Weekend Digest: The Warren Buffett vs. Elon Musk edition

by Larry Brannan ([email protected]) 196 views 

TV PREVIEW
On this week’s TV edition of Talk Business & Politics with Roby Brock, which airs Sunday at 9:30 a.m. on KATV Channel 7.

Congressman French Hill. Touring the district this week, he speaks up on his first year in office, Speaker Paul Ryan’s leadership, and health care reform.

The Iowa Caucuses. In Arkansas, we’re not seeing the TV ads bombarding the airwaves, but we’ll give you a sneak peek. KATV’s Janelle Lilley reports.

And our Talk Business roundtable. Wes Brown and Steve Brawner dive into the state’s falling unemployment rate, energy ups and downs, and a new expansion of the Razorback’s football stadium.

Tune in to Talk Business & Politics with Roby Brock on KATV Ch. 7, Sunday at 9:30 a.m.

A REAL WORKHORSE
And coincidentally, that’s also the name of the company Fast Company reports “that’s competing with Amazon for delivery drones.”

This maker of electric trucks is testing drones at an Ohio airfield.

“We saw that delivery drones will be in the mix for the future,” Workhorse Group CEO Steve Burns told Fast Company. “That’s why we built our own delivery drone that’s integrated into the truck. We saw early on that from a central warehouse in suburbia, where you deploy local delivery trucks, it makes sense logistically to have the drones fly off the top of the truck and back to wherever the truck is. A driver is in vicinity, and they know where the delivery is.”

For more on this story and the drone called HorseFly, connect to this link.

SOLAR POWER BATTLE
Bloomberg Business, asks the question, “Who owns the sun?”

Warren Buffett controls Nevada’s legacy utility. Elon Musk is behind the solar company that’s upending the market. Let the fun begin.

This battle royale was started a decade ago by Telsa Motors founder and CEO, Elon Musk and some of his family members in California. The company is called SolarCity and has gained great success due in-part to government subsidies.

SolarCity has brought renewable energy to the masses in more than a dozen states, generating about $350 million in annual revenue. The company designs, installs, and leases rooftop solar systems at prices that allow homeowners to save on their monthly power bills—and fight climate change along the way. For a 20-year commitment, SolarCity will set customers up with panels for no money down. After starting in California and expanding to Arizona and Oregon, SolarCity began selling in Nevada in 2014 and quickly became the state’s leading installer of rooftop panels.

In Nevada, it’s worked well. So well, in fact, that NV Energy, the state’s largest utility, is fighting it with everything it’s got.

Guess who owns NV Energy? Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company controlled by Warren Buffett.

And the battle is on. For an inside look at this war of solar power, go to this link.

HOW TO ACCOMPLISH YOUR NO. 1 GOAL IN JUST 100 DAYS
Entrepreneur posts, “We all have big goals we want to accomplish. From travelling the world, to starting a business, to learning another language, setting goals is easy.”

Actually accomplishing them, though? That’s where it gets hard. We may start the new year with plenty of motivation, energy and determination but often times, by February or March, we lose steam. And before you know it another year has passed and we’re no closer to living the life we want.

The advice that follows is taken from a Hack the Entrepreneur interview I did recently with John Lee Dumas of EOFire. Dumas started out like many of us, with a vague idea of how he wanted his life to change, but no concrete plan of action.

And then, he changed his approach. Instead of vague goals, he set actionable ones. As a result, he was able to build a business that has changed his life for ever. Due to his success, Dumas has released The Freedom Journal to help you achieve your own goals.

Here are the 5 steps you can use today to set and accomplish your #1 goal in the next 100 days.

WHY SUCCESSFUL MILLENNIALS SHOULD SET GOALS TOO HIGH TO ACHIEVE
Forbes says, “We tell ourselves “the sky is the limit,” yet anytime we get close to our self-imposed limitations, we shy away, back down and lose confidence.”

What if this was the year you were ruthless in your pursuit of personal achievement? If the glass ceiling was no longer there, what would you do?

For millennials, this can be difficult. The perception of young professionals and strivers can often be negative. Whether it is a perceived notion of irresponsibility or inexperience, it keeps many external forces doubting the power of millennials, and many of us internalizing that doubt. But that’s exactly how so many millennials stop pushing themselves to reach their full potential. For those who have submitted to the glass ceiling, you must move beyond it.

Those who moved past their personal glass ceilings are those that brought us to this era – they innovated, and people responded. The complete story is here.

MIKE HUCKABEE TEARS INTO CRUZ
The Washington Post, reports, “Mike Huckabee was relaxing after a campaign event, bouncing his granddaughter Scarlett on his lap, and tearing into Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) for being born in Canada.”

But that’s the least of the former Arkansas governor’s rant against his fellow GOP combatant for president.

“If, as a Christian, I resent giving 50 cents out of a dollar to the government, why would I not even give a dime out of that dollar to do the work of real charity? I don’t know how you can have smaller government if you don’t have bigger charitable hearts,” Huckabee says.

To Huckabee, Cruz has run a con on social conservatives, one they should have seen through.

Huckabee’s attack on Cruz runs along a broad spectrum — he rattled off “immigration, H1-B visas, ethanol, Syrian refugees, trade” as issues on which he had been a consistent populist, and Cruz had flip-flopped.

And there’s more. Read it all here.

OBAMA GIVES PEP TALK TO HOUSE DEMOCRATS
From Baltimore “President Obama on Thursday urged House Democrats to embrace the accomplishments of his administration, arguing the country is better off than when he took office seven years ago and voters will respond to that message when they head to the polls later this year,” says The Washington Post.

Speaking to Democrats gathered here for a three-day party retreat, Obama said Republicans doom and gloom message about the state of the country is a false election year narrative that ignores how far the economy has come since the Great Recession, foreign policy accomplishments such as the nuclear deal with Iran and the expansion of health insurance to millions of Americans through the Affordable Care Act.

“Democrats will win in November and we will have a Democratic president succeed me, just in case there is any confusion about that,” he said in a speech that served as a pep rally for House members. “The reason I can say that is we focus on the things that matter in the lives of the American people.”

For the complete post, go to this link.

USING THE ‘GIG ECONOMY’ TO REBOOT THE SAFETY NET
POLITICO reports, “In this presidential cycle, the ‘gig economy’ has been under attack, notably from Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who said that it is “raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future.”

But far from being the labor problem of our era, the gig economy is actually a solution — one with power to change things far beyond car-sharing and odd jobs. It could help transform not just the private sector, but government as well, adding flexibility to unemployment programs and decreasing dependence on a welfare system getting out of control.

Reforming our safety net is back at the forefront of the Republican Party agenda as evidenced by the recent Kemp Foundation forum on poverty hosted by Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). And if conservatives are imaginative about their solutions, they’ll realize that the huge changes in the economy in the past decades actually give us new tools to solve some of these problems. The current safety net is outdated, designed for an era when work was a 9-to-5 ritual that required interviews and a résumé. The modern economy is much more complex, and the gig economy, in particular, has dramatically reduced the barriers to finding work.

Social science data is clear that keeping safety net beneficiaries working is better for their careers and long-term economic well-being, the article says. The government should expect that able-bodied safety net beneficiaries be willing to engage in the gig economy before collecting benefits.

For the full story, connect here.

CHANGES AT POLITICO
The New York Times reports, “The Politico co-founder and chief executive, Jim VandeHei, and one of its best-known journalists, Mike Allen, plan to leave the publication after the November presidential election, its owner Robert Allbritton said in a memo to the staff on Thursday. Three other senior executives also plan to leave.”

So what’s going on, and why the huge changes?

Click on this link to find out.

WHITE ACTOR TO PLAY MICHAEL JACKSON IN TV COMEDY
E! posts, “Joseph Fiennes, a British actor best known for his leading role in Shakespeare in Love, has been cast as Michael Jackson in a new half-hour TV comedy about an unconfirmed road trip the singer reportedly took with Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.”

A rep for production company Sky Arts confirmed the news to E! News Wednesday, adding the project is titled “Elizabeth, Michael & Marlon.” Past reports had said the program was a drama.

Many people are freaking out about Fiennes’ casting because, well, guess.

“A White Actor will play MJ. Because we aren’t whitewashed enough in Hollywood, apparently,” read a tweet posted on BET’s Twitter page Wednesday.

More on this controversial casting decision at this link.

U.S. NAZI HUNTER HAS ONE ACTIVE CASE
CNN Politics posts, “The U.S. government thinks Jakiw Palij was a guard at a Nazi concentration camp, but the 92-year-old is quietly living out his last years not in prison — confined by old age to a second-story apartment in a modest red-brick duplex in one of the most diverse sections of New York City.”

Palij’s life there represents the closing of an era: the only remaining active case from the Nazi era pursued by the Justice Department’s Office of Human Rights and Special Prosecutions.

Despite more than a decade of deportation attempts by the Justice Department, Palij, who worked at the Trawniki concentration camp in Poland, likely will die here.

Why, and has Palij admitted any guilt? Follow this link to learn more.

STUDY WITH FISH HELPS RESEARCHERS LEARN HOW CANCER GROWS
The New York Times reports, “It was just a tiny speck, a single cell that researchers had marked with a fluorescent green dye. But it was the very first cell of what would grow to be a melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. Never before had researchers captured a cancer so early.”

The cell was not a cancer yet. But its state was surprising: It was a cell that had reverted to an embryonic form, when it could have developed into any cell type. As it began to divide, cancer genes took over and the single primitive cell barreled forward into a massive tumor.”

Those were the findings of Dr. Leonard Zon of Boston Children’s Hospital, Dr. Charles K. Kaufman, and their colleagues, in a study published Thursday in the journal Science that offers new insight into how cancers may develop. The researchers stumbled on that first cell of a melanoma when they set out to solve a puzzle that has baffled cancer investigators: Why do many cells that have cancer genes never turn cancerous?

The work was in fish that had been given human genes, but the investigators found the same genetic programs in human melanomas, indicating that they too started when a cell reverted to an embryonic state. Much more study is needed, but researchers say the result can help them understand why melanomas and possibly other cancers form, and potentially prevent them.

Find out more about this incredible study by connecting here.