Some random items of interest:
- Thingverse. Techporn for makers.
- DIY (do-it-yourself) CNC machines. Patrick Hood-Daniel has an impressive collection of tutorials and kits. Very slick site.
- Nice: Underlying geographies of Wikipedia.
- Does anyone have access to this paper by the NBER that they could send me?: Do Working Men Rebel? Insurgency and Unemployment in Iraq and the Philippines. UPDATE: Got it, thanks.
- New and used DNA synthesizers for sale.
- Biowar for Dummies. Paul Boutin. 2006. Oldie but goodie. We might not have long to wait. Every hands-on gene hacker I polled during my project estimated they could synthesize smallpox in a month or two. I remember that game from my engineering days, so I mentally scale their estimates using the old software manager's formula: Double the length, then move up to the next increment of time. That gives us two to four years—assuming no one has already started working. Already in the window for this. I'd like to see an update to this. How about it Paul?
- Loss of purpose/connectivity. Losing a job. Jason Reitman re: the making of the movie 'Up in the Air' : "The statement that I wasn't ready for, that everybody said, was, 'I don't know what I'm supposed to do.' If you'd have asked me before I made this film what's the hardest part about losing your job in this kind of economy, I would have said, well, the loss of income certainly. But no one talked about that. All everyone talked about was this loss of purpose, this, 'I don't know why I'm supposed to get up in the morning.' " A critical part of resilient communities is to replace that lost connectivity/meaning, which was tenuous at best, through tribal/community connectivity and participatory governance/economies.
- Scahill still hounding Blackwater. The Nation article 1 and 2. Vanity Fair profile of Eric Prince.
- SSI. YouTube War. Between June and roughly November 2007 (roughly the period corresponding to the “surge”), American forces captured eight media labs belonging to AQI. In these labs they found a total of 23 terabytes of material that had not yet been uploaded to the web.
- Surviving civil war -- Lessons from Tajikistan. Broken english, but a good read nonetheless.
- The introduction of outsourcing platforms that makes worker productivity portable and portable global capital leads to global labor arbitrage (which neatly guts the theories of comparative advantage upon which belief in the beneficial effects of modern trade theory is based). In short, exploiting the differences between the wages of the western middle class and those in developing economies is now costless and risk free (which makes it an arbitrage opportunity). Arbitrage opportunities, once found, typically reset to zero quickly (the differences in prices are brought into parity). The result in this case will be a globally normalized wage where the same price is paid for labor no matter where it is located geographically. Almost certainly, given what we are currently seeing right now, the biggest shift will be in the collapse in the incomes of the Western middle class instead of upward movement among low wage competitors. The income stasis of the last three decades is already being replaced by rapid decline. One potential political result of the collapse of our short experiment with financially empowered individuals (a rising tide lifts all boats scenario in Western democracies) is likely a creeping global neo-feudalism of indefinite duration (decentralized and autocratic stasis held in place by fluid globalized markets). The lesson: the ability to bootstrap resilient communities, and a new social contract, using locally derived resources will decline rapidly over the next decade.