The Gig Economy: The Force That Could Save the American Worker? BY MICHA KAUFMAN, 09.17.13
Back to the future, the steady job ‘created’ by Henry Ford and his cohort will fade from center stage after about a century of centrality, making economists’ jobs even harder. My belief that this is already happening and is part (probably a tiny part) of the official jobless recovery problem.
4 Big Ideas in the New iPhones That No One’s Talking About : BY KYLE VANHEMERT : 09.11.13
Not sure no ones talking about them but they are not looking at it from the right perspective…or not consistently. The 5C points out that personalization is a critical element but does not require a plethora of hardware versions to accomplish. Look at where Google/Motorola went with their customizable shell. The 5S finger print sensor, activity monitoring sub system and stepped up camera all point to the iPhones purpose as the center of your digital life.
Apple continues to lead even as the handset proliferation continues apace. The phone you own if you are serious these days is the iPhone and while others will backfill in the wake its Apple that still leads.
The 5 family is probably still in line with the concepts that Apple evolved under Jobs’ leadership. Not to say the team at the helm are only turning the crank. It’s also not to say that Apple couldn’t stumble, could miss a new wave, but right now they are in the lead and I don’t see much in the way of useful Tech they have missed yet. The iWatch and iTV, so far as I can see, have no traction because the technology is not here to make them special in the way Apple needs for their brand identity.
The iPhone/iOS is the anti Android and it will remain that way, while others like Nokia/MS, Motorola/Android and I think Samsung, SONY and even maybe HTC and LG, will evolve towards a more Apple like model. In the end the serious contenders will be variations on the Apple model with highly secure products that are your digital core.
The Next Wireless Revolution, in Electricity : By TINA ROSENBERG : September 11, 2013
Great synopsis piece on how the spin offs of our mobile life is creating an underpinning for a financially, socially and ecologically sound human social revolution. Or at least that’s what we can hope for.
Read these two pieces,
Making Sense of Syria: September 10, 2013, 3:32 PM
The Speech: 10:42 PM
What more can be said?
From Charlie Martin at pjmedia.com/lifestyle/ : Does buddhism require you to be a liberal? The short answer is no ….
I don’t think it’s necessarily so. In fact, I think Buddhism, real Buddhism, is inherently more in tune with libertarian “conservative” politics. (This isn’t the place for this particular rant, but I scare-quote “conservative” because I think it’s a bad term. As I was telling someone last night, I’m not a “conservative,” I’m an 18th-century Enlightenment radical.)
Absolutely! So am I.
And regarding the rant….as usual the “liberal” progressives have managed to at once de content and blacken + distort the abstract philosophical meaning of the words conservative and liberal…as I have whined about in the past. Politicians do this to avoid being pinned down, progressives to control the message and short circuit dialogue. Going back to the discussion on political philosophy, progressives often called liberals are not at all about liberty in anything but the most puerile sense and conservatives are generally cautious, not reactionary, and are pro liberty in its more robust sense. Progressives are generally about changing human nature by government fiat.
Libertarians…the old liberals, are about core human rights, property rights, equality before the law, the rule of law, financially competent government, citizen dominated politics, de politicized + meritocratic bureaucracy and minimalist + open regulation. In other words an eighteenth century Enlightenment radical!
by Victor Davis Hanson: @Works and Days: Syrian Knowns and Unknowns September 8th, 2013
From my perspective the best synopsis of the status.
There are no solutions and probably never were any that a politician could stomach.
L. Brad King’s prototype of a ferrofluid ion thruster. When subjected to magnetic field, the points of the crown arise from a ring-shaped trench circling a one-inch block of aluminum. (Credit: Sarah Bird)
then an electric field is applied which makes the ‘points’ extend to nano scale and then emit ionic molecules at high velocity. Very neat, self forming, self healing, some scaling details to work out but this looks very promising. Another tech breakthrough from Air Force R&D.
AUGUST 30, 2013 Care of: Carnival of Space #317Billionaire Peter Thiel funds Positron Dynamics who are developing a 10 microgram per week antimatter factory
For planetary, early interstellar precursor and simple omniplanetary applications, ACMF (antimatter catalyzed fusion) exhibits the best performance. The reference case of a 1-year human round-trip mission to Jupiter with a 10 to 100 metric ton (mT) payload requires an antimatter quantity of 1 to 10 micrograms (μg). It appears as though this requirement could drop into the 1 to 10 ng range for payloads consistent with unmanned, planetary missions.
So fuel for a trip to Jupiter (in one year!) every week.
Cold storage: A freeze wall created for a construction project by the company SoilFreeze
How the Fukushima Ice Barrier Will Block Radioactive Groundwater
Japan plans to stop leaking radioactive groundwater at Fukushima with an underground wall of ice. Here’s how it would work. … Vertical pipes are to be drilled or driven into the ground at one-meter intervals, creating what looks like an array of sub-soil fence posts. Fourteen 400-kilowatt refrigeration plants would pump -20 °C to -40 °C coolant down each pipe to absorb heat from the ground, producing an expanding cylinder of frozen earth.
In roughly six weeks, those cylinders would fuse together to form a continuous barrier that keeps groundwater out and contaminants in. The result would be a solid barrier from the surface extending approximately 95 feet down to meet a low-permeability layer of clay and rock. And while it would require long-term chilling to endure, the wall is immune to power outages lasting days or weeks. “It would take months or years to thaw the wall out,” says Daniel Mageau, vice president and design engineer for Seattle-based contractor SoilFreeze.
From Real Clear Politics: 86 Attack on Libya: A Template for U.S. Action Now
Should we choose to demonstrate our resolve in this manner, we must also prepare for the counter-response of Syria and its confederates. While we should prepare for terrorist attacks, kidnapping, or military strikes against U.S., allied, or Israeli targets, we must be equally vigilant in the cyber-domain. The actions of the Syrian Electronic Army already indicate the ability to launch increasingly sophisticated cyber-disruptions, and Syria’s Iranian sponsors also have significant cyber-capabilities that could be used to disrupt key infrastructure, communications, or energy facilities throughout the region. Suspected Iranian cyber-attacks have already targeted Saudi Aramco and Qatari RasGas, and similar attacks could be part of any retaliation.
Using the historical lesson of 1986’s Operation El Dorado Canyon, U.S. and allied forces can incur significant damage against Syria through a limited campaign and avoid the more deleterious outcomes of inaction or prolonged intervention. The bottom line: Like Reagan in Libya, Obama today has few good options — but the use of chemical weapons by Syrian government forces requires a response, albeit a judicious one.
It seems likely that ‘Syria’ will end up a patchwork of mini states, so we probably should encourage the regime to retreat to its bastion on the coast, perhaps with a loose network of the other small sects in mutual support. Once the players set up their own cores, hopefully they would settle into some kind of loose confederation. Of course the jihadis don’t want this, but if there comes a period of settling out, separating and then taking out the hard liners should become feasible, with local support…expect more drone war…
This requires a basis for a future better time, right now the old regime has proven that the only peace they accept is that of subjugation and coercion. So degrading the regimes offensive capability and its ability to limit future intervention while not going for the jugular, in any more than a symbolic way, makes sense beyond mere face saving. Degrade the offensive forces enough and a defensive cordon is their only hope. It is going to be ugly, monstrous, utterly unfair, but there is no other solution given the situation as it stands today.
Reagan had to live with Carter’s mess, Obama has to deal with his own, times have changed, bad outcomes are accelerating in a more densely populated and seriously degraded world…social and ecological degradation are at the root of this disaster and something was going to break. But the level of horror could have been reduced if action had been taken earlier.
This World and Others 