//The most important subject taught to school children is rapidly becoming computer science and applications: How to use machines instead of brains, programs instead of knowledge.
Ray Kurzweil – THE AGE OF INTELLIGENT MACHINES | The Age of Intelligent People
What will that do to our N-Geners? Will it impact their capacity for empathy and compassion?
//Excellent article about patents by Pieter Hintjens.
While politicians see patents as an easy measure of industrial power, the reality is far darker. Patents act more like a legislative parasite that consumes the industrial base, and replaces it with cartels and trolls. Essentially, as soon as patents are introduced into a sector and start to bite — after a delay of five to ten years — they tip the economics back to front. Producing new products becomes dangerous, while buying new patents becomes profitable.
The damage is often invisible until much later. Large firms accept the cost of patent conflicts as the price of doing business and a useful barrier to smaller competitors. Small firms try to remain under the radar, assuming that trolls will not see them (yet). Patent deals are typically secretive, so most conflicts remain invisible. Since innovation cycles are often many years, and patents take many years to be examined and granted, everything may be going very well, for many electoral cycles, before the public lawsuits explode.
By the time every large firm is embroiled in five, ten, a hundred patent lawsuits in parallel, it is too late. The only way to win a war is to buy bigger weapons. Eventually the trolls get their pound of flesh, the large firms all settle into comfortable cartels, the small innovators go elsewhere, and peace returns.
The market is, by this stage, effectively dead. We get the Microsofts and the Nokias. Large firms do not innovate well. The general model is to buy smaller innovators and then mass-market those new ideas. But patent wars push small innovators out of the market.
An optimistic viewpoint would say that parasites eventually reach equilibrium with their hosts, and it is only when they jump to new hosts that they are deadly. A pessimistic viewpoint would say that it is the newest fields of technology — software, alternative energies, genetics — that are the most essential to human survival, and the most vulnerable to the spread of the patent system.
At their core, patents reflect an 18th century view of the market. The basis for patents is as valid as the old theory that disease spread by “bad air”. We have used science and evidence to create progress in every other field. It is ironic that the patent system, claiming to be essential to progress, depends on old faith-based arguments that were discredited 150 years ago.
So, we have an old discredited system that rejects reform, that infiltrates the political and business establishment, that turns living markets into zombies run by cartels and trolls, that spreads to vulnerable, essential areas of technology, that puts humanity’s very survival at stake. The conclusions and next steps are yours to make.
Read the full article here: http://www.ipocracy.org
//September 30 2012 – by Annabel Crabb | smh opinion
Brilliant write this 🙂
… Freedom of speech – it’s simple in theory, but endlessly complicated and distorted by a million other factors of politics, circumstance, or the belief that you’re restricting it for the best possible reasons.
In the end, freedom of speech is like democracy: the worst possible system, except for all the others.
Attempts to curb freedom of speech for entirely excellent reasons are the most tempting of all: the shutting down of hate speech, for example, or the protection of society from extremes.
Human nature is to insulate ourselves against nasty shocks. That’s why we invented insurance. But you can’t insure against genuinely irrational human evil, any more than you can against stupidity or malice.
Which is why the bottom line on freedom of speech must always be: sometimes you just have to suck it up.
Read the whole thing here: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/the-worst-possible-option-except…
Annabel Crabb writes for ABC Online’s The Drum. She tweets as @annabelcrabb.
//Telegraph.co.uk/finance Bank-reform-held-back-by-lobby-group-myths-BoE-member-Robert-Jenkins-claims
He outlined three main myths propagated by the banking lobby. The first was that reform, principally the demand for larger loss-absorbing capital buffers, was a choice “between safety and growth”. “The banking lobby would have us believe that higher capital requirements and lower leverage will damage economic growth and retard the recovery,” he said. “Bankers have exploited this fear.”
Mr Jenkins claimed that the argument was false because more capital would not limit the amount of lending a bank could do, but would make it safer and therefore lowered its funding costs. Banks have claimed the opposite was the case due to their adherence to “return on equity” (RoE) targets, which ignore risk.
The second myth was that unless RoE was high, shareholders would not invest and capital could not be raised. Mr Jenkins dismissed the claim, saying: “The prospective investor is no longer interested in promises of short-term RoE, he is interested in achieving attractive risk-adjusted returns.”
The third myth was that governments cannot afford to over-regulate for the risk of losing financial centres. However, he said: “In a world of increased risk awareness, letting your banks off the capital hook will likely damage not enhance their ability to compete.”
Mr Jenkins also suggested that banks should be subjected to far higher capital and leverage ratios but fewer complicated rules in return.
//Found this article about Australia’s ‘fluoro-vest economy’ in the smh – and just couldn’t agree more:
It’s boom time in Australia and if you’re in the fluoro-vest economy, you’re so loaded you can commute to your second home in Bali. For the rest of the country, however, it’s getting a tad difficult to just, you know, live. Continue reading “The fluoro-vest economy”
//“The waste associated with the beverage industry comprises about a third up to a half of the marine debris that we find globally.”
Dr Britta Denise Hardesty
tiny tiny bits, that end up in the tiniest of creatures, poisoning the food chain from the bottom up…
🙁
See the complete story on ABC Catalyst
//How we are now has been engraved on our personal harddrives long time ago.
And as much as I hate to admit it, there is not much we can do about that.
There is no way to reboot or reconfigure our basic I/O systems.
Encrypted for eternity.
So unfair. How could they know what they were doing back then?
//Dr. Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor in Endocrinology, about the impacts of the ubiquitous drug Sugar in nearly every consumer product, and the interest of the food industry and agriculture business:
//By oh boy imagine that risk… 
//I live in allegedly one of the most beautiful cities in the world. But what is being built down here, outside from the big smoke of the CBD, is in many cases simply appalling. Why is that? What is wrong with the architects in Australia, the builders, designers and the government officials who let those eye-sores pop up on every street corner?!
The need for aesthetics is a default setting in the human psyche. Councils, mayors, decision makers – Do something! Build nicer!! Get rid of those horrible ugly clubs and pubs and community halls.
For a change apply taste, reason and common sense BEFORE the first shovel hits the ground. And maybe you even manage to actually visit the place that you intent to design/restructure/claim to take care of…
Save our sanity guys – build better public spaces!!!
//
Sleep is recovery for the body.
Meditation is recovery for the mind.
//Annie rocks
//The Right on Privacy has to be the most integral part of the digital age in the 21st century! It should never become outdated.
A call to push back from the Anti-Data-Retention protest movement:
Malte Spitz’ brilliant TED talk Your phone company is watching
(and don’t worry you’ll get used to the accent pretty quickly 😉
//////“Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet”
[Albert Einstein]
Albert you rock.
//Migration – the birds do it, we do it.
One day, about a decade ago, I found myself living on a different continent. It just happened somehow. My brains could hardly keep up with the pace things developed around me, and my poor little soul didn’t even try and simply disappeared in a little black box, not to be seen again for quite a while.
Now it’s ok. But the transition was awful. Had I known back then how hard migration and displacement can be to one’s self, I would have approached it with much more caution, and been far more considerate. But then again, I also might have never dared to jump…
So, if any of you out there are thinking about moving around the planet, make sure you take good care of your hearts and minds on the way… as they have great worthiness too, not only your upcoming salary package, or the size of your new house.
Becoming an expat is a one-way-only momentum. There is no coming back from that experience.
