"I see a future computing world which is networked and platform independent. And that means gatekeepers of bandwidth and content will be the winners in that world. Over the short-term Microsoft and the telcos will play their part in protecting their legacy franchises in these arenas. But ultimately, people just want to get their content when- and where- ever they can. And that means the organizations which dominate the multi-device interfaces of the future will take on a leading role in technology, perhaps the leading role.…"

"For instance, there is the Rogue Factory unit producing "custom high-tech goods"—but "what would the black market of 'special orders' look like?" Benque asks. This "black market of 'special orders'" for things like 3D-printed human organs would also be something quite extraordinary to see, given another two decades' time and cheap-enough bio-ink."

"In the old world, Russia was the King Kong of conventional gas. It was like the U.S. on military spending: basically the equal of the ROW (rest of world).

But when you look at the unconventional gas reserves, it's Asia-Pac first, NorthAm second, and the former USSR a middling third. In short, rising Asia and the U.S. can suddenly cover themselves a whole lot more, making both Russia and the Gulf pretty minor by comparison. Remember that last Nov Obama and Hu announced a "US-China shale gas initiative" that promised a swap of US technology for investment opportunities in China. That's gotta spook the would-be "OPEC of gas.""

"Menand focuses on the elite institutions that still concentrate on providing an education in the arts and sciences, and argues that they have failed to respond to these and other painfully obvious problems because they remain stuck in patterns that were set a century and more ago. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he explains, scholars set out to create a limited free space in which they could set standards for the fields they practiced and for undergraduate and graduate training--a professional space dedicated, like the legal and medical professional spaces that took shape at the same time, to pursuing the general good rather than personal gain."

"These are provocative ideas. Very analogous to the ideas found in the ping hub discussions and the peer to peer discussions. It would be fun to try and build a heuristic prefeching/pushing privacy respecting http proxy server swarm along these lines. No doubt somebody already has."

"NPR has a nice graphic for where job growth will occur in the next decade based on US Bureau of Labor Statistics data (the NPR site is much cooler than the graphic above). Now, operations research is a little small to appear as a dot on its own, but if you look at that little dot far to the right, showing the most job growth? That is “Management, Scientific, and Technical Consulting Services”. And what field is all of “management, scientific and technical”? Operations Research, of course! The projection is for 82.8% growth."

"If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things. One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience."

"Robonomics: If robots and digital systems can do everything, let them--but let human society skim value from the result. This becomes a technologically-driven version of the Basic Income Guarantee model, where citizens are given a basic above-poverty income guarantee and are free to explore education, entrepreneurship, or even a life of indolence. Or they can get one of the remaining human jobs, jobs that may pay much more than they do now in order to attract people who otherwise wouldn't want the work."

"It turns out that many of the great waves of creative destruction that have reinvented Silicon Valley didn't start there. More important, they didn't even start with the profit motive.

Rather, they started with interesting problems and people who wanted to solve them, exercising technology to its fullest because exploring new ideas was fun."

"The former Communist countries generally turned, after the dismal failure of their postwar system, to market capitalism, replacing Karl Marx with Milton Friedman as their god. The new religion has not served them well. Many countries may conclude not simply that unfettered capitalism, American-style, has failed but that the very concept of a market economy ... is ... unworkable under any circumstances. Old-style Communism won’t be back, but a variety of forms of excessive market intervention will return. And these will fail. The poor suffered under market fundamentalism—we had trickle-up economics, not trickle-down economics. But ... these new regimes ... will not deliver growth. Without growth there cannot be sustainable poverty reduction. There has been no successful economy that has not relied heavily on markets. ... The ... governments brought to power on the basis of rage against American-style capitalism ... will lead to more poverty. ..."

"It’s true that stupidity and malevolence do sometimes play a role in the disruption of industries. But in the first part of this essay I’ll argue that even smart and good organizations can fail in the face of disruptive change, and that there are common underlying structural reasons why that’s the case. That’s a much scarier story. If you think the newspapers and record companies are stupid or malevolent, then you can reassure yourself that provided you’re smart and good, you don’t have anything to worry about. But if disruption can destroy even the smart and the good, then it can destroy anybody. In the second part of the essay, I’ll argue that scientific publishing is in the early days of a major disruption, with similar underlying causes, and will change radically over the next few years."

"This piece nicely argues that it's not the loss in income that matters to most Americans (we can adjust) but the loss of certainty. We can always belt-tighten and money only makes you so happy (no rise in happiness above $20k per capita per year--the world over), but this sense that we don't know what's coming next in the economy is truly paralyzing."

Graph #2 is particularly interesting

"China has 1/5 of the world's population. If life were fair, it would have 1/5 of the world’s water. It doesn’t -- China has just 1/14 of the world’s water supplies, and much of that is rank, dank, and polluted. You think oil is important? Try living without water. Or with water too polluted to drink. And problems have worsened considerably in recent years as the population burgeoned and factories dumped toxic pollutants into rivers and lakes. A Chinese bureaucrat recently noted that 90 percent of China's cities and 75 percent of its lakes suffer from some degree of water pollution. They have water – they just can’t drink it."

'"Graduate education," he began, "is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)." The key problem, he noted, began with Kant in his 1798 work, "The Conflict of the Faculties." Kant argued that universities should "handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee."'

[Compare with aforementioned Bob Martin's Craftsmanship post...]

"As of today, there's no Craigslist busily destroying the financial foundations of the modern university. Teaching is a lot more complicated than advertising, and universities have the advantage of sitting behind government-backed barriers to competition, in the form of accreditation. Anyone can use the Internet to sell classified ads or publish opinion columns or analyze the local news. Not anyone can sell credit-bearing courses or widely recognized degrees."

"According to various distinguished sources including the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland -- the central bankers' bank -- the amount of outstanding derivatives worldwide as of December 2007 crossed USD 1.144 Quadrillion, ie, USD 1,144 Trillion. The main categories of the USD 1.144 Quadrillion derivatives market were the following:"

[Insert triumphalist Collaborationist pronouncement that I will someday be forced to make sheepish fun of here]

This is more cool than I expected anything to be in 2008.

"If the dot com crash is any predictor of future consolidation, look for the survival of systems that address some specific real need of some narrow niche and that don't have to grow to planetary size to be profitable. Display advertising rates continue to fall, making it more and more attractive for people to run house ads instead selling merchandise or services directly to whatever audience they can sustain. If what you are using does more than just scratch some coder's itch you have a better chance."

"It's a no-brainer that financial firms would be hit by the commercial real estate downturn."

The tail-end of an interesting discussion.

"The extreme of scarcity is intensified by the extreme of ubiquity."

So far it's not even very engaging.

"There is definitely a major shift underway and at its core is a growing recognition of the enormous value that a whole..."

"Content may want to be free, but it doesn’t always want to be big."

via Danny Yee http://danny.oz.au/blog/

"Charlie calls this not the end of history, but the dawn of history. The idea being that history to this point is an incomplete, imperfect process full of guesswork and implication. We're now at a point where we can record everything."

Important

Absolutely frackin' brilliant

"If all that falls into place, we will actually be reproducing the conditions that existed in Italy and Germany in the post-World War I vacuum..."

It's not foolish to consider how your house can be defended against attack.

There is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful of success, than to step up as a leader in the introduction of change. For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the e

Go listen.

Room, perhaps, at both ends: the high-end that Dean Dad suggests, and maybe the other end as well....