Random thoughts of the day #7

The Finnish Globalization Report – the other shoe drops

The Part II of the Finnish Globalization Report titled “Suomen vastaus globalisaation haasteeseen”, roughly translated as “Finland’s answer to the challenge of globalization”, was published some days ago (and is downloadable here). In theory, it’s an interesting read that raises some important questions.

And some eyebrows. It’s already been criticized in particular due to its workforce-related recommendations, but I found a couple of other things puzzling, like how they’ve managed to capture some trends so vividly and yet utterly fail to add one plus one. Just a couple of examples below:

• On energy consumption, they rely blindly on the IEA prediction of rising energy demands and how they are met. What about conservation of energy? That would have the very real possibility of lowering energy demand and still be profitable for all parties involved. Similarly, they seem to take for granted the IEA assumption that most sources of new primary energy will be outside the OECD – there’s huge untapped potential in increasing local wind energy production and other renewable energy sources, so I really fail to see how they can just acquiesce to increasing dependence on foreign countries for primary energy. They do seem to hint that it might “be good to do something about it” but that’s hardly a roadmap to success.

• They cite rising energy costs as one big concern, which is right on the mark. Yet at the same time, the report concludes that production of goods will become even further decentralized and globally dispersed. They seem to completely miss the obvious fact that steeply rising energy costs – especially fossil fuel costs – will also inevitably decrease globalization and geographic dispersion and distance of production from consumption. The same applies to food production – the report takes for granted that foreign competition with foodstuff will continue to increase.

All in all the report was quite a disappointment and didn’t really provide all that much new information.

Goodbye Thunderbird, Hello Google Reader? Bloglines? Or what?

A couple of weeks ago, my trusty Thunderbird decided that it didn’t want to update my RSS feeds anymore. No matter what I did, it just didn’t work – restarting didn’t help, creating a new account didn’t help. I decided against a reinstall because that would likely just buy me some time until it breaks again.

Who knows what made it break, but that forced me to move to an online feeds service which is likely a better option in the long term anyway. But which one? So far I’ve tried Bloglines & Google Reader, the latter of which I’m using now. On Google Reader, I like the Google homepage integration possiblity, the starring possiblity and the efficient checking of new feed items (much better than that of Bloglines). One thing I already found I am missing from the online readers; search. I mean even Google Reader does not have a search capability. What’s that all about?!

The transfer of feeds also created the opportunity to clean them up. With lots of blogs no longer being updated (6 months without an update means it’s dead in my books), some no longer interesting etc, I went from 200+ feeds to “only” 120 feeds, company-internal stuff excluded.

Anyhow, any suggestions on what would be the “best” reader are still most welcome.