Those books can get pretty boring, pretty quick. I am reading the aggressive - conservative investor by Marty Whitman of the Third Avenue Value fund and it can put you to sleep fast.

I have a four page summary of the Black Swan that I will send to you that you can read in about 10 minutes. It’s all you really need to know!

SGB

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/in-cairo-seizing-the-day-but-not-the-internet/index.html?hp

The mood soured at Internet cafes, as it did in the few Wi-Fi-enabled coffee shops of Zamalek, an upper-class Cairo neighborhood popular among expatriates. Business was slow. Clients came and went without ordering a thing - they came for in hopes of a Web connection.

The rumor mill, unimpeded by the loss of its most high-tech organ, ran high. Text messages and phone calls - the last immediate forms of communication left, apart from actual conversation - bustled with conspiracy theories:

These are the first stages of an American attack on Iran.

And here:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=a3tADKd_tY3g&refer=europe

“The majority of our IT companies, BPOs and call centers which are using the Atlantic route for dialing to the U.S. East Coast have been badly affected,” Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Provider Association of India, said by telephone from New Delhi today. Flag Telecom’s cable “has lost 50 to 60 percent capacity,” he said.

With repairs not due to begin until February 4, the break will likely have an adverse effect on connectivity for those attending the ICANN meeting in Delhi that starts on February 9.

Anyway, the event’s a stunning reminder of how Net-dependent the entire planet has become — as well as how critical it is for western national security, as even now a successful cyber-attack could have crippling economic consequences.

I hate to tell you this but I was to by a friend in Human Resources the other day that “getting hit by a bus” planning is no longer politically correct. I suppose because it implies someone being put in a painful position.

We are now supposed to plan this way, “What if the IT guy wins the lottery and never comes back to work?”

But I think that you are right about planning for events that we cannot see or do not know about.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently wrote two books about this type of thinking. The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. Basically the premise is that even the observation of one million white swans does not justify the statement “all swans are white.” There is no way to know that somewhere out there a black swan is not hiding, disproving the rule and nullifying our “knowledge” of swans.

It is always important for us to test our own knowledge and reasoning and bias towards certain outcomes. If the first ten times you bought domains you lost tons of money you might reason that domains were bad investments (and they were - to you). So, we should also ask ourselves, if the first ten times we bought domains it was profitable, does that mean it will always be a profitable venture? No, not necessarily.

Like Chuck Yeager used to say “You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can’t, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don’t give up.”

—-answer—-

Steve,
Got “The Black Swan” from a friend (Kamal), read it, didn’t really get it. Bought the audio book - fell asleep at chapter two. As for politically correct, I’m sure losing money (losing your business model) can be a painful experience, so maybe you are correct
Sahar

—-answer—-

I would guess this is for the serious business more then to individuals. For us, we do have our own server farms. Forget Amazon, if you use their servers they have complete access to your data. I know, “they are too big, they don’t need your data” .. I don’t fall for it.
Sahar