End of golf?

From a Bloomberg Magazine article "How Golf Got Stuck in the Rough":

"Today companies are relying less on glad-handing on the links, and many young people are cool to a pursuit viewed as time-intensive and elitist.  The result: Golf is suffering from an exodus of players, and courses are closing. The number of U.S. golfers has dropped 24 percent from its peak in 2002, to about 23 million players last year, according to Pellucid."

Golf is an unsustainable sport unless the golf course is in the tropics.  A cultural shift has occurred as well.

"Those sticking with the sport are playing fewer rounds.  U.S. golfers played a total of 462 million rounds last year, according to researcher Golf Datatech.  That was the fewest since 1995.  Says Morelli: "All the people under 35 are leaving the game.""

I believe golf is a sport that will significantly decrease in the next 10 to 15 years unless it rediscovers itself like Cricket has through shorter and faster games.

The Economist predicted oil crash

"As oil begins to pool in the Gulf, a gap has opened between the prices of LLS and Brent (see chart), even as LLS and WTI have moved into alignment. The discrepancy in prices between the middle of America and the East and West coasts will persist until someone works out a way to move the stuff around in greater quantities. But even if that happens, in a couple of years the whole country will have more light, sweet crude than it needs. If the oil continues to back up, prices will fall further compared with global markets, threatening production from high-cost shale beds and perhaps even smothering America’s resuscitation as an oil power."

From The Economist article "Spreading disarray" on Dec 14th, 2013 here.

HP's The Machine - Rethinking computer architecture

"“We have moved to what I call the Wall Streetization of technology,” says Shrijeet Mukherjee, the vice president for software engineering at Cumulus Networks, a maker of networking software. “It’s all about short-term gain.”"

From Bloomberg Magazine article "Can HP Build the Computer of the Future?" here.  I was reminded of the quote above.  The article ends a bit ominously:

"Mukherjee, who worked at SGI, says Web companies such as Google and Amazon have, in effect, achieved important advances for computer science with their high-efficiency data center software. They haven’t dedicated resources toward experimenting with radical advances in hardware. This is part of a generational shift, say Mukherjee and Fink, who both complain that few university students know how the guts of computers work. “There is a definite fear that we have stopped doing basic research around computer technology and that students are focused on much higher-level problems,” Mukherjee says. If HP’s hardware moonshot fails, he says he doubts a Facebook or Google will rise to take its place, but the R&D cash is there. “They certainly have the economic fortitude to make such a system,” he says. “It will require an individual who is willing to change the balance of things.”"

HP has designed its own grand challenge, to redefine the architecture of a computer.  See the HP The Machine website here.  I am following it closely.