Some random items of interest:
- DIY drones and terrorism. PW Singer channels global guerrilla warfare over at Newsweek: "Such technologies have the potential to strengthen the hand not only of Al Qaeda 2.0, but also of homegrown terror cells and disaffected loners like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. As one robotics expert told me, for less than $50,000 'a few amateurs could shut down Manhattan...'Smaller UAVs' cool, battery-powered engines make them difficult to hit with conventional heat-seeking missiles; Patriot missiles can take out UAVs, but at $3 million apiece such protection comes at a very steep price. Even seemingly unsophisticated drones can have a tactical advantage: Hizbullah's primitive planes flew so slowly that Israeli F-16s stalled out trying to decelerate enough to shoot them down.”
- This is the closest I've come to finding an example of how financial parasitism through cognitive capture works in the natural world. "Through a not yet understood chemical process, the wasps are able to, quite literally, enslave the unsuspecting spiders to build a nest for their larva, and after all that hard work, become their first meal. Sure, it seems pretty dastardly, but researchers say it's evolution."
- Enforced Financial Transparency. A group going by the name of the People's Army of the Fourth Awakening downloaded millions of documents from Latvia's tax office. It is in the process of publishing the salary information of government officials to expose corruption and self-dealing.
- Thorium nuclear power. YouTube vid.
- Cramming is making a comeback. It's a method of bleeding the middle class via both "legal" and illegal fees/charges/microtaxes that are slipped into telecom bills unnoticed.
- Niall Ferguson embraces complex adaptive systems, black swans, and rapid collapse (particularly in how it applies to the rapid failure of the United States). He's sounding like me, LOL.
- Walmart and local food (an implementation of "agile" agriculture).
- The "state of emergency" in the US (in a process that is similar to what is going on with copyrights) is becoming perpetual. Attempts to provide greater oversight were quashed.
- Biden laments the popular perception that the US is kaput: "So many people have bet on our demise that it absolutely drives me crazy." Some observations: If modern governance is more brand than substance, perception of that brand drives everything. In a hyper financial world, a loss of confidence drives demise. The 4GW premise that modern nation-states are bleeding legitimacy may be spot on.
- The Economist: According to one estimate, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. The information overhead required to operate the status quo system is exploding. In comparison, think about the STEMI compression compression (without a loss of computational complexity) afforded by networked resilient communities.