Showing posts with label global economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label global economy. Show all posts
Monday, March 23, 2009
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Ziggurat
01
Logan's Run (film).
Warcraft III.
The uber-panopticon.
Soylent green.
These are all things that come to mind when reading about Timelinks proposal to cram 1 million people into a carbon-neutral footprint pyramid-like 2.3 km structure that does away with the need for cars, a lawn, a garden, personal space, and privacy.
Picture it...you walking down the Zig-hall, and a Zig-scanner reads your retina and instantly cross-checks your identity with the Zig-repository, establishes interests from recent email communications, utterances made in your bathroom, recent purchases from the Zig-store, and a Zig-avatar appears and starts walking next to you, slyly suggesting items or services in which you might be interested...like sponsored listings you see in various search engines.
Instead of DUIs or PI crimes, there'll be Zig-infractions and in order to maintain societal balance, there'll be strict re-education policies in place since there's no space for prison...or maybe there'll be a Penal-Zig?
Excursions to the surrounding pastoral areas would be frowned upon, as the lands would be snatched up by mega-conglomerates, and seeded with powerfully mutated agricultural products that aren't so much healthy, as they are cost-effective, so Zig-officials would want to limit the amount of exposure to zigizens (like 'citizen', but for Ziggurat, sweet!) else the highly condensed populace would vector biological contaminents at a brisk pace.
Nations will collapse, and Zig-States will replace modern continent-oriented governmental paradigms. Alliances with neighboring Ziggurats will be established, and battles will be fought to control water sources as they'll be the sources for both hydro-electric power and for treating 1 million people's worth of excrement per Ziggurat.
Urban centers will collapse and will become vestigages of humanity's triumphs and folly, eventually fallen prey to managed lifestyles.
My new home cheer:
Zig-gu-rat!
It's where it's at!
Zig-gu-rat!
It's where it's at!
[repeat it...or else]
Logan's Run (film).
Warcraft III.The uber-panopticon.
Soylent green.
These are all things that come to mind when reading about Timelinks proposal to cram 1 million people into a carbon-neutral footprint pyramid-like 2.3 km structure that does away with the need for cars, a lawn, a garden, personal space, and privacy.
Ridas Matonis, Managing Director of Timelinks, said: “Ziggurat communities can be almost totally self-sufficient energy-wise. Apart from using steam power in the building we will also employ wind turbine technology to harness natural energy resources.”Oh, dude. My dystopic sci-fi novels are sooo right on. Tom Cruise's version of Minority Report here I come! Whoo-hooo!!
...
The concept will also aim at a better quality of life for the inhabitants. Transport throughout the complex would be connected by an integrated 360 degree network (horizontally and vertically) so cars would be redundant. Biometrics would provide security with facial recognition technology.
Picture it...you walking down the Zig-hall, and a Zig-scanner reads your retina and instantly cross-checks your identity with the Zig-repository, establishes interests from recent email communications, utterances made in your bathroom, recent purchases from the Zig-store, and a Zig-avatar appears and starts walking next to you, slyly suggesting items or services in which you might be interested...like sponsored listings you see in various search engines.
Instead of DUIs or PI crimes, there'll be Zig-infractions and in order to maintain societal balance, there'll be strict re-education policies in place since there's no space for prison...or maybe there'll be a Penal-Zig?
Excursions to the surrounding pastoral areas would be frowned upon, as the lands would be snatched up by mega-conglomerates, and seeded with powerfully mutated agricultural products that aren't so much healthy, as they are cost-effective, so Zig-officials would want to limit the amount of exposure to zigizens (like 'citizen', but for Ziggurat, sweet!) else the highly condensed populace would vector biological contaminents at a brisk pace.
Nations will collapse, and Zig-States will replace modern continent-oriented governmental paradigms. Alliances with neighboring Ziggurats will be established, and battles will be fought to control water sources as they'll be the sources for both hydro-electric power and for treating 1 million people's worth of excrement per Ziggurat.
Urban centers will collapse and will become vestigages of humanity's triumphs and folly, eventually fallen prey to managed lifestyles.
My new home cheer:
Zig-gu-rat!
It's where it's at!
Zig-gu-rat!
It's where it's at!
[repeat it...or else]
Friday, October 12, 2007
Noble Nobel Prize
Dubya will be known as a great president. Great in the sense that:
- his butchering of the English language was complete and pronounced
- he consistently marred the global perception of American democracy and liberty
- his drinking and drug habits rivaled those of coca lords portrayed in Miami Vice
- he probably did more to widen the chasm between the rich and poor, a more than any other president since Reagan
- he ushered in a new wave of privacy violations (I'm looking at you Patriot Act and illegal wiretapping)
- he exuded the general complacency and smug attitude that afflicts Americans, thereby maintaining the status quo, and (it could be argued) accelerated the process of dumbening that we've witnessed in recent years
- he unswerving demonstrated his lack of interest and responsibility in global warming (remember the 1997 Kyoto Protocol?) and essentially whored himself out to corporate sponsorship and 'market-based' solutions.
Yes, folks, he was the 'compassionate conservative'.
But you know who was the greatest un/almost-President of recent years? Al Gore. You know the guy who won the popular vote but lost the electoral college votes back in the 2000 election? Yeah that guy. It might've been the best thing that ever happened to him, and to the issue of global warming (eff that politically correct 'climate change' nonsense).
Today Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2006, he won an Academy Award for his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Here he is from Barbara Boxer's fundraising event this Thursday in San Francisco. You can see what he has to say about his nomination, which was ratified today.
It's like the rest of the world is saying, we know, America. We know 2008 and the future years will be better. These past 8 years have been hard on us all, but we know that we're going to be able to get on with our plan to make this place better for everyone, and it's people like this who are going to be instrumental in making this happen.
Monday, July 30, 2007
The Illusionist transforms into the Hulk
So Ang Lee's revisioning of the Hulk franchise with Eric Bana as the green beating machine didn't fare so well. I didn't think it was that bad, but it definitely lacked some oomph. I liked the whole "sins of the father" theme, and the origins story was an interesting twist, and I liked the fact that the Bay Area was a setting for the film (SF and Hulk make good team), but it definitely lacked something. Ang Lee is a great director, but I think his efforts in epic action-dramas might find more success with the Crouching Tiger variety.
Well Hollywood can't let a franchise rest (did they make an A-Team movie yet?), so they've reengaged with a completely new cast and production team to make the next Hulk film. IGN has most of the details.
What's the short version? Don't like to click on links to get to the meat? Who's the green meanie? Edward Norton, who also wrote the screenplay. Liv Tyler replaces Jennifer Connelly as Betty Ross. William Hurt and Tim Roth will co-star. I was hoping Sam "Clean out my pushbroom, willya!" Elliot was going to make a reprisal, but no such luck.
There are no story details, yet, but it sounds like there will be some explorations of "beginnings", but it's not another "origins" film. Sweet.
Maybe there will be a scene where the Hulk breaks into the Chevron bank vault to liberate some of their record breaking 2Q 2007 profits
Well Hollywood can't let a franchise rest (did they make an A-Team movie yet?), so they've reengaged with a completely new cast and production team to make the next Hulk film. IGN has most of the details.
What's the short version? Don't like to click on links to get to the meat? Who's the green meanie? Edward Norton, who also wrote the screenplay. Liv Tyler replaces Jennifer Connelly as Betty Ross. William Hurt and Tim Roth will co-star. I was hoping Sam "Clean out my pushbroom, willya!" Elliot was going to make a reprisal, but no such luck.
There are no story details, yet, but it sounds like there will be some explorations of "beginnings", but it's not another "origins" film. Sweet.
Maybe there will be a scene where the Hulk breaks into the Chevron bank vault to liberate some of their record breaking 2Q 2007 profits
This spring's punishing oil and gasoline prices helped propel Chevron Corp. to the highest quarterly profit in its 128-year history - $5.38 billion - the San Ramon company reported Friday.
That's 24 percent more money than Chevron made in the same quarter last year and easily beats the company's previous record of $5.02 billion set in last year's third quarter. Chevron's profit for the first six months of this year now stands at $10.1 billion, compared with $8.35 billion for the first half of 2006.
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Bill Gates: an American patriot supporting sexy innovation
What makes America great?
Free speech? Freedom of worship? Democracy? Yes. Yes. Yes, but nothing's sexier than innovation.
America has been one of the most innovative countries. We've only been around since 1776, but we developed the light bulb, the automobile, the computer, peanut butter, Wite-Out®, UNIVAC, the personal computer...the list goes on.
As of late, however, we seem to be lagging behind. India and China are poised to be the next great information/economic superpowers because of their triumphs in manufacturing and technology. Here in America we seem to be more interested in Anna Nicole's secret patronization of the Church of Scientology. Why? We're complacent. We're fat and lazy. We're the bump on the log that buys the 60-inch plasma/LCD/DLP and posts up in the house and watches HDTV while the rest of the world becomes better equipped to function in the global economy.
Recently, Bill Gates (yes THAT Bill Gates) went before the U.S. Senate and basically said that America needs to remain competitive, and that enhancing our flailing education system and revamping the H-1B guest-worker visa system is the only way to do it.
Essentially, America is lacking technical skills, so in the short-term the proposed solution is to make it easier to bring immigrant workers on board, while the long-term solution involves getting more students to graduate from colleges with a degree related to a field in science or math. The current national average of students that go into a college with such a major is %17.
There's a whole slew of reasons why this is the case, but I'm going to single out one: the majority of students coming into colleges have a poor mathematics or science background because these courses require rigorous study and application. Young Americans today are surrounded by immediacy (MySpace, YouTube, video games, streaming video, podcasts, blogs [wink-wink] etc.), and it would seem that spending a couple hours each night to learn about differential equations, or to attend classes on why an OLTP RDBMS isn't an optimal back-end to support BI transactions aren't sexy enough activities. While each of us need to take some responsibility, and take a more active role in our lives and understand that our actions affect those around us, there needs to be a stronger partnership with government and business.
Here's what Gates had to say on the issue:
Free speech? Freedom of worship? Democracy? Yes. Yes. Yes, but nothing's sexier than innovation.
America has been one of the most innovative countries. We've only been around since 1776, but we developed the light bulb, the automobile, the computer, peanut butter, Wite-Out®, UNIVAC, the personal computer...the list goes on.
As of late, however, we seem to be lagging behind. India and China are poised to be the next great information/economic superpowers because of their triumphs in manufacturing and technology. Here in America we seem to be more interested in Anna Nicole's secret patronization of the Church of Scientology. Why? We're complacent. We're fat and lazy. We're the bump on the log that buys the 60-inch plasma/LCD/DLP and posts up in the house and watches HDTV while the rest of the world becomes better equipped to function in the global economy.
Recently, Bill Gates (yes THAT Bill Gates) went before the U.S. Senate and basically said that America needs to remain competitive, and that enhancing our flailing education system and revamping the H-1B guest-worker visa system is the only way to do it.
Essentially, America is lacking technical skills, so in the short-term the proposed solution is to make it easier to bring immigrant workers on board, while the long-term solution involves getting more students to graduate from colleges with a degree related to a field in science or math. The current national average of students that go into a college with such a major is %17.
There's a whole slew of reasons why this is the case, but I'm going to single out one: the majority of students coming into colleges have a poor mathematics or science background because these courses require rigorous study and application. Young Americans today are surrounded by immediacy (MySpace, YouTube, video games, streaming video, podcasts, blogs [wink-wink] etc.), and it would seem that spending a couple hours each night to learn about differential equations, or to attend classes on why an OLTP RDBMS isn't an optimal back-end to support BI transactions aren't sexy enough activities. While each of us need to take some responsibility, and take a more active role in our lives and understand that our actions affect those around us, there needs to be a stronger partnership with government and business.
Here's what Gates had to say on the issue:
To remain competitive in the global economy, we must build on the success of such schools and commit to an ambitious national agenda for education. Government and businesses can both play a role. Companies must advocate for strong education policies and work with schools to foster interest in science and mathematics and to provide an education that is relevant to the needs of business. Government must work with educators to reform schools and improve educational excellence.Let's make learning, teaching and business sexy. If for no other reason at all, math and science grads tend to make more money, and Americans find money sexy. I didn't say it folks, that was Harry Warren and Al Dubin, and who are you to argue with them? Who were they? American innovators, of course.
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