A quote by Paolo Scaroni, CEO of ENI, the major italian oil company:
If it were possible to convince Americans to buy the same cars as Europeans, we could save 4 million barrels a day - equivalent to the oil production of Iran, the world’s third-largest oil exporter.
The original interview at the Financial Times (member access)
Quotes and comment of this interview
I am no economist. I have only had a varnish as a student, just enough to be able to read business magazines. But I believe economy, like politics, should not be the private playground of a self-proclaimed elite. They are a commons which is ours to shape. [more]
My neighbor’s cider press after a busy day pressing 200 litres of apple juice (from my sister-in-law’s orchard).
Try to imagine Jane Austen, Friedrich Nietzsche, or Victor Hugo starting a new work: perhaps they would choose a special handwriting style, they would order a special paper format, they would bind it with the best leather and thread. Then they’d start writing, [more]
Step by step, we will turn this place into a real home…
In case you had not noticed the tiny line in the sidebar, I have started to maintain a what’s new page, so that I (and you) can keep track of modifications on the blog structure. Think of it as my configuration management system, although I will not go so far as to assign release numbers (mandarine is always a beta version anyway).
Life looks like the course of a marble on a sloping nail board: the trajectory is generally straight, as the marble follows the slope, until it hits a nail. Then it bounces to the right or to the left, depending on exactly how it hit. Such repeated bifurcations can significantly alter the course of the marble, and tiny deviations in the initial trajectory and bounce conditions can result in considerable changes further down the board. [more]
After this third blogging mensiversary, I believe I have steadied my posting pace, patterns and policy. I may as well make it an official feature of the mandarine blog, so that you know what to expect. And now that I know that you know what to expect, it will be a strong motivation for me to keep up.
I have been married ten years today.
A new technology is slowly but surely gnawing at the marketshare of e-books. P-books, now distributed by many traditional publishing companies (under a license from inventor Goodmount Inc., Streetburg, AL), openly aim at seducing and bringing e-book readers over to the other side, with an outrageous number of claims in terms of technological superiority and innovation. I have taken some time to actually compare [more]