Lukas Biewald, 11.09.10, 04:00 PM EST for Forbes.com
How crowdsourcing will change the way the world works.
s the amount of digital work increases and the amount of physical work decreases, our notions of employment and work change profoundly. Digital work doesn't require roads and factories; it requires a laptop and an Internet connection–equipment that people have access to in their homes. The need for offices, supervisors and rigid employment arrangements diminishes.
As technology improves, companies should theoretically be able to access in real-time the perfect person for a given job–the one who will do the job the best, enjoy it the most or do it the fastest. All these factors combine in a way that will change the landscape of work. Here's what I think that will look like:–Within a decade résumés will become less important as we continue to adopt newer, multifaceted ways to measure the quality of a candidate's work.
How Voters Can Unrig the 2012 Elections with Transpartisan Voting Blocs and Electoral Coalitions
Voters did not get what they said they wanted from the 2010 elections. In fact, they got the opposite because the two major parties rigged the elections.
The parties have been rigging elections for decades by gerrymandering election districts and passing campaign financing and election laws that prevent third party candidates from beating major party candidates.
These rigged elections give voters no choice but to vote for one of the two major parties. So voters do the only thing they can do, which is to routinely kick out the major party incumbents in the futile hope that the new major party candidates they elect will not flout their will to the same degree. But regardless of which party candidates they vote for, they get roughly the same policies. These typically sacrifice voters' interests to the special interests that fund lawmakers' electoral campaigns.
Unless voters are empowered to put an end to rigged elections before the 2012 elections, using mechanisms like the one proposed below, the middle class and working Americans will be ruined financially by the lawmakers and special interests that are enabling the business and financial sector to take more than their fair share of national income.
Are charges that private military contractors commit egregious acts of fraud overblown? Not according to recent news. McClatchy Newspapers reports that the Louis Berger Group, one of the U.S. government's highest profile American contractors in Afghanistan has agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle allegations that it overbilled the U.S. government.
In return, the Justice Department will end its investigation into allegations that Louis Berger was intentionally overcharging American taxpayers. The settlement, which is just over $69 million, includes civil and criminal penalties.
Louis Berger's alleged overbilling, a practice that dates to at least the mid-1990s, swelled to tens of millions in lost tax dollars. In 2006, a former Louis Berger employee handed the government evidence against the company, two months before the U.S. Agency for International Development tapped Louis Berger to jointly oversee $1.4 billion in reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan.
Court documents reveal that the Justice Department has been negotiating a deal that would “aid in preserving the company's continuing eligibility to participate” in federal contracting in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
According to McClatchy Louis Berger is accused of manipulating overhead cost data and overhead rate proposals submitted to the U.S. government and several states including Massachusetts, Nevada and Virginia.
“YOUNGSTOWN – A model for tracking America's true joblessness puts the nation's figure at 30.5 percent in August, not the official 9.6 percent, a Youngstown State University labor analyst said Friday.
The YSU report shows the need not only for more government stimulus spending but also for a national industrial policy that includes tariffs and incentives to encourage business research and development, said John Russo, co-director of YSU's Center for Working-Class Studies.
Russo urged “a lot more money” for job training and greater investment to repair aging roads, bridges and other infrastructure, along with a program to encourage companies to hire and keep their business in the U.S…”
IIRC, anyone unemployed for one year plus one day falls off the unemployment rolls.
Tip of the Hat toOldTulsan 38 minutes ago (7:42 PM) at Huffington Post.
Citizens, state and local law enforcement play vital role in uncovering attacks More than 80 percent of foiled terrorist plots between 1999 and 2009 resulted from observations by citizens or law enforcement officials or from law enforcement investigations, according to a new report by the Institute for Homeland Security Solutions (IHSS) that reviewed open-source information on 86 foiled and successful terrorist plots against US targets from 1999 to 2009.
“Since 2001, the Intelligence Community has sought better ways to detect and prevent domestic terrorist plots, said Kevin Strom, senior research scientist and the report's lead author. “What this report reveals is the vital role played by citizens as well as state and local U.S. law enforcement agencies in uncovering such planned attacks.”
Years ago, Robert David Steele, a noted veteran intelligence officer, told HSToday.us that “fifty percent of the ‘dots’ that prevent the next 9/11 will come from bottom-up [local] level observation” and unconventional intelligence from “private sector parties.”
Does a Green Speed Bump Block the Road to Energy Independence?????? In this remarkable and remarkably unwelcome opinion piece, my good friend Robert Bryce, author of Power Hungry, explains why the subsidization of green technologies that are dependent on rare earth elements should not be justified as pathway toward energy independence, and in fact, could actually make the US more dependent on foreign energy related imports.
Over the past few months, industry and government officials in the U.S. and Japan have been increasingly alarmed as China, which has a near-monopoly on rare earths, has reduced its exports of those elements by some 40 percent. Adding yet more anxiety to the situation are projections about a possible shortfall in the supply of these elements. London-based Roskill Consulting Group, a research firm that specializes in metals and minerals, recently predicted that demand for rare earths could outstrip supply as soon as 2014. Rare earths are important because they have special features at the quantum mechanics level that allow them to have unique magnetic interactions with other elements. A myriad of “green” technologies — from electric and hybrid-electric cars to wind turbines and compact fluorescent light bulbs – depend on rare earths. And there are no cost-effective substitutes for them.
Clinton’s willingness to question China about rare earths is indicative of just how seriously the U.S. is taking the rare earths issue. But it also underscores a fundamental miscalculation by the U.S. and other countries when it comes the reconfiguration of their automotive fleets.
Over the last few years, a growing number of environmentalists and national security hawks have teamed up to denounce America’s dependence on foreign oil. Their solution: all-electric and hybrid-electric vehicles. Those vehicles, they insist, will help the environment while reducing oil imports from countries in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.
While that vision appeals to certain segments of the political class and to a myriad of subsidy-seeking corporations, the push to build more electric and hybrid cars will simply result in the U.S. trading one type of import dependence for another.
Those vehicles might cut oil consumption but they will dramatically increase America’s thirst for rare earth elements. And therein lies a crucial choice: We can continue to rely on the liquidity, price transparency, and diversity of the global oil market, the biggest market in human history. Or we can choose the “green” route. And in doing so, we will have no choice but to rely on the market for lanthanides, which is rife with smuggling, has no price transparency, and depends almost wholly on a single producer, China.
The Chinese control about 95 percent of the global market in rare earths, a group of 17 elements that includes scandium, yttrium, and the 15 lanthanides, the elements that occupy the second-to-last row of the Periodic Table. The most famous of the lanthanides is probably neodymium, a critical ingredient in the high-strength magnets used in motor-generators in hybrid cars and wind turbines.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a perfect example of what happens when a government is both ideologically driven and therefore not intelligence-driven, and when a government lacks a strategic analytic model that can clearly demonstrate how what might be good for one part of the system is bad for other parts of the system. This is called system INTEGRITY. Not only is the US bankrupt, according to the last Comptroller General to brief Congress on the subject in 2007, David Walker, but what the US government is borrowing and spending on in our name makes no sense at all from a public interest point of view.
An interview with legendary historian Lawrence Goodwyn on Obama, the larger currents in our political life, and the possibility of a rebirth in our democratic culture.
What happened to the dream of Barack Obama's transformational politics? There's been very little deviation from the disastrous Bush years on the key issues of war, empire and the distribution of wealth in the country.
I turned to Lawrence Goodwyn, historian of social movements whose books and methods of explaining history have had a profound influence on many of the best known authors, activists and social theorists of our time. Goodwyn's account of the Populist movement, Democratic Promise, is quoted extensively by Howard Zinn in People's History of the United States, and also in William Greider's masterpiece on the Federal Reserve, Secrets of the Temple. You can find Goodwyn quoted in the first paragraph of Bill Moyers' recent book, On Democracy, and cited in just the same way in countless other books and essays.
I interviewed Goodwyn from his home in Durham, North Carolina about the pitfalls of recording American history, Obama's presidency in light of previous presidents, and portents of change in our political culture.
Read Full Long Interview Online….
Contributor John Steiner says:
This is a remarkable, long, worth reading every word interview, in which Goodwyn compares Obama favorably with Lincoln and recounts the history of the financial elites in America. His concluding sentences: ³Strap on your
seat belts, Jan (Frel). The election in 2012 is going to define the meaning of the American idea.
Phi Beta Iota: There are two major flaws with this Democratic Party love-fest: 1) the Democrats are just as corrupt as the Republicans, just more inept; and 2) Obama will not get a second term because he sold out–anyone who had Rahm Emanuel as his “enforcer” and that still has Axelrod as his advisor,while also installing a Goldman Sachs lobbyist as “national security advisor,” is part of the existing system, not its antithesis. Independents and Electoral Reform (13 Steps) will produce the outcome Goodwyn posits, not Obama and not the Democratic Party.
