Hot, flat, and crowded
World Is Flat" has helped millions of readers to see globalization in a new way. Now the author brings a fresh outlook to the crises of destabilizing climate change and rising competition for energy.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
6people
2012–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Adding to my previous answer, here's a reading suggestion: Hot, Flat and Crowded, by Thomas Friedman. The book was written almost 2 decades ago and it has aged really well.
- Great question, and one that I asked just before going to Mozambique for 10 weeks a few years back. I'd just bought a kindle, which were not available outside the USA back then, and asked a few interesting folks I was chatting to at Foo. Here are my resulting first few kindle purchases: The Match King Heros Die (I bought the rest of them) The city and the city Every patient tells a story Blindsight Born to Run Hot, Flat & Crowded The Autobiography of Ben Franklin The Hunger Games (!)
And on it went - asking for recommendations was a fantastic thing to do. I'd asked for fiction as I was going there to work and would be too exhausted at first to do much else.
So I do encourage everyone to give some names of books. And yes - do take a good camera, do take binoculars - Leica if you can afford them, and embrace the experience.
A few years later I went to Antarctica on a boat for 30 days offline. By then I had hundreds of books on kindle, and several devices to read them. This is basically a solved problem now. I did take Wikipedia in offline state, which was useful.
In decades previous when traveling I cared about weight and price per word and focused on "good" books - books that you know you should read but which need a bit of effort. When you are off the grid and in countries where there are few English books then it was a great way to read great books. But now the Internet is everywhere. It might be flaky, and it might be painful to access, but you'll be able to find access to buy and download books relatively easily.
Three recommendations, aside from the above which I enjoyed a lot.
Bill Aulet: Disciplined Entrepreneurship, covers the topic very well and generously references everything else.
The Circle by Dave Eggers paints a picture that's creepily familiar already.
League of Denial will have you shake your head gently and sadly at NFL and other contact sports.
- The first time I had heard of him was when I found my roommates book The World Is Flat, at the time I had just graduated high school and was considering going to college full time. However I knew I didn't want to do that and through reading Thomas's book I somehow came to the conclusion that's not needed, that I can work anywhere doing anything, while having more freedom and making more money, not the response I've gotten from most people regarding globalization mind you.
My then girlfriend got me Hot, Flat, and Crowded when it came out because she knew how much I liked that one so much. I had been working for a solar energy company in Southern California and the book gave me a lot of talking points to sell the product. Of course the timing couldn't have been better with the "Million Solar Roofs Program" our Governator enacted. I still believe that the next big revolution will be, has to be, a green revolution.
Here's a key part about the program I mentioned via Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Solar_Initiative)
The California Solar Initiative has "a total budget of $2.167 billion between 2007 and 2016 and a goal to install approximately 1,940 MW of new solar generation capacity." [2]
The CSI initially offered cash incentives on solar PV systems of up to $2.50 per AC watt. These incentives, combined with federal tax incentives, could cover up to 50% of the total cost of a solar system. The incentive program was designed so that the incentives would reduce in steps based on the amount of solar installed in each of 6 categories. There are separate steps for residential and non-residential customers in the territories of each of the State's 3 investor-owned utilities. As of July 2012, the rebates range from $0.20 to $0.35 per AC watt for residential and commercial systems and from $0.70 to $1.10 for systems for non-profits and government entities.[2]
- > no budget for reporters that can only afford intern level experience glorified bloggers
(Edit: apparently I didn't quite understand the parent; see dylan604's comment below.)
Do you mean the NY Times? They have a large budget and if you read the bios of their reporters and opinion writers, you will see they have extensive experience, the top of their field.
Edit: As a random selection, here's the first name on the top headline: https://www.nytimes.com/by/joe-rennison
I have been a financial journalist for more than a decade. I began my career at a magazine called Risk, digging into the details of legislation introduced after the 2008 financial crisis, from rules around how much capital banks should hold to changes in the market for derivatives that had helped inflate the credit bubble that led to the Great Recession. I moved to The Financial Times in 2015 to cover the more complex corners of markets, such as sliced and diced structured bonds, before branching out to write about interest rates, debt and the stock market. I left the FT as the paper’s deputy U.S. markets editor and joined The Times in 2022.
I graduated in 2010 with a degree in philosophy, logic and scientific method from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Here's the currently top listed opinion author: https://www.nytimes.com/by/thomas-l-friedman
Thomas L. Friedman became the paper’s foreign affairs Opinion columnist in 1995. He joined the paper in 1981, after which he served as the Beirut bureau chief in 1982, Jerusalem bureau chief in 1984, in Washington as the diplomatic correspondent in 1989 and later the White House correspondent and economic correspondent.
Mr. Friedman was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (from Lebanon) and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (from Israel). He also won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Mr. Friedman is the author of “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award in 1989. He has written several other books, including “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” an international best seller.
Born in Minneapolis, Mr. Friedman received a B.A. in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University in 1975. In 1978 he received a master’s in modern Middle East studies from Oxford. His column appears every Sunday and Wednesday.
- China doing a massive ban-change to vehicles wouldn't be a first. Friedman wrote about their policy shifts in Hot, Flat, and Crowded. China has implemented changes to vehicle emissions in just a few years that took the US decades (e.g. unleaded gas). So, okay, they won't ban cars outright, but it isn't impossible to imagine other scenarios that would be impossible to imagine the US doing in the same time period.
- Thomas Friedman, in "hot flat and crowded" makes an elaborate case linking the price of crude oil to the undemocratic and oppressive nature of (middle eastern) governments.
