Opinion

They said it would revolutionize industries, make lucky investors millions, and improve everyone’s lives.  It took a long time, but 3-D printing is finally living up to its promise.  Going forward, this trend may accelerate and become even more important to both people and industry.

Only a few years ago, no one had ever heard of “ransomware.”  Unfortunately, these days the word is mentioned all too often.

Just when you thought oil and coal were mere relics of the past, and that going forward energy would be plentiful, clean and cheap - surprise, surprise, it ain’t like that after all.  In fact, the outlook is the opposite: Some regions of the world are experiencing very serious shortages of energy and prices are rising sharply. These developments are making inflation worse and could even lead to political unrest.  

Lots of people don’t like to take orders.  They don’t want a boss telling them what to do, or spending the entire work week doing work they hate and having to deal with nasty co-workers.  What they do want is to escape these situations and be their own bosses.  One way of doing that is opening a store.  Some, but certainly not all, budding entrepreneurs have been amazingly successful, and while there are no guarantees, the potential rewards make the risks worthwhile.     

They’re at it again – the insiders, that is - selling their stock at a furious pace.  That insiders are selling is not a new development – it’s been going on for quite some time now.  What makes this story timely is that they are increasing their sales.  

Some unemployed people are lucky.  As a result of the labor shortage, they were offered jobs with better benefits and higher wages than they had before as incentives to return to work.  But others were not as fortunate, and their jobs were eliminated - replaced by robots.