The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
The Dark Side of the Sharing Economy: Could Airbnb Accelerate Gentrification?
Neal Gorenflo
Shareable.net, 06.25.13
In the last week, two thought leaders in the sharing space, Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group and Anya Kamenetz of FastCompany, have written posts exploring the dark sides of the sharing economy.
Going viral, over 46,000 views.
English sub-titles, easily read.
By David Ignatius
Washingtonpost.com, July 5, 2013
For an illustration of why the federal government has become so unmanageable, consider the Air Force's attempt last year to cut its budget by retiring unneeded warplanes. This sensible policy ran into a shredder — largely because of the political clout of the Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve.
Governors united across party lines to protest the potential loss of their pet C-130s and other planes. Members of Congress lined up behind the potent lobbying pressure of the Guard and the reserves. The result: The Air Force was ordered not to make the cuts it thought were best for the nation’s defense, and it instead had to retain scores of planes it wanted to retire.
Read full article. Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Reserve C-130's as Poster Child for Strategic Dishonesty”
Huh?
3 NSA veterans speak out on whistle-blower: We told you so
In a roundtable discussion, a trio of former National Security Agency whistle-blowers tell USA TODAY that Edward Snowden succeeded where they failed.
When a National Security Agency contractor revealed top-secret details this month on the government's collection of Americans' phone and Internet records, one select group of intelligence veterans breathed a sigh of relief.
Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe belong to a select fraternity: the NSA officials who paved the way.
VIDEOS AT SOURCE — all text below the line.
Continue reading “Mini-Me: Three Pre-Snowden NSA Whistle-Blowers “WE TOLD YOU SO””
Here is some good news and some bad news. More jobs were created, but they are generally low level jobs, and 53 per cent of adult Americans still don't have jobs. We cannot have a prosperous democracy when over half the adults don't have secure full-time employment.
Only 47% of Adults Have Full-Time Job
MIKE FLYNN – Breitbart
EXTRACT:
Of the 144 million Americans employed last month, only 116 million were working full-time. Friday's report showed that 58.7% of the civilian adult population of 245 million was working last month. Only 47% of Americans, however, had a full-time job.
Paul Craig Roberts
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.
Do you remember the promise of the New Economy that was going to replace the lost “dirty fingernail” manufacturing jobs with innovative highly paid New Economy jobs? Well, the promise was just another deception from the elites who have stolen Americans’ future.
For the umpteenth consecutive month and year, the June BLS payroll jobs report (released on July 5) shows that the US economy has created no such jobs. The same old tired categories account for the same old lowly paid new domestic service jobs.
Marco Arment the creator of Instapaper, has an excellent and provocative piece on why Google is closing down all of its RSS appendages (they just closed also the RSS feeds in Google Alerts) and the logic behind this strategy.
He writes: “Officially, Google killed Reader because “over the years usage has declined”.1 I believe that statement, especially if API clients weren’t considered “usage”, but I don’t believe that’s the entire reason.
The most common assumption I’ve seen others cite is that “Google couldn’t figure out how to monetize Reader,” or other variants about direct profitability. I don’t believe this, either. Google Reader’s operational costs likely paled in comparison to many of their other projects that don’t bring in major revenue, and I’ve heard from multiple sources that it effectively had a staff of zero for years. It was just running, quietly serving a vital role for a lot of people.”
“The bigger problem is that they’ve abandoned interoperability. RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs all enable interoperability, but the big players don’t want that — they want to lock you in, shut out competitors, and make a service so proprietary that even if you could get your data out, it would be either useless (no alternatives to import into) or cripplingly lonely (empty social networks).
Google resisted this trend admirably for a long time and was very geek- and standards-friendly, but not since Facebook got huge enough to effectively redefine the internet and refocus Google’s plans to be all-Google+, all the time.4”
