Some random items of interest:
- Stiglitz. The American legal system has become: heads I win, tails you lose when big money is involved.
- Valdis Krebs has some interesting analysis on how contagion spreads in incestuous financial networks. The very same things that make oligarchies strong, makes them vulnerable.
- University of Reddit. Open source university. 7 k members already.
- Maker cars. 3D printed Hybrid Car called the Urbee. Designed to run on sunlight (overnight charge from solar panels), gasoline, or ethanol (200 mpg highway, 100 mpg city @ $0.02 a mile).
- Chemistry hacking for fun and profit. The quest for the 'legal high'. Using a knowledge of chemistry and garage labs to produce new psycho-active drugs that aren't illegal (yet). On the resilient community front: this also indicates that small, local chemistry labs can potentially replace many (most?) of the industrial pharmaceuticals currently consumed if needed.
- Tank-a-bank. How to use flash mobs to take down a bank. GG thinking. 2 million members in a Facebook group taking this type of action in response to insults like TARP would have done much more than anything the Tea Party has accomplished.
- Here's a very interesting interview with Ed Catmull, the President of Pixar. In it, he explains his approach to managing creative teams to produce stellar results over the long term. Really amazing stuff. I particularly liked 1) his focus on team health as the best indicator of project success/failure, 2) the need to keep projects at the edge of chaos, 3) how peer support can fix stuck projects, 3) complete transparency as a way to eliminate distrust and group dysfunction, 4) his efforts to change up the review process to circumvent selfish behavior (withholding information to avoid embarrassment or show weakness), 5) the belief that real creativity in big projects is a team function, 6) it's better to restart projects than to push forward to release a mediocre one, and 7) his belief that it is better for a manager to fix mistakes than to prevent them (the corollary to this is that managers should expect to be surprised by new information at meetings). There's lots more.
- The microfinance trap. At the end of the day, it's still just debt. The only innovation being that we learned how to get even more people hooked on it.