MELBOURNE — Last month, two Australians moved into a pre-fabricated, architecturally designed, sustainably built apartment craned onto Melbourne’s Federation Square, dressed in nothing but their underwear and bathrobes.
For five days the couple, Millie and Adam, were asked to buy nothing new. They had to borrow, swap, rent, and source everything they needed — second hand.
Conceived by Tamara DiMattina, a Melbourne public relations professional, the aim of the New Joneses was to get people thinking about wasteful consumption. Though short-lived, the campaign gained widespread exposure in local, national and global media.
Philipp Saumweber is creating a miracle in the barren Australian outback, growing tonnes of fresh food. So why has he fallen out with the pioneering environmentalist who invented the revolutionary system?
Jonathan Margolis
The Observer, Saturday 24 November 2012
Desert blooms: Philipp Saumweber, the founder and CEO of Sundrop, with a tray of his “perfect” produce. Photograph: Jonathan Margolis for the Observer
The scrubby desert outside Port Augusta, three hours from Adelaide, is not the kind of countryside you see in Australian tourist brochures. The backdrop to an area of coal-fired power stations, lead smelting and mining, the coastal landscape is spiked with saltbush that can live on a trickle of brackish seawater seeping up through the arid soil. Poisonous king brown snakes, redback spiders, the odd kangaroo and emu are seen occasionally, flies constantly. When the local landowners who graze a few sheep here get a chance to sell some of this crummy real estate they jump at it, even for bottom dollar, because the only real natural resource in these parts is sunshine.
Infopolicy: A little-noticed report by the OECD sheds light on why the telco industry so forcefully prevents more and better internet connectivity to Europe’s entrepreneurs and households: the telcos are currently overcharging by five orders of magnitude by forcing people to use the telco network rather than the Internet.
An OECD report, referenced by Glyn Moody, describes how vastly more efficient the bottom-up Internet is compared to the old telco industry’s top-down model, and notes that in 99.5% of connection agreements on the Internet, there’s not even any written agreement signed. (In the telco industry, by contrast, you can’t even become an individual subscriber without signing written agreements.) The report uses this observation as a base to state that the telco industry has no business meddling with the net in its upcoming ITU meeting, just like the European Parliament declared in a resolution recently.
But the report also highlighted something else: the Internet provides a large superset of the services of the telco industry, at a cost five order of magnitudes less for the same service. In other words, the telco industry is currently overcharging for voice service by five orders of magnitude – that is, overcharging by a factor of 100,000 compared to market price for net connectivity. (This ties well in with our previous observations that the future sales value of voice and storage is exactly zero, but the OECD is arguably a much heavier voice than this site.) The telcos’ ability to do this – to prevent the net’s utility, the public interest, and economic growth – is entirely due to a gatekeeper position that comes from having strategically bought all the small ISPs in the infancy of the net’s commoditization. It is now completely against the telco industry’s interest to roll out internet connectivity at the pace of the public interest, so it doesn’t happen.
This gatekeeper position is not just used to prevent rollout of more connectivity – it is also used to prevent the existing connectivity from threatening the current ridiculous levels of overcharging (think voice apps on mobile phones, and how many telcos actively sabotage traffic from Skype and Viber, for instance).
It can be hard to digest this enormous discrepancy – an overcharge of five orders of magnitude – so let’s break it down into a household example.
If your phone bill was 500 euros last year, it should have been half a cent, according to the OECD:
Copyright and patent monopolies can be reformed to be less terrible, but in the long-term they need to be reformed into smithereens with a sledgehammer. Politically, this may be impossible. Practically, doing nothing to encourage creativity and innovation may not even be desirable. Erik Zoltan and I have a new alternative: the Payright System.
The full proposal is available here, but at 35 pages it’s a lengthy read. I’ll do my best to sum it up here.
Erik Zoltan
Erik Zoltan is the mastermind behind the Payright System; I only served as a contributing editor. Zoltan is the Massachusetts Pirate Party‘s co-founder and representative to the US Pirate National Committee. He can also divide by zero, count to infinity, and roundhouse kick Chuck Norris.
Copyright concerns the right to copy. Payright concerns the right to get paid. Under Payright, a creative work or invention can be distributed, modified, reappropriated, and built upon with no restrictions. If you monetize a work, you just have to share a predetermined percentage with the original creator(s).
The poker player and baseball nerd turned political forecaster won fame after predicting the result of the US election with uncanny accuracy. And as his star rises so too does that of a whole new generation of ‘quants' leading the digital revolution
Nate Silver is a new kind of political superstar. One who actually knows what he's talking about. In America, punditry has traditionally been about having the right kind of hair or teeth or foaming rightwing views. Silver has none of these. He just has numbers. Lots of them. And, on the night of the US presidential election, they were proved to be right in quite spectacular fashion.
Beyond the banking world, a parallel universe of shadow banks has grown in the form of hedge funds and money market funds. They're outside the reach of conventional financial regulation, prompting authorities to plan introducing new rules to prevent the obscure sector from triggering a new financial crisis. But in doing so they risk drying up an important source of funding to banks and firms.
Large multinationals, many of them based in the United States, are masters at avoiding taxes on profits made abroad. Apple, for example, paid just $100 million in taxes in 2010 on overseas profits of $13 billion. But Germany would like to put a stop to the practice, and is finding some influential support.
In Melbourne, meet the New Joneses
