From the video, in 2011: Whopping increase in app creation and downloads: – ONE BILLION apps downloaded worldwide each month – $3 BILLION paid by Apple alone to independent apps developers Surge in use of social media mobile platforms: – 166 PERCENT increase in Facebook Mobile users in the first half of 2011 alone – 103 MILLION wireless tweets were posted each day – ONE BILLION Foursquare check-ins – 26 PHOTOS were made “hipstery” on Instagram every second Ongoing explosion in data traffic: – EIGHT TRILLION texts were sent – up 1.1 trillion from last year – 1800 PERCENT increase in traffic on U.S. networks predicted in just four years Unprecedented competition and choice: – MORE SMARTPHONES purchased than PCs in the United States – MORE WIRELESS SUBSCRIPTIONS than people – TWO BILLION networked mobile devices by 2015 – 4G SERVICES being rolled out by at least six carriers in 2011 alone Massive potential for job creation and economic growth: – 2.4 MILLION American jobs supported by wireless – $27.5 BILLION investment in U.S. mobile networks by wireless carriers – 500,000 JOBS & $400 BILLION to U.S. GDP with additional 500 MHz of additional spectrum
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Posted to ethernettv.net
2011: The Year Mobile Took Over The World
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EthernetTV/~3/2WRfE_PmzE0/641
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Posted to ethernettv.net
Occupy Wall Street: Leaked Memo, Banks Plan Attack
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EthernetTV/~3/EYHFNl4zW2k/598
- Tags:
- economics
- politics
- society
- Ethernet TV
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Posted to apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com
Accelerating Change and The Corrosive Effects of Relative Poverty
Clip: “Poor people have been demonized, poverty has been criminalized. 42% of our precious children, of all colors, live in or near poverty. That is a national disgrace,” Dr. Cornell West. As we've written over the past several years, we believe that America on the whole is a magnificent Success Story, one of the great success stories of all history. Yes, even in spite of such startling statistics. What we have attempted to convey is the fact that, as the result of Capitalism’s success – not it’s failure – we subsequently carry the burden of a sobering existential obligation; to responsibly model the end game and exit strategy for industrialization, so that other nations and civilizations may follow. This is not hubris, this is accountability.
Just 235 years into our American experiment, it would number among history’s greatest travesties should we arrive at this pinnacle of achievement, only to collapse under the obesity of our own gross overconsumption, strident fundamentalism, and self-entitled, hoarded super abundance. In the context of the sheer scale of our technological achievements, history will mock us far more harshly than it mocks the downfall of earlier experiments in Democracy. Yes, looking back, it is oh so easy to see the obvious mistakes that those unenlightened ancients made. Surely, we are so much more sophisticated than they. Or are we?
Current Economic Reality Author Philip K. Dick wrote, timelessly, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn’t go away.” Today, we can’t get away from the inescapable reality that we live in the miraculous, robotized, space-faring, techno-utopian future imagined by our 18th century founders. We’ve made it. We have arrived. Great, great, great Grandma and Grandpa would be proud. Except for the fact that we haven’t slowed down for even a nanosecond, to take notice, to reflect. To introspect. To understand.
Accelerating change, like the very universe around us, is accelerating itself. How can something infinite, be expanding? Yet, that’s what we observe, thanks to the kind of fundamental research that enables Nobel Prizes. This is the reality that won’t go away, even if we close our eyes, hearts, and minds to it. We observe and interact with multiple artificial intelligences – from sophisticated, high frequency trading stock market bots to smartphone apps – extended and amplified human minds, where millions of hipster hip pockets are packed with a full blown Global Multicast Station, live-streaming anywhere an internet packet carrier signal can be found; where augmented social cognition, and synthetic life are ho-hum, everyday features.
So cheers to us! We made it. We have arrived. I'll hazard to propose that it’s safe to say, from such a vantage point, no thoughtful person argues against the fact that 19th century industrial capitalism is the very best way to transition a society from agriculture, to industry, to material abundance. Of course it is, okay Larry Kudlow? History has proved time and again that capitalism works -- for a particular phase of industrial development and cultural evolution. Today, we have successfully traversed that road. We did it! Good for us! Are we encouraging ourselves enough, yet? Maybe not.
Marshall McLuhan said, “The future of the future is the present; and that is something that people are terrified of.” An insight to which Alexi Murdoch might respond, “Its only fear, only fear … that keeps you locked in here.” So, we find ourselves living Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, hunkered down in isolation, hoping Kurzweil’s Singularity will be nice to us.
People are confused. Utterly dependent on vestigial routines staying the same, even as accelerating change has become the new normal. Yet, somehow, we know deep down in our knowers that 19th century methods are simply not viable means for adapting to the sustainable 22nd century planet, presently under construction. Right now, today, we are creating that world.
NOTE: Unfortunately, MSNBC's clip-n-share didn't generate a new thumbnail for this second clip; it's not a dupe. So, mute the commercial if you prefer, but please don't skip it, it's brief and explains the corrosiveness of relative poverty better than I'm able in this short space.
Clip: "This really isn't about Wall Street, it's about a society in which our values are out of whack," says Howard Dean. No less than former libertarian and Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan is equally quick to explain that growing and unsustainable resource skews threaten American Capitalism, itself. Yet, from Hollywood, to Silicon Valley, from Hamptons cocktail conversation to tea party affairs, relative poverty is dismissed as irrelevant, when compared the the utter blight of absolute poverty. A mistake that both cocktail and tea party crowds make is failure to accurately assess the corrosiveness of all poverty, period. Relative poverty is, in essence, another thinly veiled form of institutional corruption; a topic that Lawrence Lessig has been tirelessly educating us about, for years (Loss of Trust and Other Ramifications of Institutional Corruption). As Howard Dean and Joe Scarborough put it, “When Americans no longer believe in the system, then you know we have crossed the Rubicon."
The Poor Will Always Be With You Without waxing religious, many readers will doubtless be playing that partial tape in their heads. The poor will always be with you. It’s a convenient cliché commonly used in proper prosperity gospel company to dismiss our own personal responsibility with full Pharisaical self-righteousness. Jesus was not exactly the most cynical character in history. He wouldn’t say, “The poor will always be with you, so feck ‘em.” Rather, he said in a hundred different ways: take compassion on, and care for everyone in the community. Take care of the least. When you take care of the least, you care for me. It’ll be easier for a rich man to get through the eye of a needle; and so on. This isn’t the place for a sermon, only to dismiss another fatuous objection to doing the right thing for our communities, our country, and humanity.
I have no doubt that the best place for mainstreamers to begin getting educated about the magnitude of poverty in America will be Tavis Smiley and Cornell West’s collaboration, “The Poverty Tour: A Call to Conscience“ series now airing on PBS, October 10-14, 2011.
“Poverty in the United States is cyclical in nature, with roughly 13 to 17% of Americans living below the federal poverty line at any given point in time, and roughly 40% falling below the poverty line at some point within a 10-year time span. Poverty is defined as the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 43.6 million (14.3%) Americans were living in absolute poverty in 2009, up from 39.8 million (13.2%) in 2008. The poverty level for 2011 was set at $22,350 (total yearly income) for a family of four. Seriously. Imagine a couple trying to live on $22,000, let alone four. No individual will be riding high on the hog with a $1,200 monthly Basic Income Guarantee, or $14,400 annually, in 2011 US dollars. The 2006 American Enterprise Institute book, “In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State” called for $10,000 annually.
Similarly, when commentators use the inconsequential sounding, "15% of Americans are poor," remember that means 15% in absolute poverty. Like understatements of unemployment that use the low-ball U3 number instead of the closer-yet-still-understated U6 number, beware the "15% poor" deception. At least double that number barely subsist, not far above the official boundary. Don't just believe us or the commentators; double check our numbers and sources, do the homework for yourself at the U.S. Census Bureau and online. We're always happy to publish your corrections and better data.
So the fundamental challenge – and it is mostly a mental frame of reference challenge – at this historic juncture, is to continue the American Legacy of Einstein who said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge," of Henry Ford, “A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business,” of Abraham Lincoln, “The fiery trials through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation,” and of Patrick Henry, "Give me liberty or give me death."
“As if” Liberty is not American Liberty Wage slavery is not liberty. Working paycheck to paycheck, often at more than one job, in order to provide just the essentials of life is exactly the life that our sharecropper great grandparents lived. Work the land as if it were you own, but it will never actually be yours. You are owned, cradle to grave. That’s not the 21st century that our forebears had in mind.
America's opportunity and obligation today is to demonstrate the real incentive for the billions of human beings living on less than $2/day to adopt the model that served us so well, to pass the baton to them – not by clawing back 19th century manufacturing jobs that they need to advance – rather, by proving the attainable pay-off. The actualization of authentic and abiding liberty from tedious toil, and the flourishing realization of substantive economic justice for all.
Let’s be clear, my fellow Americans: liberty from tedious toil has nothing to do whatsoever with the end of WORK. Nor does the end of the J.O.B. as the only legitimate Justification Of Being as a contributing, valued member of civil society spell the end of productivity. As you study the dozens of web sites linked herein, you will learn that the concepts of work and job are as different as hope is from optimism. The former will always be with us; the latter are merely indicators of a particular set of conditions.
Where Do We Go From Here? There are a number of ways to demonstrate true American Leadership for the 21st and 22nd century, to not reject the dynamism of free markets, but to increment Capitalism (to use the programming notation, Capitalism++) into healthy and sustainable hybrid econo-systems. Most assuredly, new ways and means to raise the bar for humanity will emerge as the extended and augmented intelligence of the global cognition grid evolves, adapts, and becomes an increasingly natural and seamless feature of the fabric of global civilization; what Kevin Kelley refers to as The Technium; toward what Ray Kurzweil refers to as the Singularity.
Presently, there are two undeniably obvious realities which we can leverage to our advantage. First, and this one might surprise you, Wall Street's very own A.I. High Frequency Trading bots Secondly, over a half century of exhaustive and comprehensive scholarship and successful Case Studies for a Basic Income Guarantee; a simple matter of scaling up the long successful Alaska Permanent Fund. The two are like peanut butter and chocolate.
The first proposal is straightforward. Clusters of HFT bots can be programmed to maximize revenue for a handful of people, or they can be instructed to fund Basic Income. Yes, we still want and need markets. Yes, the coolest new cars and electronics might come from Namibia in 2024; good for them, is good for all of us. Yes, there will still be people astronomically richer than most of us. No, there will be nobody living in tents, cars, or under bridges for want of sufficient minimal greenbacks or equivalent. Mental health and homelessness? Yes, an ongoing challenge. In every case, Basic Income is a permanent economic stimulus that will only improve corporate sales.
Note to Wall Street: If your mighty trading bots are smart enough to create the Giant Pool of Money and fractal tranche synthetic CDO's, then they're smart enough to figure out #BasicIncome in the U.S. and worldwide. You don’t get it both ways. As for the second approach, oil is rightly accounted the common resource of all Alaskans, hence the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD). Similarly, so is the collective output of our highly advanced technium: aka, our GDP, the sum of all our efforts. From veritable armies of unpaid parent-labor raising the next Intel or IBM executives FOR FREE; to tutors; to volunteers; to peer counselors and friends and clerics who provide everyday psychological services that would otherwise cost hundreds of millions of dollars on the open market. People's lives contribute inherent value. Social capital is the substance of all enduring value.
Couch Potatoes, Cheetos, and the Idiot Box The raggedly tired 18th century Protestant specter, as we all know, goes something like this: “most of you – yes, you, readers – will sit in front of a 1950’s style 3-channel broadcast idiot box with a bag of Cheetos all day, happy to barely breath or think, bloating to maximum body mass and then popping in 40 or 50 years, all on a $1,200/mo. basic income.”
The first and most obvious problem with that argument is that this is the year 2011. Similar to opposition of marijuana legalization, people who are prone to do that are obviously already doing so. Remember the part about reality being that which doesn’t go away, just because you don’t believe in it? Yep, they’ll probably continue to do so until we learn better ways to reach them and help them heal; all too often from the injuries of post traumatic stress disorder suffered in childhood, at the hands of abusive parents who themselves were being pummeled by poverty – absolute and relative – who didn’t know any better themselves, for absence of role models, and were ill equipped to protect themselves and their families from the devastating psychological impacts of fighting for survival in such a hostile environment.
Moreover, as varieties of self-destructive behavior becomes apparent, this too is of greater benefit, for we will finally be able to better identify those of you – yes, you, if you choose to play the humans are lazy sloths card, because you likely most fear that others will act as dysfunctionally as you suspect of yourself – who need the help, education, and encouragement to lead normal, functional, balanced and productive lives.
The New Normal++ For most of us, the Basic Income Guarantee will simply encourage us to not give up in between work assignments; to not settle while seeking the best opportunity for both us and our next employer collaboration; maybe, to scrape by long enough to really create that work of art or literature; or enable these 40 lazy space engineers to keep helping that amazing, game-changing startup until they can connect with customers to really make a go of it. Instead, those engineers will be on the skids; told that they are not above taking a job at McDonalds or Wal-Mart if that’s what it takes to be a responsible human being.
The old normal wouldn’t blink to say, “yep, unemployed rocket scientists should compete with high school kids at McDonald’s if those are the only jobs available.” Utterly absurd.
Human beings are inherently industrious; not indolent, slothful, and lethargic. If humans were so deficient by nature, we would literally be hanging from our toes in the trees along side our kin, or evolution would have taken us out, long, long ago. We are not lazy and useless, by nature. We are imaginative, daring, productive, adventurous, curious, persistent, and creative creatures.
That's what implementing a Basic Income Guarantee says about us. That’s why we utterly reject the cynical, hateful violence of the brutish, bare-knuckles political opposition who's only arguments consist of red-baiting character bashing, "we'll become like those lazy Europeans, Marxists, Communists!" Oh, do you mean those lazy Europeans at CERN who invented the World Wide Web and are now pursuing the Higgs boson? Or the scientists in Moscow who put the first human being into space and without whose cooperative leadership there could be no International Space Station?
Bottom Line: The truly lazy people are those too torpid to think through the opportunities and obligations incumbent upon our generation. Here is what laziness looks like in 2011: demanding predictable, interchangeable, easily performed jobs, jobs, jobs, so you can vacate your mind for 8 hours a day of monotonous distraction and then go home and consume, consume, consume the rest of the planet into oblivion. That, is laziness.
The fear of Breaking the Job Trance is what keeps us locked in here. Maximizing human opportunities to do exciting and meaningful WORK is the solution. That simple distinction may be the most important one that we realize, stepping forward, leveling up our world game, to Capitalism++.
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Posted to ethernettv.net
IBM “Think Friday”– How to Migrate the #99percent to 4 Day Work Week
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EthernetTV/~3/DMC6A7fAknQ/541
Wow? Could it really be possible? Finally, organizations are understanding that THINKING is actually one of most valuable activities in existence? Yes, yes, yes, execution is everything; but as we’ve written for years, without the best IDEAS to execute upon, what have you got? Nothing! It takes both. Of course, anyone who has tried to implement technological or organizational change knows that human behavior and culture are the biggest blockades, by far. People will gnaw your fingers down to knuckles if you dare to ruffle their comfortable, however dysfunctional or redundant, routines. Maybe for the skeptic, “Think Friday” is also partly a genius way to tell middle muddle managers, bean counters, and HR #DefaultReality #StatusQuo control freaks that “we’re not really giving them time off …” — which isn’t a bad thing either, seeing as a 4 Day Work Week and guaranteed Basic Income are two immediate policy measures that could soak up the surplus Human Attention in our society and provide it the stable base required to take pure innovation to incredible new levels.
For those searching for how to adopt basic income, or how to pragmatically implement an immediate basic income guarantee, in 2008, two states, Oklahoma and West Virginia, looked into the feasibility of requiring a four-day work week in two legislative sessions. As the stock market executed it’s current head fake higher, enthusiasm may have waned. The reality of today’s labor situation should reanimate this interest, to say the least.
- Tags:
- economics
- society
- futuretechture
- work
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Posted to apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com
Where Do We Go From Here? Martin Luther King Jr. on #BasicIncome #99percent #OccupyWallStreet #OccupySF #OWS
"We are demanding an emergency program to provide employment for everyone in need of a job, or if a work program is impractical, a guaranteed annual income at levels that sustain life and decent circumstance." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? 1967.
Follow @Livable4All and @BasicIncome
- Tags:
- economics
- basic income
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Posted to apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com
Recalcitrant Religious Fundamentalism #OccupyWallStreet #LondonDeclaration
High Priests protecting the Golden Calf while Monetary Mullah's observe, from on high.
Source: TheAtlantic
London Declaration: Immutable Human Right #1: Freedom from Poverty.
"We, the signatories to this ‘London Declaration for Global Peace & Resistance against Extremism’, affirm that all humans everywhere possess inherent dignity and immutable rights: these including freedom from poverty, oppression, fear and prejudice and freedom of belief, worship and expression."
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- economics
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Posted to ethernettv.net
How to Fix The U.S. Budget Deficit: Turn off Cable News and Turn on Transparency TV
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EthernetTV/~3/YCYQLgn2ddQ/527
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Posted to apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com
The End of Poverty
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ApprehendingPostscarcity/~3/pa-weKSexeU/end-of-poverty.html
A Feature Film
John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, author, "24,000 people die every single day from hunger and hunger related diseases. At least 24,000. That doesn't need to happen, we have plenty of resources, so that shouldn't happen; it happens because of the system we've created. We can say, without a doubt, that this system is an absolute failure. From the most rational, objective economic standpoint it's a failure. Less than 5% of the world's population live in the United States. We are consuming over 25% of the world's resources and creating roughly 30% of it's major pollution. That's a failure."
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- postscarcity
- economics
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Posted to apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com
Idiocracy vs Postscarcity
Mark Taylor in Nature News suggests that we mustReform the PhD system or close it down. Awesome. Are we so pathologically obsessed with the status quo that we'd actually institute a systemic policy that intentionally retards the advance of knowledge and the continued growth of human intelligence? Really? It's not news to readers of this space that: Higher education in the United States has long been the envy of the world, but that is changing. The technologies that have transformed financial markets and the publishing, news and entertainment industries are now disrupting the education system. We'd rather shut down universities than contemplate ways to transcend this brief blip, this historical aberration known as the industrial capitalist, and post-industrial information revolutions? Why not declare victory, and move on to the next model? On the other disheartening hand, if the best that our best and brightest "surplus PhD's" can collectively figure out is to turn back to pre-middle ages, perhaps we deserve the inevitable zombie apocalypse idiocracy, after all.
Dude, that would totally suck. Let's please not.
- Tags:
- postscarcity
- economics
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Posted to google.com
No Great Stagnation: TV Remote Control Device, 1976
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/marginalrevolution/hCQh/~3/bw2i_7gFzdw/no-great-stagnation.html
United States Patent 3962748 and no, this is not from the Onion.
Hat tip: Boing Boing.
- Tags:
- economics
- Television
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Posted to ethernettv.net
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, When is the Next AIG to Fall? | Marc Faber
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EthernetTV/~3/SPsd7CTni8U/
- Tags:
- economics
- Ethernet TV
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Posted to google.com
The Snowe Job, and Why a "Trigger" for a Public Option is Nonsense (via feedly)
http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/09/snowe-job-and-why-trigger-for-public.html
Shared by @silverton: As tweeted earlier http://twitter.com/silverton/status/3902022666 ... leave it to Dr. Reich to expound the rationale PRECISELY!
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I was just on the phone talking with a reporter for a national media outlet who referred to Senator Olympia Snowe's idea for a public option "trigger" as the "centrist position." Whoa. When the mainstream media start naming something as "centrist" the game is almost over because just about everyone with any authority in our nation's capital wants to be at the "center."Let me back up a step. The public insurance option has become a lightening rod for Republicans, hate radio jocks, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, and lobbyists for the health-industrial complex who accuse the White House and Democrats of planning a "government takeover" of health care. Anything that has the word "public" in it is always an automatic target for their rants. But most Democrats understand that a public insurance option is essential to control healthcare costs and expand coverage -- both because private for-profit insurers now face so little competition in most markets that only the prod of a public option will force them to lower costs and extend coverage, and also because a nationwide public option would have the scale and authority to negotiate lower rates with drug companies and healthcare providers, thereby pushing private insurers to do the same.The White House is looking for a way to be in favor of a public option but also get enough Blue Dog Democrats -- many of whom hail from swing districts and states, and therefore need some cover -- to vote for it. One such cover is a Republican Senator from Maine, named Olympia Snowe. If she votes for the bill, Blue Dogs can calm their constituents -- who have been worked up into a lather by the right -- by saying "you see? Even a prominent Republican senator is voting for this."So will Snowe play ball? It depends. Her idea (evidently encouraged by Rahm Emanuel, the President's chief of staff) is to hold off on any public option. Give the private insurance companies a period of time -- say, five years -- within which to make changes that extend coverage to more people and also drive down long-term costs. If those goals for coverage and cost aren't met by end of the five-year grace period, kaboom: the public option is triggered -- which will force such changes on the insurance companies.The beauty of Snowe's proposal is that it seems to offer Blue Dogs a way out and liberal Democrats a way in. Nobody has to vote for or against a public option. The public option just happens automatically if its purposes -- wider coverage and lower costs -- aren't achieved. And the trigger idea seems so, well, centrist.The problem is twofold. First, it's impossible to design airtight goals for coverage and cost reductions that won't be picked over by five thousand lobbyists and as many lawyers and litigators even if, at the end of the grace period, it's apparent to everyone else that the goals aren't met. Washington is a vast cesspool of well-paid specialists who know how to stop anything resembling a "trigger." Believe me, they will.Second, any controversial proposal with some powerful support behind it that gets delayed -- for five years or three years or whenever -- is politically dead. Supporters lose interest. Public attention wanders. The media are on to other issues. Right now the public option is very much alive because so many Democrats care deeply about it, with good reason. But put it off for years, and assign it to the lawyers and lobbyists I just mentioned, and you can kiss it goodbye for ever.If the idea is to have a public option waiting in the wings in case private insurers blow it, why wait for it at all? If it gets lower costs and wider coverage, it should be included right from the start.What worries me isn't just that the mainstream media are calling Snowe's trigger "centrist," but that the White House might see it as an easy out. "I continue to believe that a public option within that basket of insurance choices would help improve quality and bring down costs," the President said Monday. Fine. But he hasn't yet said the public option is essential. He hasn't threatened to veto a bill lacking it. There's even reason to believe the White House has quietly encouraged Olympia Snowe to pursue her "trigger."The best way to give Blue Dogs cover is for the President to explain clearly and boldly why the public option is essential to health care reform, and why he's ready to veto any bill that doesn't include it. That's also the only way to give the nation a good chance of getting true health care reform. Hopefully, that's what he'll do Wednesday evening.Otherwise, we get a trigger to nowhere. [extracted from The Snowe Job, and Why a "Trigger" for a Public Option is Nonsense via feedly] -
Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
US unemployment is 18.2% counting “the old-fashioned way”
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=1166
The unemployment timebomb is quietly ticking. One dog has yet to bark in this long winding crisis. Beyond riots in Athens and a Baltic bust-up, we have not seen evidence of bitter political protest as the slump eats away at the legitimacy of governing elites in North America, Europe, and Japan. It may just be a matter of time. SOURCE: Telegraph.co.uk. Do keep in mind that in America, some of the “governing elites” may inhabit Washington, D.C. but the vast majority do not. So, for the sake of those who would like to turn back the clock to some mythical Good Old Days, which never were, you might be surprised to find the ol’ rose-colored lenses a bit more — how shall we put this sensitively — brownish in hue, compared to what you thought you recalled: The Centre for Labour Market Studies (CLMS) in Boston says US unemployment is now 18.2pc, counting the old-fashioned way. The reason why this does not “feel” like the 1930s is that we tend to compress the chronology of the Depression. It takes time for people to deplete their savings and sink into destitution. Perhaps our greater cushion of wealth today will prevent another Grapes of Wrath, but 20m US homeowners are already in negative equity (zillow.com data). Evictions are running at a terrifying pace. [Emphasis mine].
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Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
Pondering SEO++
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=1097
Reading this post from Activating WOM reminds me of listening to one of my SEO friends describe the challenges facing his business, not all that long ago. As I listened, realized that the initial SEO arms race is basically over. Everyone has a full stockpile of the exact same weapons from the last failed war. There is simply very little opportunity for meaningful marginal differentiation left between SEO providers. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, many of the same people who stand to gain most from the new social media arsenal, also seem to be largely ignoring some of the most refined new tools; or waiting for someone else to go first. Doesn’t that open the door wide open to gain an early mover advantage? “Yeah early,” you might think, “but isn’t it still too early?” That answer depends on where you want to position your company, brand, product, or service. There are already growing numbers of important benchmarks and Case Studies that bear out the effectiveness of word of mouth (WOM) methods that emerging super tools like PeopleBrowsr have instantiated. These tools are rolling out of production and into the active theater, right now. One representative example is the PepsiCo SXSW campaign that continues to evolve as Pepsico Zeitgeist. My very mention of these here is another testament to its ongoing success, because I personally get nothing, nada, Zilch from Zeitgeist! Yet, the brand just got more exposure. Moreover, if you wait until all these examples are all published in the HBR, McKinsey, or whatever, you’ll be far too late. Again. Why not strive to become that Featured Case Study, this time? Many brands — from the emerging local to the renewing global — will do just that by Activating WOM in 2009 and following suit in 2010. IMO, what Kevin and Jennifer are talking about is not just a trendy new way, but perhaps The Very Best Way to begin defining a more meaningful, practical, and personalized brand value differentiation; one that richly engages a target audience, right down to the core of individual customers. This would be a welcomed departure from recent decades of Death From Above, Business As Usual, during which, the very principles of brand differentiation have been largely hijacked by myopic, perspective-skewed supply-siders. Today’s sophisticated, would-be brand advocates and ambassadors see right through all that noise. Companies that seek to achieve brand loyalty through mass robotic SEO alone, should not be surprised with robotic results that include unenthusiastic, bar-coded, cookied, QR’d, numbered customers who only respond to the next brute force stimuli, come-on, or gimme-half-off gimmick. That’s far too labor intensive and costly to maintain over the long run. If brands want to win hearts and minds for decades at a time, to nurture and grow Legacy Grade brand loyalty, they have no choice but to win them over One At A Time; and the best way — nay, the only way — to do that is through Relationships that are built upon Authenticity and Trust. Toward that end, WOM has a long history of being the highest integrity, least obnoxious, and most reliable conduit for conveying those human values. Period. OTOH, learning how to create a sustainable, scalable WOM marketplace is not quite so straightforward. That’s where companies need all the help they can get. One drawback that I worry about is that if WOM devolves into a pure popularity contest that merely shifts existing resource skews around without enabling an ever more even flow model. I personally think that would utterly miss the mark. Thankfully, none of the credible business leaders exploring and exploiting such methods have ever said that such changes would be quick or easy; only that they would result in steady, sustainable growth of Longitudinal Brand Loyalty. Personally, I further suspect that the most innovative companies and brands will be those that demonstrate how to generously and proportionately allocate the direct financial benefits of this Conversation As Content across the entire value communication spectrum, including the social conveyers of those values themselves — from the most casual mentioner, to the most enthusiastic brand ambassador. These innovators will be numbered among the new banner brands of the post Great Recession economy, and services like Seesmic could have started to realize these disruptive revenue generating opportunities this long ago. Maybe Seesmic did listen to the community way back when (and even farther back) and we just haven’t seen the results, yet. I know that this is saying a mouthful and may be an attempt to compress too much into too small a space; I promise to try and do better to unpack in greater detail in a later post. In any event, these new business methods and models do eventually come full circle in a way that disrupts the old hardened categories and empowers new human capabilities by measured, pragmatic steps. We might also take some small comfort in the reminder that back in the day, people used to call a combination of slightly discomfiting cognitive dissonance and palpable possibility, the meandering, iterative path of progress. Onward!
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Posted to apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com
Paul Romer: Many Hong Kongs
http://apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com/2009/05/paul-romer-many-hong-kongs.html
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 12:28:40 -0700From: Stewart Brand Subject: Many Hong Kongs (Paul Romer talk)Repost from: [SALT] mailing listThis talk was the first public launch of an idea that Romer has been working on for two years.His economic theory of history explains phenomena such as the constant improvement of the human standard of living by looking primarily at just two forms of innovative ideas: technology and rules.Technologies rearrange materials with ingenious recipes and formulas. More people create more technologies, which in turn generates more people. In recent decades technology has enabled the "demographic transition" which lowers birthrates and raises income per person even higher as population levels off.Rules structure the interactions between people. As population density increased, the idea of ownership became an important rule. A supporting rule for managing violations replaced the old idea of deadly vengeance with awarding damages instead: simply shifting value replaced destroying value. For the idea of open science, recognition replaced ownership as the main event, which means that whoever publishes first is most rewarded, and that accelerates science.Rules can amplify or stifle technological progress. China was the world leader in inventing new technologies until about a thousand years ago, when centralized dynastic rules slowed innovation almost to a stop.Romer notes that business keeps evolving as new companies introduce new rule sets. The good ideas are copied, and workers migrate from failing companies to the new and old ones where the new rules are working well.The same goes for countries. Starting about 1970, China took some of the effective rules of Hong Kong (which was managed from afar by England) and set up four special economic zones along the coast operating as imitation Hong Kongs. They worked so well that China rolled out the scheme for the whole country, and its Gross Domestic Product took off. "Hong Kong was the most successful economic development program in history."Romer suggests that we rethink sovereignty (respect borders, but maybe import administrative control); rethink citizenship (support residency, but maybe import voice in political affairs); and rethink scale (instead of focusing on nations, focus on cities---on city states like Hong Kong and Singapore.)Paul Romer proposes that developing countries could invite instant Hong Kongs---new cities in new locations run by experienced governments such as Canada or Finland. They would enrich the country where they are built as special economic zones while also rewarding the distant government that makes the investment of building the new city state and installing a set of fair and productive rules. Over time, as with Hong Kong, the new city is turned over to the host country.The idea is getting some traction in the developing world. This summer Romer is going public with a Bridge Cities Institute website for further exploration and eventual application of the idea.One miracle of cities is that they sometimes renew themselves brilliantly. This could be a whole new form of that.-- Stewart Brand -- The Long Now Foundation -- Seminars & downloads at http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/
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Missed Paul Romer in Realtime
http://apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com/2009/05/missed-paul-romer-in-realtime.html
Darn it. Missing this event Right Now ... in realtime.
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Star Trek: Postscarcity Economics for Dummies?
http://apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com/2009/05/star-trek-postscarcity-economics-for.html
As far as I'm concerned, it's generally the chickenshit Status Quo Credibility Hedgers that hide behind the word "utopian," mostly because they are just too lazy or afraid to make the effort required to promote, provoke, and perpetuation progressive change. However, knowing that the world is as it is -- at least until we so-called utopians make it better for all of you; no thanks to your ankle biting -- it's worth noting small advances of popular awareness like this from Salon.com:[I]n the long run, suggests Romer and as potentially demonstrated by "Star Trek," the benefit of expanding knowledge and technological change will be widely distributed prosperity: an end to scarcity, a future where the fundamental challenge of providing for our basic needs has been solved.Click to read the rest of the story ...
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Echoes of a Post-Scarcity Prophet
http://apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com/2008/12/echoes-of-post-scarcity-prophet.html
Economist Paul Romer on growth, technological change, and an unlimited human future. From Reason Online, by Ronald Bailey.
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