Category: Commerce

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Y Combinator Hacker News Community’s Model for Info-Sharing & Potential for Collective Intelligence

03 Economy, 04 Education, 11 Society, Academia, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Hacking, Law Enforcement, Media, Military, Mobile, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence, Technologies

“Hacker News” has a welcome page and guidelines page offering an overview of what the organizers expect from those planning on posting comments and why it's good overall for the community.  I (Jason Liszkiewicz) was impressed with this. Hacker News has a solid number of participants and provides a simple and mature format for exploring and contributing thoughtful feedback, insight and resources.

It has a jobs link (mainly for engineers and programmers) and the “Ask Hacker News” link which enables the community to share information and reply to what is shared. Such a model (deemed an “experiment”) that provides mature and thoughtful information-sharing is something we need more of. Communities inter-linking with communities (or at least over-lapping) to spill over each others insights can be invaluable and potentially priceless.

Example: Ask HN: What do you perceive as worth spending money on?

This simple and useful model is something I hoped would emerge + converge from the SMS/text messaging developers at ChaCha.com (humans online responding to text messaged questions) or somewhere else. Converging multi-community info-sharing online, offline, and through the mobile world on a global scale is an exciting possibility.

The next level to all of this exists in the form of ideas or fragmented applications but it seems not beyond that, yet.

Email earthintelnet|at|gmail.com or post something at this new forum to discuss these ideas. Or, provide some mature and thoughtful feedback at the Hacker News community.

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Journal: Wal-Mart Wants to Screw 1.5 Million Women (Again, This Time in Front of the Supreme Court)

03 Economy, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence

Full Story Online

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block female employees from suing on behalf of as many as 1.5 million women in what would be the largest gender-bias suit against a private employer in U.S. history.

. . . . . . .

The company agreed in 2008 to pay as much as $640 million to settle 63 federal and state class actions claiming the company cheated hourly workers and forced them to work through breaks.

. . . . . .

The case is Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes.

Tip of the Hat to Monica Nixon at LinkedIn.

WAL-MART–Proud to be the Enron of the Retail Industry.

See Also:

Review: Wal-Mart–The High Cost of Low Price (2005)

Review: An Atlas of Poverty in America–One Nation, Pulling Apart, 1960-2003

Review: Big-Box Swindle–The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses

Review: No Logo–No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (Paperback)

Review: The Global Class War –How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win it Back (Hardcover)

Review: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Paperback)

Review: Nobodies–Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy

Review: Screwed–The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class — And What We Can Do About It

Review: The People’s Business–Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy

Review: State of the Unions–How Labor Can Strengthen the Middle Class, Improve Our Economy, and Regain Political Influence

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Journal: Contractors Accountable for Toxic Results

03 Economy, 09 Justice, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics, Officers Call

Strike Two on “Just Following Orders” Defense

David Isenberg
David Isenberg Author, Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq

Posted: September 9, 2010 04:28 PM

To paraphrase Yogi Berra it's déjà vu all over again for KBR.

In my Aug. 31 post I wrote about a significant pro-veteran ruling in the Oregon KBR Qarmat Ali litigation. This is the case where Oregon National Guard troops allege KBR's liability for negligence and for fraud arising out of plaintiffs' exposure to sodium dichromate and resultanthexavalent chromium poisoning while assigned to duty at the Qarmat Ali water plant in 2003.

Paul Papak, the federal district judge rejected the motion by KBR and co-defendants to dismiss the suit for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction and rejected it.

Read Entire Posting at Huffington Post

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Journal: UN on Food Security, It’s All Connected

Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

Full Article Online

Renewed instability in global food markets requires urgent response, UN expert said

An independent United Nations human rights expert today called on governments and the international community to promptly tackle the renewed instability of global food markets, noting the related social unrest that has hit some countries in recent weeks.

Tip of the Hat to Charles Rault at LinkedIn.

Continue reading “Journal: UN on Food Security, It's All Connected”

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Google, MSoft, IBM, HP, Oracle, Intel (chips), National Security and Perceived Internet Threats

04 Education, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 10 Security, Commerce, Computer/online security, Cyberscams, malware, spam, Government, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Technologies
  • U.S. Strategy: Control The World By Controlling The Internet
    A Chinese Perspective, by Chen Baoguo, August 24, 2010
    In May 2009, Microsoft announced on its website that they would turn off the Windows Live Messenger service for Cuba, Syria, Iran, Sudan and North Korea, in accordance with US legislation. In January 2010, Google, the company which owns the largest Internet information resources, declared that in order to establish a more open Internet environment, they had to abandon the Chinese market.What is even more worrying is that Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of US Homeland Security Committee, recently presented to the US Senate a bill titled “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset. “To control the world by controlling the Internet has been a dominant strategy of the US.From the network infrastructure protection of the Clinton era to the network anti-terrorism of the Bush era and to the “network deterrence” of the Obama era, the national information security strategy of the US has evolved from a preventative strategy to a preemptive one.Meanwhile, the methodology has moved from trying to control Internet hardware to control of Internet content.

  • Video: “The cyber-threat has been grossly exaggerated” debate between Marc Rotenberg & Bruce Schneier VERSUS Mike McConnell & Jonathan Zittrain

  • China Cyber-army Talk Pulled from Black Hat
    By: Brian Prince 2010-07-15
    A presentation on Chinese state-sponsored hacking has been pulled from the Black Hat security conference due to pressure from the Taiwanese government. The talk, titled “The Chinese Cyber Army: An Archaeological Study from 2001 to 2010,” was to be held by Wayne Huang, CTO of Web application security firm Armorize Technologies.
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Google: Post-Geographical, Post-National Super-State (Distorted Multi-Plex Eye)

Civil Society, Commerce, Corporations, Privacy, Technologies

Google’s Earth

By WILLIAM GIBSON
August 31, 2010

“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google.

Continue reading “Google: Post-Geographical, Post-National Super-State (Distorted Multi-Plex Eye)”

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Journal: Return on Investment Missing from IT World

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process
Full Blog Online

BI implementations fail because they are sold to the IT departments and not to the business users. The use case and ROI needs to be built with the business users. If that is not done, it results in:

  • high probability of self-ware
  • lack of ROI for the business user
  • a pure IT project not driven by the needs of the business

Phi Beta Iota: For decades we have been railing against the substitution of technology for thinking; the absence of processing power and analytic desk-top tool-kits, and so on.  We have also pointed out that “BI” is nothing more than data mining, that competitive intelligence ignores context, and that only commercial intelligence with a 360 view as well as historical and future forecast aspects will do.  Peter Drucker said in Forbes ASAP on 28 August 1998 that we have spent the past 50 years focused on the T in IT, and need to spend the next 50 focused on the I.  That is what this web site and the Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3 seeking donors, are focused upon.  The World Brain and Global Game, connecting all minds to all information in all languages all the time, is achievable.   Paul Strassmann was the first to point out in a very credible documented way that the ROI for most IT investments in the Fortune 500 is negative to neutral.  IT is not pulling its weight because IT has no strategy and no intellectual frame of reference, e.g. connecting dots to dots, dots to people, and people to people so as to achieve specified outcomes.

See Also:

Steele Brief to NSA in Vegas 2000