Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 2515 – Public Intelligence Blog

Our economy is almost entirely based on a Darwinian competition–many products and services fighting for shelf space and market share and profits. It's a wasteful process, because success is unpredictable and unevenly distributed.

The internet has largely mirrored (and amplified) this competition. eBay, for example, not only pits sellers against one another, it also pits buyers. Craigslist makes it easy for buyers to see the range of products and services on offer, making the marketplace more competitive. Google, most of all, encourages an ecosystem where producers can evolve, improve and compete.

I think the next frontier of the net is going to use the datastream to do precisely the opposite–to create value by making coordination easier.

Continue reading “Seth Godin: Paradigm Shift toward Cooperation”

2011/06/18

GroupOn as a Ponzi Scheme–Collapse Soon?

Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

Why Groupon Is Poised For Collapse

Rocky Agrawal Jun 13, 2011

TechCrunch

EXTRACT:

Businesses are being sold incredibly expensive advertising campaigns that are disguised as “no risk” ways to acquire new customers. In reality, there’s a lot of risk. With a newspaper ad, the maximum you can lose is the amount you paid for the ad. With Groupon, your potential losses can increase with every Groupon customer who walks through the door and put the existence of your business at risk.

Groupon is not an Internet marketing business so much as it is the equivalent of a loan sharking business. The $21,000 that the business in this example gets for running a Groupon is essentially a very, very expensive loan. They get the cash up front, but pay for it with deep discounts over time. (This post applies to Groupon operations in the United States and Canada; it’s different in other parts of the world.)

In many cases, running a Groupon can be a terrible financial decision for merchants. Groupon’s financials also raise questions about its ongoing viability. Buying Groupon stock could be as bad a deal for investors as running a Groupon offer is for merchants.

2011/06/18

US Failure to Understand Pakistani Reality

08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Sense-Making, Military

I defer to NightWatch but it is the naivete of the IC that cannot
comprehend that the rest of the world does not look like the US……….This is territory that is NOT administered by the Government of Pakistan but rather by the Tribal Elders. The permission is required by Pakistani Law, something that the US continues to fail to understand. I guess, in the vain of old movies, “What we have here is a failure to communicate”……

Pakistan accused of tipping off more militants about raids

US officials want country to keep operations secret

By Kimberly Dozier Associated Press / June 19, 2011

Read full article….

2011/06/182011/10/22

Onset of Death for the Two-Party Tyranny….

07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government

Death of the Duopoly

Being binary is bad for business, so when will politics cure its bipolar disorder? Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch on the lessons Washington should learn from the real world.

By NICK GILLESPIE and MATT WELCH

Wall Street Journal, Saturday, June 18, 2011

Nothing in American life today seems as archaic, ubiquitous and immovable as the Republican and Democratic parties.

The two 19th-century political groupings divide up the spoils of a combined $6.4 trillion that is extracted each year from taxpayers at the federal, state, county and municipal levels. Though rhetorically and theoretically at odds with one another, the two parties have managed to create a mostly unbroken set of policies and governance structures that benefit well-connected groups at the expense of the individual.

Democrats and Republicans are at risk of becoming irrelevant, says Reason.com's Nick Gillespie, as more voters identify as Independents or with other groups like the Tea Party. He talks with WSJDN's Kelsey Hubbard about the shortcomings of the longstanding duopoly in American politics.

Americans have watched, with a growing sense of alarm and alienation, as first a Republican administration and then its Democratic successor have flouted public opinion by bailing out banks, nationalizing the auto industry, expanding war in Central Asia, throwing yet more good money after bad to keep housing prices artificially high, and prosecuting a drug war that no one outside the federal government pretends is comprehensible, let alone winnable. It is easy to look upon this well-worn rut of political affairs and despair.

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota: A Wall Street Journal informal poll shows 83% of respondents now ready to vote for a third party, with some excluding the Tea Party as flaky. Ralph Nader led this fight, others are finishing it. We are honored to be in that number.

Journal: ‘Systemic Corruption’–Daunting Challenge in Globalized Era

My Talk With Tom Atlee: Primer on Citizen Intelligence

Reference: Electoral Reform Act & Third Party Politics

Review: Griftopia–Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It (Paperback)

Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

2008 ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig

2011/06/18

Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Paul Fernhout

Alpha E-H, Public Intelligence

Paul Fernhout has been helping his wife (Cynthia Kurtz) develop Rakontu, a free and open source software communications and sensemaking tool for small purpose-driven communities that focuses on exchanging stories. He has hopes to expand Rakontu eventually into a broader Public Intelligence platform including a semantic desktop, simulations, narrative methods, visualization tools, and structured arguments. He has done some earlier work towards a FOSS social semantic desktop based on a triple store called “The Pointrel System“.

Building on something Albert Einstein said long ago about nuclear energy, he likes to remind people that in his opinion “The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity”.

Paul participated in Doug Engelbart's 2000 Unfinished Revolution II Colloquium hosted by Stanford University which discussed themes on public collaboration about solving pressing global issues in networked improvement communities, and he made several related email contributions. He believes Public Intelligence could be a way to build on Doug Engelbart's early innovations to collectively figure out how to use advanced technologies of abundance for the betterment of global society. He calls for the public funding of such tools in an essay entitled “The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc.” and also in an OpenPCAST suggestion to the US government on the same theme. He has written several essays on post-scarcity abundance themes, including speculations on reforming Princeton University and reforming the CIA into post-scarcity institutions. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, he wrote a parable about collective efforts by individually-weak abundance-minded actors in the presence of strong centralized scarcity-minded organizations, which he feels unfortunately has been all too prescient about the course of that war.

He is currently exploring the idea that there have always been at least five types of interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) with the balance between the five economies shifting due to cultural changes and technological changes.

Paul is a graduate of Princeton University (A.B. Psychology '85, same year as Michelle Obama), studied Ecology and Evolution at SUNY Stony Brook (M.A. Biology '93), and received a Navy Science Award for a robot he created for a high school science fair back before that was a common thing.

2011/06/182011/10/26

Event: 26 Oct 2011 Assisi Italy Pope, Peace, & Prayer — 5th Inter-Faith Event Since 1986 — Terms of Reference…

01 Poverty, 02 Diplomacy, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics

UPDATED 26 October 2011 (Vatican focus on global financial reform / authority, need for ethics – avoids addressing secular corruption as we suggested in below letter sent January 2011)

Penguin: Vatican Calls for World Government…Oopps

Vatican, Ethics, & Truth I (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

Vatican, Ethics, & Truth II (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

Occupy Wall Street’s Most Unlikely Ally: The Pope

Vatican Breaks Bread (Sort Of) With Occupiers

Cardinal Turkson: Beyond Wall Street

2011: Commercial Intelligence and Competitive Strategy in International Markets – Context and Challenge Inteligencia Empresarial y Estrategia Competitiva en Mercados Internacional – Contexto y Desafio

UPDATED 18 June 2011 (Turkey Rising, Truth, Convergence of Science & Religion)

Turkey Rising–21st Century an Ottoman Century?

Catholic Church Getting Serious About “Truth”

Review: God and Science–Coming Full Circle

Review: The Beginning of All Things–Science and Religion