“An opportunity is basically a chance to practice.

“What presidential candidates say is, at best, an imperfect guide to their actions in office. What proves to be a more reliable indicator of presidential behavior is a candidate’s roster of advisers.

“Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace.

“True freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

“The mentality from which the OLPC springs is the same mentality which in past centuries created the missionary programs—that we, the west, know what’s good for the rest of the world. The technology of choice then was the printing press, so we sent missionaries armed with stacks of bibles. These days we have computers, so we send out modern missionaries (of our western lifestyle, including consumerism, global warming, and credit default swaps) armed with computers.

“Leverage-obsessed Wall Street has been broken for eight years now. Just two years in the late 1990s, 1996 and 1997, saw more IPOs than the last eight years combined. The ratio of mergers and acquisitions to IPOs has gone from roughly 1:1 from 1996 to 2000 to 6:1 during 2001 through 2008.

A $100 million high-growth revenue company is no longer an interesting candidate for an IPO, potentially a $1 billion company with some nurturing and capital. Instead, it becomes a piece of some large company. With its fate no longer in its hands, the company loses its key management and its vision. We are replacing potentially great companies with underperforming divisions of mature companies.

Once Wall Street recovers from its leverage hangover, the $100 million technology company will once again become an attractive investment. Value creation and financial returns will again be aligned.

“Senator Obama’s 20-month conversation with the electorate now enters a new phase. There is a sense of ownership, a kind of possessive entitlement, on the part of the people who worked to elect him. The shorthand for his organizing Web site, “MyBO,” says it all.

“Bubbles have two components: a trend that prevails in reality and a misconception relating to that trend. In real estate, the trend consists of an increased willingness to lend and a rise in prices. The misconception is that the value of the real estate is independent of the willingness to lend. That misconception encourages bankers to become more lax in their lending practices as prices rise and defaults on mortgage payments diminish. That is how real estate bubbles are born.

Markets that are prone to bubbles should be regulated. It is impossible to prevent bubbles from forming, but it should be possible to keep them within tolerable bounds. Regulators such as the Fed, the Treasury, and the SEC must accept responsibility for preventing bubbles from growing too big. So far they have explicitly rejected that responsibility.

“I probably make as many mistakes as any investor. But I usually discover them quicker and correct them before they cause too much harm.