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Don - Gift Economy. Disrupting manufacturing: Innovation and the future of skilled labor. The common assumption today is that robots will soon drive our cars, manage our work, and manufacture our goods. But what is the reality of disruptive innovation in U.S. manufacturing? And how should schools educate skilled labor for this new era? Globally, manufacturing now accounts for approximately 16 percent of GDP and 14 percent of employment. While the industrial workforce in the United States is up from 11.4 million to 12.3 million, employment is still stuck at historical lows (not seen since the 1940s). More troubling still, labor force participation has been declining since 2009. In fact, over the past three decades, the gap between rich and poor has widened—reversing the prior trend toward a growing middle class.

Discussions on the future of manufacturing are acutely focused on the threat of automation. Disrupting manufacturing Recent findings from PwC reveal significant adoption in advanced manufacturing technology—especially additive manufacturing or 3-D printing. Platform Cooperativism : Nov 13-14, NYC. Cooperative Development Institute – We're transforming ownership of our economy.

What would society look like with universal basic income? What would you do if somebody gave you a few hundred pounds each month to spend on whatever you wanted? Would you quit your job? Retrain and look for a better one? Spend more time with your kids? Get those vital repairs done on your house? Eat better food? I’m not trying to taunt you. Basic income – the proposal to give a flat, non-means-tested payment to every citizen – is an old idea. Campaigns to get the idea taken seriously are sprouting like mushrooms around the world. “Basic income is about power, about letting it go,” Michael Bohmeyer, a former entrepreneur who runs Mein Grundeinkommen, told me. That is the sort of freedom that sounds like blasphemy to conventional, liberal, “free-market” economists. “If we don’t disconnect work and income, humans will have to compete more and more with computers,” Bohmeyer explains. With that in mind, Bohmeyer began an experiment in anti-capitalism that has been more successful than he could have imagined.

The End of the Capitalist Era, and What Comes Next | Jeremy Rifkin. The capitalist era is passing... not quickly, but inevitably. A new economic paradigm — the Collaborative Commons — is rising in its wake that will transform our way of life. We are already witnessing the emergence of a hybrid economy, part capitalist market and part Collaborative Commons. The two economic systems often work in tandem and sometimes compete. They are finding synergies along each other’s perimeters, where they can add value to one another, while benefiting themselves.

Although the indicators of the great transformation to a new economic system are still soft and largely anecdotal, the Collaborative Commons is ascendant and, by 2050, it will likely settle in as the primary arbiter of economic life in most of the world. What’s undermining the capitalist system is the dramatic success of the very operating assumptions that govern it. The reluctance to come to grips with near zero marginal cost is understandable. This Blogger’s Books and Other Items from... 35 Everyday Microsoft Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows & Mac. Of all the programs included in Microsoft’s Office suite, Excel is perhaps the most intimidating. There’s an enormous scope to what you can accomplish with the software, and that can be overwhelming. Even finding the desired function from a packed toolbar can be a challenge — unless you know the right keyboard shortcuts. It might be impossible to commit all the combinations in this guide to memory, but even one or two essential shortcuts can have a massive impact if you use Excel on a regular basis.

Used in conjunction with the standard set of shortcuts that apply to Windows more broadly, these are powerful time-savers that you’ll wish you knew about sooner. Shortcuts to Help Set Up Your Spreadsheet When you’re just getting started with a new spreadsheet, there are plenty of tasks that can be sped up significantly with the right shortcuts. If you want to create a basic bar graph based on a set of data, highlight everything that you want to be included and use ALT + F1 on Windows or FN + ? How To Use Microsoft Excel To Manage Your Life. It’s no secret that I’m a total Excel fanboy. Much of that comes from the fact that I enjoy writing VBA code, and Excel combined with VBA scripts open up a whole world of possibilities. In the past, here at MUO, I’ve shared a few of the things I’ve done with Excel and VBA, like exporting Excel data into Word or sending out emails straight from Excel.

Of course if you aren’t much of a coder, you can always get Excel applications someone else has written, like those listed by Simon. However, if you’re serious about using Excel to manage more of your life, then you should take the time to learn how VBA coding works. To help with that, I’ve decided to share a “Automation” spreadsheet that I’ve created to manage different areas of my life. This spreadsheet has 4 tabs and covers everything from grouping links of URLs that I want to launch all at once, to managing my debt and paying it off faster. Microsoft Excel is not just a data spreadsheet. Monitoring Your Websites Managing Your Debt. How to Manage Your Project with Word Templates. Advertisement In project management, as in life, preparation is half the battle. When it is time to organize and document a complex project, you may need many different reports, forms, plans, and other resources.

We have compiled a variety of useful Word templates for project management that can help you get started. How to Stay Motivated on Long-Term Projects and Not Give Up How to Stay Motivated on Long-Term Projects and Not Give Up If motivation was easy to cultivate, nobody would have any problems doing so! For those who lose motivation over long term projects, these tips may prove fruitful. Read More 1. TidyForms has an excellent project template with a hefty amount of details in a nine-page document. It is outline-structured, includes clear tables for data, and has a spot to insert your project plan from another application, such as Microsoft Project. 2. TidyForms also has a short and sweet project scope template. 3. 4. 5. WBS in Text Format WBS in Varying Views 6. Status Reports. COULD ICELAND LEAD THE WAY TO A MONEYLESS ECONOMY? Iceland could become the world’s first moneyless economy according to Irishman Colin Turner, founder of the Free World Charter (FWC), who has started a campaign to promote the idea of a resource based economy on the North Atlantic island.

Colin, who founded the FWC in 2011 and has already attracted almost 50,000 signatories from over 200 nations, believes that the self-sufficient nature of the Icelandic economy would make it a perfect candidate for a radical shift away from traditional capitalism. The campaign is already garnering support from prominent Icelandic individuals and organisations as Colin explained: “So why Iceland? It’s an island that could easily become fully self-sufficient in terms of energy and food. There’s also a high degree of political and economic awareness and debate especially after events in recent years that have affected the global economy.” “It’s not just about money of course. A collaborative directory of the cooperative + solidarity + new economy. Internet of Ownership. To Build Community, an Economy of Gifts by Charles Eisenstein. For a multitude of reasons, we need to need each other. posted Dec 27, 2011 Wherever I go and ask people what is missing from their lives, the most common answer (if they are not impoverished or seriously ill) is "community.

" What happened to community, and why don't we have it any more? There are many reasons—the layout of suburbia, the disappearance of public space, the automobile and the television, the high mobility of people and jobs—and, if you trace the "whys" a few levels down, they all implicate the money system. More directly posed: community is nearly impossible in a highly monetized society like our own. In former times, people depended for all of life's necessities and pleasures on people they knew personally. Because people in gift culture pass on their surplus rather than accumulating it, your good fortune is my good fortune: more for you is more for me. That is one reason for the universally recognized superficiality of most social gatherings. Interested? Why the Gift Economy Will Grow Unnoticed.

I am finding myself increasingly surprised and dismayed at proponents of alternative currency who propose and promote systems that fundamentally offer very little change from our current system. In most cases these “alternatives” are simply non-governmental versions of the same transactional-scarcity model. The majority of innovation occurring currently is in inherently abundant informational goods and there is an intrinsic incompatibility between scarce transactional currency and abundant goods.

This creates a ripe opportunity for a new model of value accounting that is itself abundance based. I was therefore quite pleased to find two recent posts by Alan Rosenblith arguing for this same re-conception of currency. In discussing the markets for informational goods Alan notes: What’s most important about this new mode of production is that it is NOT about the quid-pro-quo, something-for-something social contract. Photo courtesy of seier+seier.

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