#OSE Open Source Everything – Page 229 – Public Intelligence Blog

By Spengler

Asia Times, Nov 27, 2012

It is symptomatic of the national condition of the United States that the worst humiliation ever suffered by it as a nation, and by a US president personally, passed almost without comment last week. I refer to the November 20 announcement at a summit meeting in Phnom Penh that 15 Asian nations, comprising half the world's population, would form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership excluding the United States.

President Barack Obama attended the summit to sell a US-based Trans-Pacific Partnership excluding China. He didn't. The American led-partnership became a party to which no-one came.

Instead, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, plus China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, will form a club and leave out the United States. As 3 billion Asians become prosperous, interest fades in the prospective contribution of 300 million Americans – especially when those Americans decline to take risks on new technologies. America's great economic strength, namely its capacity to innovate, exists mainly in memory four years after the 2008 economic crisis.

Continue reading “Gold Transformer: Post-US world born in Phnom Penh — But See Also CELAC Etcetera”

2012/11/282012/11/28

Rickard Falkvinge: Free Market Failure: Telcos Charge More For Sending A Text Next Door Than Cost Of Sending Data From Mars

BTS (Base Transciever Station)

Free Market Failure: Telcos Charge More For Sending A Text Next Door Than Cost Of Sending Data From Mars

Infrastructure: The telco industry charges more, kilobyte by kilobyte, for sending a text message from your phone to next door than what it costs to send the same message from Mars to Earth. This is the apex in this series of the dysfunctional telecom market, giving a background to why the telecom industry wants control of the Internet so badly, and is using every conceivable resource to stall, prevent, and delay its resulting economic development.

For the third installment in this series, we focus on text messaging. FoI reader Chris Monteiro suggested that we should describe how it is more expensive to send SMS text messages from your phone, kilobyte by kilobyte, than it is to send the same data from Mars to Earth. That couldn’t possibly be right, we thought, but nobody seemed to have done the math before.

So let’s do the math.

Continue reading “Rickard Falkvinge: Free Market Failure: Telcos Charge More For Sending A Text Next Door Than Cost Of Sending Data From Mars”

2012/11/28

SmartPlanet: IO Theme to Curb Unrest: Buy Nothing New

Economics/True Cost

In Melbourne, meet the New Joneses

By Lieu Thi Pham | November 28, 2012

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.

Meet the New Joneses — a social experiment in new consumption.

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.

The New Joneses is a product of DiMattina’s bigger Buy Nothing New Month (BNNM) initiative — an annual campaign which asks people to pledge via the website to buy nothing new in October, challenging them to buy only second hand, fix, reuse, recycle, swap, and share or rent necessities.

Read full article.

Continue reading “SmartPlanet: IO Theme to Curb Unrest: Buy Nothing New”

2012/11/282012/11/28

SmartPlanet: Mobile Phones Lifting Global Economy

BTS (Base Transciever Station)

Mobile phones lifting the world’s economies: report

By Joe McKendrick | November 27, 2012

The proliferation and adoption of mobile phones is having a tangible and measurable impact on the growth of many of the world’s national and regional economies. These devices are the lever that is lifting the world.

A new study estimates that a doubling of mobile data use leads to an increase of 0.5 percentage points in the GDP per capita growth rate across selected 14 countries, and that countries with higher level of data usage per 3G connections have seen increases in GDP per capita growth exceeding a percentage point.

These findings come from an assessment just released by the GSM Association and Deloitte, which looked at the incremental benefits of next-generation mobile telephony services, such as 3G technology and mobile data services, and their impact on economic growth. “Mobile services have the potential to impact economic development further through the provision of high-value 3G and 4G data services accessed via smartphones, tablets and dongles that deliver mobile data services to businesses and consumers,” the report states.

The report draws from research of data usage and economic growth across 14 countries provided by Cisco Systems based on their Visual Networking Index (VNI), as well as Deloitte studies on the productivity impact of mobile in 79 countries and the impact of 3G penetration across 96 countries.

Read full article.

Continue reading “SmartPlanet: Mobile Phones Lifting Global Economy”

2012/11/282012/11/28

SchwartzReport: Growing Food in Desert with Solarized Seawater — AND Stabilizes Sea Level

Economics/True Cost, Innovation, Knowledge, Resilience

Growing food in the desert: is this the solution to the world's food crisis?

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

Philipp Saumweber CEO of Sundrop perfect produce — 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.

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: Growing Food in Desert with Solarized Seawater — AND Stabilizes Sea Level”

2012/11/282012/12/16

2012 Steele for Branson: The Virgin Truth 2.6

Access, BTS (Base Transciever Station), Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Economics/True Cost, Education, Geospatial, Governance, Hardware, Innovation, Knowledge, Money, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Software, Sources (Info/Intel), Spectrum, Transparency

DOCUMENT (1 Page): Virgin Truth 2.6R

2012/11/272012/11/27

John McGuire: YouTube (13:30) The Dawn of Open-Source Self-Sovereignty & The Human Element

P2P / Panarchy

Phi Beta Iota: 13.5 minutes, a cry from the heart of America, useful as a moment of personal self-reflection.

A short video stressing the importance of Self-Evaluation, Identity Reclamation, and becoming an Agent for the Open-Source post-scarcity era. Thanks for your interest and support!