Doug Hornig's Contributions

The rise of humans from fearful creatures huddled around cave fires to the dominant species on the planet largely parallels the evolution of weaponry. Different subgroups rose and fell, spreading their culture or declining in influence as they either came up with the new best thing with which to slaughter their neighbors or fell behind in the innovation game.

Water is not scarce. It is made up of the first and third most common elements in the universe, and the two readily react to form a highly stable compound that maintains its integrity even at temperature extremes.

The building of great skyscrapers tends to occur at times of boundless optimism within a given economy. In almost all cases the initiation of construction of a new record-breaking skyscraper preceded major financial corrections and turmoil in economic institutions.

How many times have you heard something like this? "The Cloud is going to change the way we ______." Fill in the blank with any phrase from "conduct business," to "organize IT," to "live our lives." Rosy projections are the order of the day. Exuberance - some would say irrational exuberance - abounds.

It is not news that our capacity to gather and store immense amounts of data has grown by leaps and bounds. A few years ago, it was unthinkable for a free email account to offer more than 10 or 20 megabytes of storage.

High-frequency trading (HFT) is one of the hottest developments - and most controversial topics - in investing today. It's arrived so fast that many investors have been left scratching their heads, wondering, "What is HFT anyway? Where did it come from, and should I be worried about it?"

The development of converged networks is one of the hottest trends in technology today. Packets, packets, it's all about the packets...

There are two trends in the world of technology that are continually gathering steam and can't help but collide. First is the meteoric growth in the worldwide movement of data, particularly via mobile devices, and how that projects into the very near future. The numbers are way beyond the grasp of the normal human mind.

In the world of finance, there is always talk of bubbles - mortgage bubbles, tech stock bubbles, junk bond bubbles. But bubbles don't develop only in financial markets. In recent years, there's been another one quietly inflating, not capturing the attention of most observers: a Liberal Arts bubble.

Thanks to an outpouring of complaints and a reversal of similar plans by major competitors, Bank of America finally canceled its plan to start charging customers a $5 fee to use their debit cards for purchases. The plan had particularly rankled those who contend that it had nothing to do with covering legitimate expenses and everything to do with covering bad bets that the bank has made in other areas.

We've written here before about the enormous amount of cash that is sitting idle overseas, because the companies involved don't want to pay the stiff tax bill that would result from repatriation. Most of the large corporations with sizeable international divisions - Microsoft, Pfizer, Oracle, Apple, Cisco, and the like - have enormous amounts stashed outside the country.

Contrary to popular opinion, the SPDR Gold Trust does not buy and sell gold. It creates and redeems paper shares in the company. These are passed through a group of market makers, who trade them on the NYSE, then deposit into or withdraw from the HSBC vault in London the corresponding amount of physical bullion, in the form of 400 oz. London Good Delivery bars.

You know an asset class is hot when the scam artists start coming out of the woodwork. Such was the case during the real estate bubble of this century's first decade, as those selling mortgages packaged them in ever more complex vehicles, many of which are now known to have been utterly fraudulent.

We're going broke. This is not news. Anyone who has looked at the country's fiscal mess with a minimum of objectivity has known this for years.

Considering all that it has put us through, you probably didn't realize that the Fed even had a soul. But it does (soon to be did). His name is Thomas Hoenig, and he's been president of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank for 20 years. Presently, he's also a voting member of the Fed's Open Market Committee, which sets monetary policy. (And is unrelated to yours truly - as far as I know.)

In raw numbers, in February of this year, households received $2.3 trillion in income support from unemployment benefits, Social Security, disability insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' benefits, education assistance and other cash transfers of government funds to individuals. The same month, households paid $2.2 trillion in income, payroll, and other taxes. The difference was nearly $100 billion, or around 1% of personal income.

We know that our readers are probably riveted by the trials and tribulations of Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan. This is important stuff, no doubt. Chas and LiLo, they’re like, y’know, family.

In the field of robotics, we have no Newton. No one who, assisted by a falling fruit, cried out, “Eureka, I have it, and it is called a… I know… a robot.”

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission was given broad powers – by last year’s Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act – to restructure the futures and over-the-counter derivatives markets. And Gary Gensler, appointed to chair the commission in May of last year, is known to be something of an activist.