Some utterly random items (and thoughts) that may be of interest:
- Elizabeth Warren: America without a Middle Class
- Bernanke in trouble in the Senate. I particularly like this statement from a Senate source: "It’s great to see everyone come together – Democrats, Republicans, progressives and libertarians, against this Federal Reserve, which is not federal, and not a reserve, just a group printing money and giving it to their buddies."
- Broken strategy. Reuters. Surge goal: 400,000 Afghan troops and police. The end game will be open source counter-insurgency (hyper-local militias). Not sure they will get there before the money runs out.
- Micro P2P phone networks. OpenVoIP overview. Wiki. Nice.
- In general, if you can turn the process structure used to make a product into more of a problem of information manipulation than physical work, you are likely see very rapid cycles of innovation and productivity improvement (due to Moore's law and open source tinkering). That's what makes conceptual products like MIT's "food printer" interesting to me. It's also why permaculture (as a replacement for traditional agriculture) is very interesting. Your productivity in generating food using permaculture is a function of your ability to design better ecosystems and not how much energy or work you inject into the system.
- Party crashers and assassination opportunities. Besides the implications of the lax security that allowed the Salahi's entry to a White House party without vetting, the funny thing (in the same way that you laugh about misfortune to lighten the burden) is that entry to the event was only a function of money. They could have bought a ticket to the White House party.
- Wired. How much does it cost to get access to your private communications from service providers? This implies that the only difficulty in gaining access to say, real-time geo-location information on ALL of the cell phone users in Pakistan (for example), is what the service provider would charge you. Sure, you could steal it, but with that much data and the need for real-time updates, it would be counterproductive to do so.
- Nigeria. Lawfare aimed at the Oil Companies is picking up where MEND left off. Cool.
- Neo-Feudal Capitalism. Is this model potentially viral?
- More on a rapid ice age (Gulf Stream break down). Previous evidence from Greenland ice samples had suggested this abrupt shift in climate happened over the span of a decade or so. Now researchers say it surprisingly may have taken place over the course of a few months, or a year or two at most. That's my experience with complex systems that enter catastrophic turbulence. Change is fast. Not sure if this is going to happen, but the ride looks very interesting.
- Robert Brenner on the failure of capitalism. I have problems with modern, accepted economic theory. It smacks of religion and not science, and that's a problem for decision making. Some of my gripes: It has failed to deliver predictive results, as we saw with the financial meltdown. Worse, it has problems explaining historical results: It can't explain why western economies haven't delivered any improvements to middle class incomes in three decades, despite rapidly rising productivity and growing GDP. It can't explain the rise of Wall Street, the ongoing rush of assets bubbles, and our current ziggurat of debt. It can't even explain why "free trade" works, for anyone but the low wage provider, in a world where all evidence points to the fact that information technology makes productivity hyper-portable. Some effort to paper over this failure (in prediction) has been undertaken by followers of the Austrian school of economics, but that explanation is too narrow (it merely describes why the financial pneumonia killed you and not the economic AIDS that made you vulnerable). Brenner, albeit a neo-Marxist, takes a stab at providing a more useful model. Not sure he accomplished this, but it is more interesting and systemic than most of what I have read. He makes that case that global capitalism as we know it is over and nothing is ready to replace it.