How Will the 99% Deal with 70 Million Psychopaths? Did you know that roughly one person in a hundred is clinically a psychopath? These individuals are either born with an emotional deficiency that keeps them from feeling bad about hurting others or they are traumatized early in life in a manner that causes them to become this way. With more than 7 billion people on the planet that means there are as many as 70,000,000 psychopaths alive today. These people are more likely to be risk takers, opportunists motivated by self-interest and greed, and inclined to dominate or subjugate those around them through manipulative means. Last year, the Occupy Movement drew a distinction between the top 1% and the remaining 99% — as distinguished by measures of wealth and income. Of course, this breakdown is misleading since there are many top income earners who sympathize with the plights of others and are not part of the problem. The global economy we have today is built on a deep history of top-down hierarchies that promote domination and control.
Silicon Valley likes to promise ‘digital socialism’ – but it is selling a fairy tale | Evgeny Morozov The outside world might regard Silicon Valley as a bastion of ruthless capitalism but tech entrepreneurs fashion themselves as believers in solidarity, autonomy and collaboration. These venture humanitarians believe that they – and not the wily politicians or the vain NGOs – are the true champions of the weak and the poor, making the maligned markets deliver material benefits to those on the fringes of society. Some of the valley’s in-house intellectuals even cheer the onset of “digital socialism,” which – to quote digital thinker and environmentalist Kevin Kelly’s 2009 cover story in Wired – “can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant the old debates.” Leaving aside the battles over the true meaning of “sharing” in buzzwords like “the sharing economy”, one can discern an intriguing argument in all this self-congratulatory rhetoric. Silicon Valley’s oft-repeated tales of “user empowerment” are made of these kinds of promises.
Data Revolution Report - Data Revolution Group The Secretary-General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development (IEAG) met the Secretary-General today to hand over their culminating report A World That Counts: Mobilising The Data Revolution for Sustainable Development. Download ‘A World That Counts’ The IEAG consists of over 20 international experts convened by the Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to propose ways to improve data for achieving and monitoring sustainable development. The report highlights two big global challenges for the current state of data: The challenge of invisibility (gaps in what we know from data, and when we find out)The challenge of inequality (gaps between those who with and without information, and what they need to know make their own decisions) The IEAG report makes specific recommendations on how to address these challenges, calling for a UN-led effort to mobilise the data revolution for sustainable development: Fostering and promoting innovation to fill data gaps.
Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (The Real Reason For The Forty-Hour ... By David Cain / raptitude.com/ Oct 23, 2013 Well I’m in the working world again. I’ve found myself a well-paying gig in the engineering industry, and life finally feels like it’s returning to normal after my nine months of traveling. Because I had been living quite a different lifestyle while I was away, this sudden transition to 9-to-5 existence has exposed something about it that I overlooked before. Since the moment I was offered the job, I’ve been markedly more careless with my money. I’m not talking about big, extravagant purchases. In hindsight I think I’ve always done this when I’ve been well-employed — spending happily during the “flush times.” I suppose I do it because I feel I’ve regained a certain stature, now that I am again an amply-paid professional, which seems to entitle me to a certain level of wastefulness. What I’m doing isn’t unusual at all. It seems I got much more for my dollar when I was traveling. A Culture of Unnecessaries You may have heard of Parkinson’s Law.
The strange case of America’s disappearing middle class | Paul Mason | Opinion The shot was of two women in party dresses taking a selfie next to the Greek riot police. In the summer of 2015 it was an unremarkable sight – middle-class supporters of the euro rallying to save Greece from the threat of Grexit. But when I described the scene, in a voiceover aimed at an American audience, a query came back from the US: this does not sound right; they look too posh to be middle class. Middle class, in the US, means what working class means in Britain. Except that, while nobody – even in Corbyn’s Labour party – goes around saying they represent “working-class values”, all politicians in America claim to represent the values of this middle class. But the middle class is shrinking. The graphs showing the shrinkage read like a textbook example of the future that French economist Thomas Piketty predicts for the world. Middle America is, of course, supposed to be the bedrock of US democracy. Neoliberal economics favour the already rich and those rich in assets.
Oxfam Australia to dump two data centres Oxfam Australia has started decommissioning one data centre and is set to move information from its remaining facility into a hybrid cloud over the next four years. Speaking to Computerworld Australia, Oxfam Australia technical infrastructure manager, Grant Holton-Picard, said that its two data centres had hardware, software and services implemented in 2008 which were approaching end of lease this year. “We did some cost estimates and one of the expected outcomes would be that there was a cost savings over the next four years for that [data centre] environment,” he said. Thomas Duryea Consulting was awarded 70 per cent of the work for the IT infrastructure overhaul. Two other partners, which could not be named, will complete the remaining 30 per cent. The consulting firm has supplied the head office data centre in Carlton, Melbourne with new EMC VNX5300 storage infrastructure while IBM servers were replaced with Cisco unified computing servers. Join the Computerworld newsletter!
The Anthropocene: It’s Not All About Us Anthropocene artifacts. (Photo by Garrett, on Flickr) Time to celebrate! Woo-hoo! It’s official: we humans have started a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. Let’s wait to stock up on party favors, though. Welcome to the Anthropocene: A world that may feature little in the way of multi-cellular ocean life other than jellyfish, and one whose continents might be dominated by a few generalist species able to quickly occupy new and temporary niches as habitats degrade (rats, crows, and cockroaches come to mind). To be sure, there are celebrants of the Anthropocene who believe we’re just getting started, and that humans can and will shape this new epoch deliberately, intelligently, and durably. Is the Anthropocene the culmination of human folly? The viability of the “we’re-in-charge-and-loving-it” version of the Anthropocene – let’s call it the Techno-Anthropocene – hinges on highly optimistic prospects for nuclear power. But the prospects for current nuclear technology are not rosy.
Mapping the Emerging Post-Capitalist Paradigm and its Main Thinkers “We do not live in an era of change, but in a change of eras” is the way Jan Rotmans from the University Rotterdam describes the structural changes impacting our societies. This is also the phrase Michel Bauwens chose to open his latest book yet to be published in English which title is likely to be close to “Towards a post-capitalist society with the Peer-to-Peer”. For thinkers like Jan Rotmans and Michel Bauwens this change of eras is akin to the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the 19th century, and characterized by transitions in various fields. In a nutshell, our societies face 3 major tipping points: A change in social order from a central, hierarchically-controlled society to a horizontal, decentralized, and bottom-up working unit. A changing economic structure: where in the past large, bureaucratic organizations were necessary to produce cheap products, in the new digital economy it is possible to develop products and services locally on a small scale.
Cassava on eBay? M-Farm SMS helps Kenya's farmers get better prices | Mark Tran | Global development The importance of smallholder farmers in terms of food security and economic development is increasingly being realised. Most of the 1.4 billion people living on less than $1.25 a day live in rural areas and depend largely on agriculture, while an estimated 2.5 billion people work in full- or part-time smallholder agriculture, many of them in Africa. Yet these farmers labour under severe handicaps: remoteness from markets; lack of storage, seed and fertilisers; and weak bargaining power with buyers. A lack of information, particularly on prices, puts smallholders at a disadvantage. M-Farm, a Kenyan company co-founded in 2010, seeks to redress the balance in favour of smallholder farmers by addressing what co-founder Jamila Abass calls "asymmetry of information" – and make money in the process. Abass created M-Farm with Susan Oguya and Linda Kwamnoka, inspired to act by stories about the exploitation of smallholders by middlemen offering meagre prices.
What Shade of Green are You? | Generation Alpha Part 1: The Spectrum of a Movement The environment movement has, of late, become all but subsumed by the climate movement. I point this out not because climate doesn’t matter, but because it’s not the only thing that does. I fear that many important challenges are going unaddressed due to lack of attention. And I fear that our tactics are narrowing in scope, shunning direct action and favouring populism. The emerging trend of the environment movement is toward the centre of the bell curve, both in terms of issues addressed, and the means by which they are addressed. As the movement pulls resources toward the organizations and agendas at the centre of the bell curve the extremities get frozen out, and alternative perspectives get lost. With such intense competition for such limited resources, brand image and recruitment become powerful means for amplifying a perspective, and the movement collapses toward the populist centre, where most of the funding is applied. Bright Green Lite Green
When the Government Tells Poor People How to Live WORCESTER, Mass.—The letters began arriving in the mailboxes of the sprawling public housing complex last spring. The Worcester Housing Authority had tried to make residents self-sufficient, the letters said. The letters explained that step in big letters that were hard to miss: “IMPORTANT MESSAGE: Residents Required to Go to Work/Attend School.” “If you want a government benefit, then you have to do something for it," Ray Mariano, the head of the Worcester Housing Authority, told me, in explaining the program. Worcester is the latest government authority to try and influence the personal decisions of citizens.To make New York residents healthier, for example, Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to ban super-sized drinks, and last month, U.S. But the Worcester program goes a step beyond many of these initiatives, as the penalty for not complying is so great. Is this the role government ought to be playing in people’s lives? People may make bad choices, Mill and others argue. “It’s too much.
MFarm empowers Kenya's farmers with price transparency and market access For many low-volume Kenyan farmers, the only source of information about the market rate for crops comes from the very people who are trying to buy them. The lack of pricing transparency means that farmers don't always get the best deal. MFarm seeks to solve this by providing up-to-date market prices via an app or SMS, direct to farmers. It also connects farmers with buyers directly, cutting out the middlemen. MFarm's CEO is Jamila Abass, a 29-year-old computer scientist from Kenya. She founded MFarm in 2010 after reading about how farmers have been "oppressed for decades and disconnected in terms of information". "Many farmers only have the produce, but don't have the means to market their produce themselves," Abass told Wired.co.uk. "Farmers don't have storage facilities and they know that the buyer who comes around to the farm can just go next door and get produce from someone else. MFarm is a for-profit organisation, taking a transaction fee for every deal done using its platform.
Radical Paganism | PAGANARCH Jason Pitzl-Waters’ recent op-ed piece in The Wild Hunt is fucking excellent. … I stayed a Pagan because it also promised me a world, a culture, remade. A world where multiplicity, diversity, was honored. A world where a singular, all-powerful, male-pronouned, deity was replaced with innumerable pantheons of powers. A world where there was Goddess. Paganism, if it isn’t radical, is worthless. The brilliance of Capitalism is this, that it’s taught us all that we cannot make our own worlds and instead must rely on what the market provides, selecting from the aisles our beliefs, our opinions, and our modes of living. Honoring gods and goddesses [and I note with pleasure that Jason does something not many Wiccan-ish writers do--too often, they talk about the Goddess and ignore the obvious question the polytheist poses: "which one?" Becoming Pagan is a radical act, and it doesn’t end at just buying a pentacle-necklace and making a wand, or setting up an altar to the gods. Like this:
Equity crowdfunding: the future of capital raising? - Mineweb Mining finance and investment Expert says mining companies that aren’t thinking about crowdfunding just don’t get it. Prinesha Naidoo | 17 December 2015 10:54 JOHANNESBURG – As the commodities rout makes it increasingly difficult for mining companies to tap capital markets, equity crowdfunding is emerging as an alternate financing mechanism. Traditionally considered the domain of technology startups, equity crowdfunding appears to be changing the way in which companies, irrespective of the sectors in which they operate, are raising funds. Equity crowdfunding for companies in the mining sector – a relatively new concept whereby investors receive a stake in the companies in which they invest – appears to be gaining momentum. For Jofre, the relative success of equity crowdfunding lies in the “democratisation of capital” and exposure to a wider investment pool. Thus far, the most successful mining-related crowdfunding campaign appears to be that of asteroid mining company Planetary Resources.