Archive for 'Society & Culture'
Raising Retirement and Medicare Ages Can Backfire
There was a time when I thought that raising the retirement age was a good idea. People were living longer and healthier, and most work was information or service work. So why not? The U.S. age for Social Security is already going up to 67. What would be the harm in raising it to 70? [...]
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Future of Religion: The Summer of Presbyterian Discontent
(Glen Hiemstra note: The future of religion is a frequent question, and from time to time we are pleased to publish pieces by Rev. David R. Brown on the subject. You can find links more at the bottom of this post. This post is also published as an article in the archive; we are doing [...]
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A Post-PC Era? PC’s still in the future.
IBM CTO Mark Dean, who was one of the designers of the first IBM PC that debuted in 1981, weighed in recently on whether we are entering a “post-PC” era in which tablets and phones replace PC’s. That meme is exaggerated, but Dean does suggest that computing itself is in transition… PCs are being replaced [...]
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Debt crisis – from history to the future
Watching the U.S. “debt crisis” unfold, I am reminded that to see the way forward, it is often good to look backward. History does not consist only of facts, but history is full of facts that cannot be ignored. In this case, it helps to see where the debt came from – this is essential [...]
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Future of Health Care
Today I delivered a keynote speech for the Western States BCBS Internal Operations Conference, in Seattle. My task was to talk about longer term future trends and the challenge of shaping the preferred future. These are health insurance providers, and vendors, from west of the Mississippi. They see a volatile world ahead, though with many [...]
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A Shift In Our Approach to Health Care
Early this year 1200 people crowded a ballroom in Singapore to begin the first ever conference in Asia on the subject of integrated health care. Here in the U.S. we tend to think that others have solved the health care challenges of the future. It is true that most other developed countries reached agreement on [...]
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The Impending Dominance of the Electric Car
On May 4th I had the pleasure of attending a Washington Clean Technology Alliance (WCTA) Lunch Seminar to hear James Billmaier, author of JOLT! The Impending Dominance of the Electric Car and Why America Must Take Charge. After listening to Jim speak, I was fully convinced that America will soon become an “electriconomy” as he [...]
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True Diversity
Everyone knows that the population in the United States is growing, but many do not know that the nonwhite population is growing much faster than the white population. According to a report released earlier this month by the Brookings Institution nonwhites accounted for all the growth in the youth population from 2000 to 2010. In [...]
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The Truth About Climate Change
In a perfect world, people would rely on facts to uncover the truth. I don’t want climate change to be real, but I’m not going to ignore all of the statistics that tell me that it is. However, the problem that many people face is how to change not only their beliefs, but their entire [...]
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To Tweet or Not to Tweet
This is a great question addressed by Time magazine last week. Although I personally try not to devote too much time to social media, they make a great comparison with the internet and it’s beginnings – “Were Netscape and the Web enhancing our economy, or were people just spending more time at work checking out ESPN.com“? I [...]
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Social Accounts