American Inequality -- A Brilliant Piece by David Brooks at the New York Times

You have to read this article at the New York Times.
Really.

David Brooks in The Inequality Map
starts out by writing:

"Foreign tourists are coming up to me on the streets and asking, “David, you have so many different kinds of inequality in your country. How can I tell which are socially acceptable and which are not?”"

and finishes with

"Dear visitor, we are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other. Have a nice stay. "

What he writes between the start and the end is really quite brilliant, except for some garble -- to a Stanford man -- about Brown ;-)

Energy: Oil and Gas Needs to Increase in Next 25 Years Says the Economist

Energy, energy, energy.

See
Focus: The future of oil and gas | The Economist

Tech Start-Ups Move Toward Patenting Rather than Creating New Products: An Ominous Economic Development Meaning Even Fewer Jobs in the Future

Jessica E. Vascellaro has the story at the Wall Street Journal Online
in Tech Start-Ups Rethink Worth of Patents.

The grossly over-reaching and imprudent grant of patents by government agencies for "obvious'" state-of-the-art progress around the world has made patents such insidious economic and legal pests that we are witnessing an age where patent filings -- which often do little for domestic economies and often create few domestic jobs -- are supplanting the development and manufacture of actual products, which is where employment of workers takes place.

The whole system in the United States is skewed toward NON-production.

The best example is the ugliest patent troll and monopolist - the firm Apple, which is more-or-less a patent mill, while their products are produced overseas by other companies who provide the jobs and the resources.

To our way of thinking, that is not going to work long-term for the economy of the USA, which is not going to be able to survive down the road from a focus on non-production.