Category: Entrepreneurship

Occupational Licensing Hurts Military Spouses

(p. A15) Heather Kokesch Del Castillo launched a dietary advice business in Monterey, Calif., in 2014. The business grew and Ms. Del Castillo eventually established a nationwide client base as a “health coach.” But when her husband, who is in the Air Force, was transferred to a base in Florida, her business hit a roadblock. A Florida Department of Health investigator showed up at the door of their new home with a cease-and-desist letter and a $750 fine.
After nearly two years of operating her business in Florida, Ms. Del Castillo learned that she had run afoul of a law requiring any person offering dietary advice to possess a state-issued license. Qualifying for that permit requires a bachelor’s degree in dietetics, a 900-hour internship, a passing grade on an exam administered by the state Commission on Dietetic Registration, and a $355 fee. A licensed dietitian had tipped off the Health Department that Ms. Del Castillo was giving unauthorized advice. She retained the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm, to fight the law that stripped her of her livelihood.
State licensing laws pose a particular burden on military spouses like Ms. Del Castillo. About 1 in 4 Americans need licenses to perform their occupations. In some states, florists, taxidermists and even fortune-tellers need licenses to operate. Far too often, these licenses serve less as safeguards of public health and safety than as barriers to entry. In many cases, the state-appointed boards that issue licenses are stocked with industry insiders seeking to restrict competition.
. . .
Military spouses were 10 times as likely to have moved to a new state in the past year than the average American, according to a combined 2012 study by the Treasury and Defense departments. Surveys suggest that anywhere from 35% to 50% of military spouses work in professions that require licensure, and nearly 75% of them would need to be relicensed upon transferring to a new state. Perhaps as a result, the unemployment rate for military spouses is 16%, while the national unemployment rate is only 4.1%

For the full commentary, see:
Shoshana Weissmann and C. Jarrett Dieterle. “Why Do You Need a College Degree to Give Diet Advice?; State licensing laws overly burden military spouses, who move frequently only to find they can’t work.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, February 1, 2018): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Jan. 31, 2018.)

Virtual Reality Was Intended as a Complement to Physical Reality, Not as a Substitute

(p. A17) The illusion of presence is what drove Mr. Lanier from the start. He envisioned VR not as an alternative to physical reality but as an enhancement–a way to more fully appreciate the wonder of existence. More conventional individuals, their senses dulled by the day-to-day, may be drawn to virtual reality because it seems realer than real; he considered it a new form of communication. “I longed to see what was inside the heads of other people,” he writes. “I wanted to show them what I explored in dreams. I imagined virtual worlds that would never grow stale because people would bring surprises to each other. I felt trapped without this tool. Why, why wasn’t it around already?”
“Dawn of the New Everything” is full of such self-revelatory moments. The author grew up an only child in odd corners of the Southwest, first on the Texas-Mexico border, then in the desert near White Sands Missile Range. When he was nine, his mother, a Holocaust survivor, was killed in a car crash on the way home from getting her driver’s license. The tract house they’d bought burned down the day after construction was completed. The insurance money never came, so Jaron and his father lived in tents in the desert until they could afford to build a real home–which turned out to be a mad concoction of geodesic domes of Jaron’s own design. They called it Earth Station Lanier.
. . .
Lacking a degree from high school, never mind college, he nonetheless parlayed his virtual-reality obsession into a company, VPL Research, that for a few years in the late ’80s made VR seem real, if only in a lab setting. Then came board fights and bankruptcy, and VR disappeared from public view for more than 20 years.
What went wrong at VPL? Unfortunately, you won’t find out here. Mr. Lanier warns us he isn’t going to deliver a blow-by-blow; instead we get a disjointed sequence of half-remembered anecdotes. What does come through is his ambivalence about going into business at all, and his even deeper ambivalence toward writing about it.

For the full review, see:
Frank Rose. “BOOKSHELF; The Promise of Virtual Reality; The story of VR, the most immersive communications technology to come along since cinema, as told by two of its pioneers.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, February 6, 2018): A17.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 5, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Review: The Promise of Virtual Reality; The story of VR, the most immersive communications technology to come along since cinema, as told by two of its pioneers.”)

The book under review, is:
Lanier, Jaron. Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2017.

Reporters Celebrate Union Before Losing Jobs

(p. A23) A week ago, reporters and editors in the combined newsroom of DNAinfo and Gothamist, two of New York City’s leading digital purveyors of local news, celebrated victory in their vote to join a union.
On Thursday [November 2, 2018], they lost their jobs, as Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade who owned the sites, shut them down.

For the full story, see:
ANDY NEWMAN and JOHN LELAND. “DNAinfo and Gothamist Shut Down After Workers Join a Union.” The New York Times (Tuesday, November 3, 2017): A23.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 2, 2017, and has the title “DNAinfo and Gothamist Are Shut Down After Vote to Unionize.” The online version says that the page number of the New York edition was A21. The page number of my edition, probably midwest, was A23.)

Entrepreneur Claims Intel Is Not “Doing What Comes Next”

(p. B3) SAN FRANCISCO — Over 28 years at the giant computer chip maker Intel, Renée James climbed to its No. 2 position, becoming one of Silicon Valley’s prominent female leaders.
Now she is taking aim at Intel’s most lucrative business, one that she helped build.
Ms. James, who announced in 2015 that she would resign from Intel, on Monday revealed a start-up backed by the private equity firm Carlyle Group to sell chips to handle calculations in servers. Those computers run most internet services and corporate back-office operations.
. . .
Ms. James emphasized her respect for her former employer and played down potential competition. She said her new company, Ampere, was designing chips for new, specialized jobs at cloud services that aren’t Intel’s primary focus.
“I think they’re the best in the world at what they do,” Ms. James said of Intel. “I just don’t think they’re doing what comes next.”
. . .
Ms. James learned management skills from Andrew Grove, the acclaimed former Intel chief. Before he died in 2016, she said, Mr. Grove encouraged her to follow her dream of a chip start-up — a plan with parallels to the 1968 founding of Intel as a breakaway from a chip pioneer, Fairchild Semiconductor.
“He said, ‘I just want you to know, this is a really hard job,'” Ms. James recalled. “I said: ‘I know. But it’s so much fun.'”
Her venture is the latest in a series of largely unsuccessful attempts, dating back more than seven years, to shake up the server market with technology licensed by ARM Holdings that is used as a mainstay of smartphones. One selling point is reduced power consumption, a hot topic in data centers.

For the full story, see:
DON CLARK. “Intel’s Former No. 2 Aims At Lucrative Chip Market.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 6, 2018): B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 5, 2018, and has the title “She Was No. 2 at Intel. Now She’s Taking Aim at the Chip Maker.”)

Obstacles and Conflicts Were Too Much for Lanier’s “VPL Research” Startup

(p. 11) Lanier’s book is, . . . , intimate and idiosyncratic. He carries us through his quirky and fascinating life story, with periodic nerdy side trips through his early thinking on more technical aspects of virtual reality. If you liked Richard Feynman’s autobiographical “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” but thought it was rather self-indulgent, this book will prompt similar reactions. You could almost say that Lanier’s vivid and creative imagination is a distinct character in this book, he discusses it so much. Midway through, Feynman himself makes an appearance, and it seems as if we’re meeting an old friend.
Lanier has been credited with inventing the term “virtual reality,” and he founded one of the original companies to produce it, VPL Research. He goes over the technology’s history in detail, outlining not only the obstacles to getting consistent hardware but some personalities and interpersonal conflicts that ultimately led to his company’s breaking up. He also demonstrates the role personal connections and interactions play in Silicon Valley.

For the full review, see:
CATHY O’NEIL. “Enter the Holodeck.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, February 4, 2018): 11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JAN. 30, 2018.)

The book under review, is:
Lanier, Jaron. Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2017.

“We Have to Entrepreneurialize Society”

Economist Klaus Schwab is the founder and organizer of the annual Davos gatherings of government and corporate insiders.

(p. R15) MR. BAKER: There has been a tremendous growth in industrial concentration, big companies getting bigger. Small companies are essentially being squeezed out. There’s a concern that it’s not just bureaucracies and supernational institutions, but companies themselves, are just too big and too remote. What can be done to address those concerns?
PROF. SCHWAB: We have to entrepreneurialize society. If we look where jobs will come from, they will come mainly from new enterprises, from medium-size enterprises. So companies and countries have to create an ecosystem which allows young people to create their own companies. We have to create new Facebook s, new Googles, and so on. Then we have the necessary dynamic situation which maintains a certain degree of competition in the economy.

For the full interview, see:
Gerard Baker, interviewer. “Nationalism vs. Globalism: A Question of Balance; Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, on how to deal with a fractured world.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2018): R15.
(Note: bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has a date of Jan. 22, 2018.)

Taboo Geoengineer Outlaws Could Counter Global Warming

(p. D3) A quarter-century ago, Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, blew its top in a big way: It spewed a cubic mile of rock and ash and 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide gas into the atmosphere. The gas spread around the world and combined with water vapor to make aerosols, tiny droplets that reflected some sunlight away from the Earth. As a result, average global temperatures dropped by about one degree Fahrenheit for several years.
Powerful volcanic eruptions like Pinatubo’s in 1991 are one of the biggest natural influences on climate. So NASA researchers and other scientists are planning a rapid-response program to study the next big one.
But the climate impact of a Pinatubo-size eruption is also a natural analog of an idea that has existed on the fringes of science for years: geoengineering, or intervening in the atmosphere to deliberately cool the planet.
One geoengineering approach would use high-flying jets to spray similar chemicals in the stratosphere. So by studying the next big volcanic eruption, scientists would also gain insights into how such a scheme, known as solar radiation management, or S.R.M., might work.
“This is important if we’re ever going to do geoengineering,” said Alan Robock, a Rutgers University researcher who models the effects of eruptions and who has been involved in discussions about the rapid-response project.
. . .
Geoengineering has long had an outlaw image among much of the scientific community, viewed as risky last-resort measures to solve climate problems that would be better dealt with by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Even discussing geoengineering concepts has long been considered taboo among many scientists.
. . .
But in the past few years, some scientists and policymakers have begun to argue for limited direct research into geoengineering concepts to better understand their potential as well as risks, and be better prepared should global warming reach a point where some kind of emergency action were deemed necessary.
A few scientists have proposed small-scale outdoor experiments to study aspects of solar radiation management, and last month the American Geophysical Union, one of the nation’s largest scientific societies, endorsed the idea of some research into what it called “climate intervention.”

For the full story, see:
Henry Fountain. “A Volcanic Idea for Cooling the Earth.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 6, 2018): D3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 1, 2018, and has the title “The Next Big Volcano Could Briefly Cool Earth. NASA Wants to Be Ready.”)

Serial Breakthrough Innovators Have “Almost Maniacal Focus”

(p. C4) It’s 6 a.m., and I’m rushing around my apartment getting ready to fly to California to teach an innovation workshop, when my 10-year-old son looks at me with sad eyes and asks, “Why are you always busy?” My heart pounds, and that familiar knife of guilt and pain twists in my stomach. Then a thought flickers through my head: Does Jeff Bezos go through this?
I recently finished writing a book about innovators who achieved multiple breakthroughs in science and technology over the past two centuries. Of the eight individuals I wrote cases about, only one, Marie Curie, is a woman. I tried to find more, even though I knew in my scientist’s heart that deliberately looking for women would bias my selection process. But I didn’t find other women who met the criteria I had laid out at the beginning of the project.
. . .
The politically correct thing to say at this point is that expanding the roster of future innovators to include more women will require certain obvious changes in how we handle family life: Men and women should have more equal child-care responsibilities, and businesses (or governments) should make affordable, quality child care more accessible. But I don’t think it is as simple as that.
In my own case, I can afford more child care, but I don’t want to relinquish more of my caregiving to others. From the moment I first gave birth, I felt a deep, primal need to hold my children, nurture them and meet their needs. Nature is extremely clever, and she has crafted an intoxicating cocktail of oxytocin and other neurochemicals to rivet the attention of parents on their children.
The research on whether this response is stronger for mothers than for fathers is inconclusive. It is tough to compare the two, because there are strong gender differences in how hormones work. Historically, however, women have taken on a larger share of the caregiving responsibilities for children, and many (myself included) would not have it any other way.
Is such a view hopelessly retrograde, a rejection of hard-won feminist achievements? I don’t think so.
The need to connect with our children does not prevent women from being successful. There are many extremely successful women with very close relationships with their children. But it might get in the way of having the almost maniacal focus that the most famous serial breakthrough innovators exhibit.
I’m no Marie Curie, but I do have obsessive tendencies. If I did not have a family, I would routinely work until 4 a.m. if I had an interesting problem to chase down. But now I have children, and so at 5 p.m., I need to dial it back and try to refocus my attention on things like homework and making dinner. I cannot single-mindedly focus on my work; part of my mind must belong to the children.
This doesn’t mean that mothers cannot be important innovators, but it might mean that their careers play out differently. Their years of intense focus might start later, or they might ebb and surge over time. The more we can do to enable people to have nonlinear career paths, the more we will increase innovation among women–and productivity more generally.

For the full commentary, see:
Melissa Schilling. “Why Women Are Rarely Serial Innovators; A single-minded life of invention is hard to combine with family obligations. One solution: ‘nonlinear’ careers.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Feb. 3, 2018): C4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has a date of Feb. 2, 2018.)

Schilling’s commentary is related to his book:
Schilling, Melissa A. Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World. New York: PublicAffairs, 2018.

Musk’s Slow Hunch May Be Undone by Smaller Satellites

(p. B3) SpaceX ‘s long-delayed Falcon Heavy rocket, slated for its maiden flight on Tuesday [February 6, 2018], faces uncertain commercial prospects and lacks a clear role in efforts to send U.S. astronauts back to the moon or deeper into the solar system.
The company conceived the rocket at the beginning of the decade, when SpaceX was an underdog fighting to increase its share of launches and needed a beefed-up alternative to a fleet of underpowered boosters. But after spending some $1 billion and grappling with five years of delays and huge technical challenges related to reliably harnessing power from 27 engines, the company is contending with significantly eroded commercial demand for such a potent heavy-lift booster.
The primary reason for the weakened demand is that both national security and corporate satellites continue to get smaller and lighter. So now, even if it performs as advertised, the Falcon Heavy might be Elon Musk’s biggest contrarian bet since he founded SpaceX over 15 years ago.

For the full story, see:
Andy Pasztor. “SpaceX Launch to Test Contrarian Bet.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Feb. 5, 2018): B3.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has a date of Feb. 4, 2018, and has the title “New Falcon Heavy Rocket Represents a Major Bet for SpaceX.”)

Level of Loneliness About the Same as 70 Years Ago

(p. 8) . . . is loneliness, as many political officials and pundits are warning, a growing “health epidemic”?
. . .
The main evidence for rising isolation comes from a widely reported sociology journal article claiming that in 2004, one in four Americans had no one in their life they felt they could confide in, compared with one in 10 during the 1980s. But that study turned out to be based on faulty data, and other research shows that the portion of Americans without a confidant is about the same as it has long been. Although one of the authors has distanced himself from the paper (saying, “I no longer think it’s reliable”), scholars, journalists and policymakers continue to cite it.
The other data on loneliness are complicated and often contradictory, in part because there are so many different ways of measuring the phenomenon. But it’s clear that the loneliness statistics cited by those who say we have an epidemic are outliers. For example, one set of statistics comes from a study that counted as lonely people who said they felt “left out” or “isolated,” or “lacked companionship” — even just “some of the time.” That’s an exceedingly low bar, and surely not one we’d want doctors or policymakers to use in their work.
One reason we need to be careful about how we measure and respond to loneliness is that, as the University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo argues, an occasional and transitory feeling of loneliness can be healthy and productive. It’s a biological signal to ourselves that we need to build stronger social bonds.
Professor Cacioppo has spent much of his career documenting the dangers of loneliness. But it’s notable that he relies on more measured statistics in his own scientific papers than the statistics described above. One of his articles, from last year, reports that around 19 percent of older Americans said they had felt lonely for much of the week before they were surveyed, and that in Britain about 6 percent of adults said they felt lonely all or most of the time. Those are worrisome numbers, but they are quite similar to the numbers reported in Britain in 1948, when about 8 percent of older adults said they often or always felt lonely, and to those in previous American studies as well.

For the full commentary, see:
ERIC KLINENBERG. “Is Loneliness a Health Epidemic?” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sunday, February 11, 2018): 8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date FEB. 9, 2018.)

Mars Is Humanity’s “Backup Plan”

(p. C3) The stated goal of the U.S. Mars program is to create a permanent base there. That is difficult to imagine in the planet’s harsh environment, which was depicted with such stark realism in the 2015 film “The Martian.”
But there are possibilities on the planet for making bases more viable. Mars explorers could use natural lava tubes in extinct volcanoes to create an underground base shielded against harmful radiation. Underground deposits of ice discovered in recent years could be used for drinking water and to provide oxygen for breathing, as well as hydrogen for rocket fuel. In theory, astronauts could eventually establish agricultural stations to create a self-sustaining colony, using genetically modified plants that could thrive in a cold environment rich in carbon dioxide.
A new spirit of exploration and discovery is certainly part of the push for this new space age, but concerns about the future of the Earth are also a motive. There is a growing realization that life on the planet is extremely fragile, that killer asteroids, super volcanoes and ice ages have nearly extinguished life in the past, and that climate change may spin out of control. Even if the Earth remains habitable, we know that one day the sun itself will expire.
So the choice ultimately will be simple: Colonize outer space, or perish. We need an insurance policy, a backup plan. The dinosaurs didn’t have a space program. We may need ours to evade their fate.

For the full commentary, see:
Michio Kaku. “To the Moon, Mars and Beyond.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Feb. 3, 2018): C3.
(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated Feb. 6, 2018, and has the title “SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond.”)

Kaku’s commentary is related to his book:
Kaku, Michio. The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth. New York: Doubleday, 2018.