The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
A 10 Year Vision: Future Trends in Geospatial Information Management
The United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM) recently published their second edition of Future Trends in Geospatial Information Management. I blogged about the first edition here. Below are some of the excerpts I found interesting or noteworthy. The report itself is a 50-page document (PDF 7.1Mb).
Cryptosecession and the limits of taxation
Cryptosecession is the use of cryptographic and blockchain-based technologies (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitnation) to economically secede from incumbent institutions—namely, the state. Jason is at the 2016 Public Choice Society conference at the moment, where he’ll be presenting a paper in which we show that the threat of cryptosecession exerts an even greater limitation on government over-taxation than fiscal federalism and political secession. Things aren’t altogether rosy, though, because this elicits a sort of ‘arms race’ between secessionists and the state. All depends on the ability to secede to the ‘crypto economy’, which in turn depends on the relative development of crypto technologies of opacity (or resistance) versus state technologies of legibility (or control). The paper can be viewed here and slides for the talk are here. Below is the abstract, and a couple of slides that sum up the argument: Read more.
Finland's hugely exciting experiment in basic income, explained
The headlines are shocking: “Finland plans to pay everyone in the country $876 a month”; “Finland plans to give every citizen a basic income of 800 euros a month”; “Finland plans to give every citizen 800 euros a month and scrap benefits.”
The reality is a little less wild. Finland is definitely not close to paying “everyone in the country” or “every citizen” — not yet, anyway. What it is doing is weighing a proposal for a basic income: an approach to welfare in which residents would get a flat amount of money every month, regardless of how rich they are. Read more.
I read “This Renowned Mathematician Is Bent On Proving Academic Journals Can Cost Nothing.” If you are not an academic, you may not know that some folks pay the publisher to publish one’s research report, journal article, or wild and crazy summary of non reproducible results.
Good business? You betcha. I remember a meeting a decade ago at the Cornell Theory Center. I asked if a faculty member who published in an online journal would be recognized for the work. The answer, not surprisingly, was, “No.” Flash forward to today. Many institutions like the estimable University of Louisville prefer their wizards’ write ups to be in prestigious paper journals. Sure, maybe a short item in the Harvard Business School blog will get some blue or green stars. The gold ones, from what I have heard, go to the expensive, paper journals like those from the ever savvy Elsevier outfit.
The write up states: read more.
The P2P foundation is building the knowledge base and the commons that may form the core of a new kind of society further down the road…
As of 2016, the P2P Foundation’s structure has been reorganized around three interdependent operational hubs: the Foundation itself, Commons Transition and the P2P Lab.
To know more about our recent achievements, read our 2015 review, or click here for more.
The Promise of Bitcoin: An Interview With Andreas M. Antonopoulos
My recent interview with Andreas M. Antonopoulos, information security expert and tech-entrepreneur, and the author of “Mastering Bitcoin”.
EXTRACT:
2. Bitcoin is simultaneously a currency, a financial asset, and a technology protocol. Underlying bitcoin is the blockchain, a distributed public ledger. For people who are not intimately familiar with either bitcoin or blockchain, could you briefly explain what these technologies consist of?
The blockchain is a distributed database. The magic of bitcoin comes from sharing control over that distributed database through a consensus mechanism called “Proof of Work”. This ensures that no one is in control of bitcoin and that it operates based on predictable rules.
3D Printer Build Workshops Survey
This form is used to collect data on past and existing 3D printer build workshops. The goal is to gain insights on whether the DIY 3D Printer Build Workshops can scale to broader participation as a self-sustaining revenue model. The results of this form are public information, visible in the results spreadsheet (http://bit.ly/1TMVEcY). Test of form took 11 minutes to complete. This form is published under the CC-BY-SA license by Open Source Ecology (http://bit.ly/QixCrU).
