Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Kurt Cobb Fourteen years ago, as shortages in key commodities appeared and prices soared, I asked whether just-in-time was nearly out of time. If the corona virus spreads worldwide, we may all be asking that question soon.
Even if you don’t follow Italian politics, the recent upset in the elections is significant. Italy’s Berlusconi was the first of the right populists to win power, and now Italy seems to have developed an immunity toward their propaganda strategy: “The idea is to target the lowest cultural level of the population. Use scare tactics, find enemies of all sorts, demonize them, then promise safety in the hands of a right-wing government.”
Everywhere the key to controlling others has become controlling information related to them, and that information now includes your movements, your purchases, your habits (at work and at home), your current whereabouts, and anything and everything you put on the internet about yourself. In addition, anything you choose to monitor using “smart” technology will have the providers of such technology looking over your shoulder as you do.
My team has discovered another use for microwave ovens that will surprise you.
The 1973 dystopian science fiction film “Soylent Green” is set in the year 2022, just one year after a nonfictional Finnish company hopes to begin selling an artificially produced yellow protein-laden flour created by bacteria that the company says will revolutionize food production.
The flour is derived from vats of yellow bacteria whose fermentation process create a yellow protein that when dried looks like flour.
No one can say for certain whether current tensions between the United States and Iran will spiral into war. But remember: When they tell you it’s not about oil (and natural gas), you can be certain that these resources are at the center of American motives. Absent these resources it would be difficult to understand the United States’ decades-long obsession with Iran.
Epistemology is the study of how we know things. All of us cycle between two main ways of knowing in our modern culture: 1) the rational, reductionist way and 2) the holistic, relational, intuitive way. By far the most dominant way is the rational, reductionist way and our institutions, scientific, economic, financial and organizational are governed by this way of thinking.
The world’s nations may conclude a treaty governing undersea mining through the auspices of the United Nations as early as next year. Once that is concluded, large scale mining of ocean bottoms is expected to begin.
One method—already in use in coastal waters controlled by individual countries—will be to suck up nodules of ore lying on the seabed with huge vacuums and filter out the sediment that comes with it.
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said that “the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” Unfortunately, when some economists turn their sights on the economics of climate change, their unreliable methods imperil not just the economic life of humankind but its very existence.
The STEM imagination is trying like Candide, the eponymous character of Voltaire’s novel, to tell us that we live in the best of all possible worlds and that that world is getting better and better. It seems that to find the truth offered by the STEM imagination, we need only to suspend our judgement and leave our doubt behind so that we can join in the celebration of this unbounded future
Bolivia and Climate Change’s Great Lithium Problem / Apple co-founder: ‘I’ve really given up’ on self-driving cars / Regenerative businesses in a degenerative economic system?
The problem with this warning, and perhaps also why it is shedding supporters, is that it says all the right things but feels like it is speaking to an empty room. It has all been said before. I confess I have the same issue with street protests. At some point, you have to put down the placard and actually do something about the situation.
