John Robb: Global Economic Reset — And Surviving It

Communities of Practice, Officers Call, Policies, Resilience
John Robb

A Global Economic Reset? Don't Wait to Find Out. Build Something Better

By John Robb

Building a resilient life, home and community is its own reward.  It's simply the best way to live a good life.  However, there's also another reason to do it.  It's where the global system is headed, and the penalties for not starting early are steep.  To really understand this, here's a well-written and detailed report on how and why a collapse of our global financial and economic systems are likely to occur.

It's a new report called, “Trade Off” by David Korowicz.  Here's a quick summary:

  • The global financial and economic system is now a network. Everything is connected.
  • This system has become VERY big and VERY complex. It's simply beyond what government bureaucracies and markets were designed to manage/control.
  • Inevitably, as with all unstable systems that can't be manged/controlled, it will collapse. It will shrink to a size that can be managed through markets and bureaucracy.

As reports on this topic goes, it's very well written and provides quite a bit of conceptual detail.  However, as with ALL reports on this topic, it doesn't offer a solution.  Why? There simply isn't one available for the system as it is today. No fix. No patch. No tweak that will auto-magically fix our system's problems.  So, what happens when the global system resets? Nobody really knows, but….

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Rickard Falkvinge: Time for a War on Bathtubs (They Kill Five Times More People Than Terrorists Do)

Knowledge
Rickard Falkvinge

We Should Be Spending Billions Fighting Bathtubs, Not Terrorism

Falkving.net, 16 November 2012

Every year, on average, 40 Europeans die in terrorist attacks. When you compare the policies and billions plown down into this number, you quickly discover that we should not be spending billions to fight terrorism, but to fight bathtubs. Over five times as many people drown in bathtubs every year.

I’m a very strong proponent of evidence-based policymaking and putting quality requirements on the legislative process, and therefore, I require hard data to justify decisions and policy. When researching this topic, the strangest thing about the number of fatalities from terrorism wasn’t the number itself, but how hard it was to find. It seemed to never have been published anywhere by any single European bureaucracy. It seemed that policymakers weren’t interested in quantifying the threat.

You can find lots of data on terror in Europe (causes, groups, police forces, etc) when searching for it. You just can’t find what danger it actually poses.

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Patrick Meier: Twitter Maps and Videos Showing Hurricane Sandy in Real-Time, with Geospatial and Substance Tags

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial
Patrick Meier

The Most Impressive Live Global Twitter Map, Ever?

My colleague Kalev Leetaru has just launched The Global Twitter Heartbeat Project  in partnership with the Cyber Infrastructure and Geospatial Information Laboratory (CIGI) and GNIP. He shared more information on this impressive initiative with the CrisisMappers Network this morning.

According to Kalev, the project “uses an SGI super-computer to visualize the Twitter Decahose live, applying fulltext geocoding to bring the number of geo-located tweets from 1% to 25% (using a full disambigua-ting geocoder that uses all of the user’s available information in the Twitter stream, not just looking for mentions of major cities), tone-coding each tweet using a twitter-customized dictionary of 30,000 terms,

Click on Image to Enlarge

and applying a brand-new four-stage heatmap engine (this is where the supercomputer comes in) that makes a map of the number of tweets from or about each location on earth, a second map of the average tone of all tweets for each location, a third analysis of spatial proximity (how close tweets are in an area), and a fourth map as needed for the percent of all of those tweets about a particular topic, which are then all brought together into a single heatmap that takes all of these factors into account, rather than a sequence of multiple maps.”

Kalev added that, “For the purposes of this demonstration we are processing English only, but are seeing a nearly identical spatial profile to geotagged all-languages tweets (though this will affect the tonal results).” The Twitterbeat team is running a live demo showing both a US and world map updated in realtime at Supercomputing on a PufferSphere and every few seconds on the SGI website here.”

Read full post with two embedded short videos.

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SchwartzReport: Marijuana Legalization Reaches New High in National Poll

Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Law Enforcement, Politics

Marijuana Legalization for Personal Use Reaches New High in Poll

JUSTIN SINK – The Hill

We should remember that it was the states that ended Alcohol Prohibition. It began just as this is beginning, and went up quite quickly to the Federal level. I am not sure that this will happen the same way. Look for this: When it becomes politically dangerous to be anti-Marijuana. It will happen quicker with Representatives, because of their smaller concentrated populations, district by di! strict. I think this will drive the Senate to change as well.

But the opposition may be so bitter, that it is one of the first of the new development trends shifting power to the states. This is going to depend on what the Obama administration does.

A record 48 percent of Americans support legalizing small amounts of marijuana for personal use, just one week after three states voted to legalize the drug under some conditions – including Colorado and Washington's historic votes to allow the personal use and sale of pot.

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Owl: $20 Table Storms the World — Four Million Back Ordered

#OSE Open Source Everything, Hardware, Innovation, Software, Spectrum
Who? Who?

How a $20 tablet from India could blindside PC makers, educate billions and transform computing as we know it

“This is going to be revolutionary for the developing world”

On Sunday Nov. 11, the president of India, Pranab Mukherjee, will have unveiled the seven-inch Aakash 2 tablet computer Tuli’s company is selling to the government for distribution to 100,000 university students and professors. (If things go well, the government plans to order as many as 5.86 million.) In the meantime, Tuli is deluged with calls from reporters, and every day his company receives thousands of new orders for the commercial version of the Aakash 2. Already, he’s facing a backlog of four million unfulfilled pre-orders.

In developing countries, a $20.00 tablet is going have a profound impact:

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Berto Jongman: Shadow Banking & Tax Loopholes – With Comment by Robert Steele on Integrity & Automated Transaction Payment Tax

Economics/True Cost, Politics
Berto Jongman

Beyond Regulators' Grasp How Shadow Banks Rule the World

By Martin Hesse and Anne Seith

Spiegel, 11/14/2012

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.

Read full article.

Tango with the Tax Man Multinationals Find Loopholes Galore in Europe

Spiegel Staff

Spiegel, 11/14/2012

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.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Shadow Banking & Tax Loopholes – With Comment by Robert Steele on Integrity & Automated Transaction Payment Tax”