Some random items of interest:
- Bruce Sterling on why the global financial oligarchy = global guerrillas: large financial centers in certain cities around the planet are certainly going to kill millions of us by destroying our social safety networks in the name of their imaginary financial efficiency. You’re a thousand times more likely to die because of what some urban banker did in 2008 than from what some Afghan-based terrorist did in 2001. Financiers live in small, panicky urban cloisters, severely detached from the rest of mankind. They are living today in rich-guy ghetto cults. They are truly dangerous to our well-being, and they are getting worse and more extremist, not better and more reasonable. You’re not gonna realize this havoc till you see your elderly Mom coughing in an emergency ward, but she’s going there for a reason.
- Vaclav Smil. His worry: A genuine flu pandemic... is a 100 per cent certainty. What we can’t predict is how bad it will be.
- Jeff Rubin on expensive energy: Plan B can only be less oil consumption. Whether Americans realize it or not, they are already on that path. The disaster in the Gulf is just putting that reality into sharper focus. Last year there were four million fewer vehicles on the road in the United States than there were the year before. In the next decade, there will be 40 to 50 million fewer cars than today. In the process, an economy that once consumed over 20 million barrels of oil per day will find a way to run on 15 million barrels or even less. He's an optimist (he's not factoring in the collapse of the US middle class).
- Kevin Kelly on energy trickles vs. torrents. "When a plane full of tourists flies from LA to Cairo so they can visit the Great Pyramid, that one flight uses as much energy as it took to build the Great Pyramid."
- Transition network 2010 conference. Efforts at a soft launch of Resilient Communities still gaining steam.
- Runaway general. Zen has more.
- My intentionally bombastic boingboing interview. Here's an hilarious critique by some vacuous academic globalists.
- Colombia. Super cartel smashed by US. Breaking up monopolies to make both market and open source innovation possible.
- Paul Hartzog on bow-tie control systems.
- Seth Godin on the death of the office. As in: virtualize everything else.