Michael Hershkowitz's Page

I didn't do it this week, but I recently got involved in a peer-to-peer lending site called lendingclub.com. You can lend or borrow, and it's done completely without banks. As a borrower, I can borrow based on my income and credit situation, with an interest rate based primarily on my credit score, and the lenders are people just like me who want to support the people taking out the loans, and make a few bucks doing it. You can lend in 50$ increments, so if you had 500$ to invest, you could… Continue

When you talk about money, as has been stated before, you talk about something that has value because people give it value. It's important to understand that currencies exist in part because of that psychological value, and cannot exist without it. So, in a hypothetical currency crisis where the dollar becomes nearly worthless, what has value?



I've asked myself this to try to intelligently place myself on the right side of the line that is destroying the middle class here in America.… Continue

Every day urban and suburban gyms are lined with people on elliptical machines, stairmasters, stationary bikes, rowing machines, etc, using their muscles to create kinetic energy. In this case, they're all making a something rotate.



This also applies to all those lifting machines where you make pulleys spin by lifting various amounts of weight. The rotation that all these exercise creates can be converted to electricity using the same technology as windmills. Using advances in… Continue

Pretend you're trying to explain the daily life of an urbanite in 2010 to an urbanite in 1910, or 1810. Much of it would sound like some kind of sorcery - wireless internet, cell phones, radio waves, credit cards with magnetic strips. We've covered a huge amount of technological ground, but everything was done incrementally, with a few true inventions amongst many incremental improvements.



Imagining a goal seemingly distant from the current state is a healthy exercise, but it can be… Continue