America

Walmart, (Sam) Wal(ton’s) mart. The Walton fortune has long been split among 4 main heirs and still each shard is listed in the top 4, 5, 6, and 7 of America’s richest, each with over $20 billion.

The story Sam Walton tells of how he started Walmart is one of my favorite autobiographies and business books. My old, scribbled paperback is long lost but I can now safely share the book with you digitally through the 3rd-party magic of Scribd: read it online.

It’s time to (re)read Sam Walton and be inspired by history’s most successful practitioner of commerce, there are too many opportunities out there waiting for us!

I believe the Google-China faceoff a momentous occasion. A major fallout between 2 of the very most powerful organizations on Earth.

So I created this experimental summary to try to wrap my head around it. The idea is to aggregate all the developments of a major news story, linking even more aggressively than Wikipedia and straight to first sources as much as possible. The favicon bullets are links to that paragraph’s source. All emphases mine.

Mixtecs are an indigenous group of southern Mexico, one of the most classic, important and populous. Well, this number of the Antropologia Mexicana magazine buriedly reports that there are now more Mixtec speakers in the US!

No wonder then that I heard more Native American languages in California than in my Mexican hometown.

Mexico should make peace with the fact that, under the pressure of geography and economic complementariness, it is now more linked to Anglo America than to Latin America.

This was frontpage news in the November 3rd edtition of ”El Norte” (there’s an online version of the article, sadly behind a silly paywall).

I’ve only started researching about it but EB5 visas seem to be very, very interesting. Strange, life. I used to dream about similar opportunities and here it is.

As a kid some of the books that I most reread were from the Time Life science library, an affordable expensive (at that time and place) and fascinating book collection my parents happily bought for the family. They say that when I was very, very young the book I loved the most was the one about Primates, which had lots and lots of great pictures of monkeys.

But I don’t remember that far (I have a poor memory of very early childhood).

Exactly!

That picture above is from a Japanese upscale convenience store. Yup, the Japanese have so refined the convenience store concept, called combinis in Japan, that they even have upscale ones. The sheer density and quality of combinis throughout Japan just boggles the mind. Did you know Seven Eleven is, since 1991, a Japanese company? And, at least in Japan, it’s the Toyota of convenience stores, of which there are many brands.

Compare with Europe, where, as far as I can tell, they simply don’t have the concept of convenience stores. Here in Spain they only have ugly, pricey, mom & pop dry good stores, called “Chinos” because they’re mostly run by Chinese.

Mexico itself has lots of convenience stores, better than the ones in the States I’d say, and there’s some interesting innovation going on of micro-supermarkets specialized in groceries, or pharmacies that are convenience stores too.

That’s the kind of thing that fascinates me when I travel, the kind of thing you don’t notice until you live with it, and that you never read about anywhere. The kind of mundane things that really change your day to day life, instead of the one-off, impressive, touristy things that you just see and its over.

I’m a strange kind of traveller, like a very slow kind of tourist, a be-ist! I prefer to stay at places for months and not focus on them much, just let them gradually reveal themselves. I like keeping place in the background, how it makes the fringes of my life (like city walking, shopping, eating, bookstore browsing, the new media…) interesting and new. But for the core of my life I really am very happy making stuff, it’s the thing I want to do most. Intensive travelling, where the place (and its people) are the very focus of your life is not that appealing to me, it’s too distracting.

Travelling all across the developed world this question’s naturally recurring. Here some likely fragments of the answer:

It’s a stab. Please help with more ideas that come to mind.

Predictably, I found this deeply, personally moving.

Obsesionado como estoy con la cuestion de lugar, me he topado en mis busquedas con estas 4 oportunidades internacionales para Mexicanos. Me gustaria fueran mas conocidas y aprovechadas, por lo que las comparto aqui desapasionadamente pues si creo en el consejo es cuando es descriptivo, no prescriptivo, cuando te abre caminos, no cuando te empuja.

Just watched Obama’s start speech. It was long. At parts founding-father-ish, stodgy, bombastic, God-alluding, and over-collectivistic. Talk about modern immigration was absent (or was I looking for it too hard?). The remarkable thing, though, was how good it was. Great even, at parts. Astoundingly evenhanded.

My distrust of democracy and my bitter goodbye to America made me uninterested and outright antagonistic to politics in general, America’s in particular. Still am. But you got to grant it, it ain’t perfect, but I know of no country with a better dream of what it wants to be. America’s back.