper economics, but since most of its traffic seems to have come from a link that Chris Onstad put up on his site, I guess that makes it about Achewood), has been generating a steady stream of mostly fascinating comments. Here are a couple about how media …