He predicts that India and China will catch up with the western economies by 2048 (based on income per person). The data behind his prediction is most interesting. Many people are ‘worried’ about the power of Asia, this video shows exactly where India and China are compared to the UK and US.

Have a look at the TED video:

More data can be found on Gapminder.org (owned by Google).

http://www.gapminder.org/

PH-BVB (where PH could stand for Philips Healthcare, the company I work for)

I first ‘met’ PH-BVB flying home from Cairo, what a pleasure!

The next morning I opened the window and guess who is eating the last pieces?

A ‘Sparrowhawk’, ‘Sperwer’ in dutch, in our backyard, finishing the last remainings of the poor pigeon.

My colleague already prepared me by saying, it’s a 3 star hotel, but I promise you: you will enjoy it.

And I did, what a super cool place, amazing interior and super friendly people.

The elevators are having pictures inside so it looks like you are in a shark cage or the cable car to Table Mountain.

Whenever you plan to visit Cape Town, visit the Protea Fire and Ice hotel.

http://www.proteahotels.com/protea-hotel-fire-and-ice.html

Click HERE for my pictures of South Africa.

From NYT: Reading the news that General Motors and Chrysler are now lining up for another $20 billion or so in government aid — on top of the billions they’ve already received or requested — leaves me with the sick feeling that we are subsidizing the losers and for only one reason: because they claim that their funerals would cost more than keeping them on life support. Sorry, friends, but this is not the American way. Bailing out the losers is not how we got rich as a country, and it is not how we’ll get out of this crisis.

See his original post:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/opinion/22friedman.html?_r=1

Again the following column is amazingly ‘on the spot’!

Read the whole article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/opinion/01friedman.html

That may be President Obama’s most important bailout task: to educate the country that there is no easy escape here, except taking our medicine, getting our fundamentals right again and working our way out of this, brick by brick, by getting back to making money — what was that old Smith Barney ad? — “the old-fashioned way” — by earning it.

I’m just uploading more travel pictures (business travels).

http://basvanbreugel.wordpress.com/pictures/

We had a blast, good customer responses and perfect weather!

Photos will follow soon!

Just to have an interesting start of the blogyear, a nice picture about mounting an AC in Russia: