Change around us – Page 21

Making sense of the radical change surrounding us – a long-term perspective – 1

The change overwhelming us is simultaneously exciting, frightening, thrilling, unsettling, clear, and confused. We have a scary and exciting future with incredible opportunities that we can only vaguely see.

How to make sense of it?

Two writers more than all others have helped me as I slowly sort things out: Seth Godin and Walter Russell Mead.

I’d like to highlight a few articles from Mr. Mead to give a sense of the major trends facing us. He regularly refers to the breakdown of the “blue model.”

The way we’ve done things since World War II isn’t working anymore. The breakdown will continue. The challenge is to figure out how to rearrange the economy and our society into something new. None of us have any idea today what that “new” thing is. But we can see the old model is breaking down.

In Life After Blue, he provides a good summary: Continue reading “Making sense of the radical change surrounding us – a long-term perspective – 1”

American middle class isn’t stagnating but is better off than in the ‘70s

A frequent comment at several blogs I follow and discussion on this blog is the dramatic improvement in life generated by technology over the last few decades. Look here, here, here, and here. For a longer term perspective, look here.

Don Boudreaux and Mark Perry expand the discussion beyond technology to explain the middle class is much better off today than in the 1970s. Check out their article in the Wall Street Journal – The Myth of a Stagnant Middle Class.

The claim they are addressing is the idea that only the richest people are better off over the last 30 years:

Continue reading “American middle class isn’t stagnating but is better off than in the ‘70s”

New frontiers are open – Part 4

The new frontiers:

Oil Patch
Publishing
Education
Space Exploration

New frontiers have opened up, with incredible opportunities as wide as the prairies in the northern plains states. They also have the same high price of admission as the old frontier.

In the previous post, I talked about the oil patch and publishing. Now I’ll talk about education and space exploration.

Education

Continue reading “New frontiers are open – Part 4”

New frontiers are open – Part 3

The new frontiers:

Oil Patch
Publishing
Education
Space Exploration

The American prairies

The opportunities opened up wide as the prairies and the Dakota sky with the signing of the Homestead Act.

A man and his family, or a single woman, or a former slave, could stake out a claim, work as hard as you wanted, and with a little bit of luck and constant hard work, make a go of it. Millions of people did.

The opportunity was there for the taking.

As I mentioned before, the land was free but the admission price to play was steep.

That frontier has long been closed.

Other frontiers have opened up, with the opportunities, also as wide as the prairies. Also with the same high price of admission.

Continue reading “New frontiers are open – Part 3”

Downside to cameras everywhere and the near-zero cost to record data

We are being recorded and logged and photographed everywhere we go. We need to be aware.

I’m not sure we have all caught on to the extent that we are tracked. Andy Kessler ponders where we are in his Wall Street Journal article, In the Privacy Wares, It’s iSpy vs. gSpy – Big Brother is watching us. But we are watching back.

Boundaries of monitoring

He reminds us there is a log and probably a photo from every time you interact with a toll booth, cell tower, ATM, or commercial security cameras, of which there may be as many as 30M around the country.

As cheap as storage is, those records will be retained for years, if not decades.

Ponder the new boundaries of the monitoring:

Continue reading “Downside to cameras everywhere and the near-zero cost to record data”

Who inherits your digital music, books, and movies? Who controls your social media after you die?

Can you give your digital books or movies to your heirs? Can your family gain access to your social media sites after your death to preserve your memories and content?

Our legal system hasn’t quite dealt with those questions. At the moment, the answers to those questions are probably no.

Continue reading “Who inherits your digital music, books, and movies? Who controls your social media after you die?”

Can your cloud provider do anything they want with your data?

If you read the terms of service for one particular provider, it looks like the answer is yes.

Check out these terms of use from Prezi, which provides a cloud-based presentation tool:

Continue reading “Can your cloud provider do *anything* they want with your data?”

“Feudal Security”

That’s the title used by Bruce Schneier in a post that draws an analogy of the ways we use our data to a feudal society.

My very short description is that our system of allowing Apple or Google or Microsoft to store our data on their servers and provide hardware platforms with reduced opportunity to manage our own security is a change from the previous model of having our own servers and maintaining our own security and backup.

That is similar to a feudal society in which the peasants work for a lord who provides all their security.

Continue reading ““Feudal Security””

Why the Malthusians always get it wrong

“We are about to starve to death” is a recurringly popular idea. And it is recurringly wrong.

Rich Karlgaard surveys the Malthusians of several ages before giving two reasons such folks always miss the boat in his article Bad News Bear at Forbes.

Mr. Karlgaard mentions four people in the we’re-gonna’-starve-this-afternoon camp. I’ll add a fifth.

Continue reading “Why the Malthusians always get it wrong”

Want your own tricorder? They are under development but not available. Yet.

A full-blown tricorder like McCoy or Spock used is still a ways off. Development is in progress.

That’s the story from The dream of the tricorder in The Economist.

Smart phones will be the platform for the day we do have functioning tricorders.

In the meantime, we are seeing single-function devices that have a special app and plug-in device.

Continue reading “Want your own tricorder? They are under development but not available. Yet.”

Want to start your own educational institution? Go for it.

The educational frontier is wide open. Want to start your own institution of higher education? With today’s technology, some time, and a few dollars, anyone can do it.

Continue reading “Want to start your own educational institution? Go for it.”

Battle of the 4 big tech giants

Wow. If you want to keep up with the rapid change around us, you really need to keep an eye on The Economist. I’ll have 2 posts and a comment in another post based on ideas in this week’s edition.

Magazine cover has four deep-sea monster squids fighting each other. Nearby is a bathysphere with two little people watching the battle. Labels identify the giants of the deep as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook.

Continue reading “Battle of the 4 big tech giants”

Another change around us that we ought to ponder is nuclear proliferation

Sometimes the change around us is grim, like having nine countries with nukes.

When the world had the U.S. and Soviet Union staring at each other with nuclear weapons, we focused clearly on the implications. Since the fall of the Soviet Union (which reduced the nuclear war risk, the conventional war risk, and the overall level of suffering & misery around the world) we’ve spent less time thinking about how nukes affect everything else.

That is a mistake, thinks Paul Bracken, in The Second Nuclear Age.

Continue reading “Another change around us that we ought to ponder is nuclear proliferation”

Go beyond the optimism or pessimism – look at the complexity

On my other blog, Nonprofit Update, I have a post describing an essay that talks about the wild swings between optimism and pessimism of our perceptions about what is taking place in Africa. The underlying circumstances can feed either optimism or pessimism as you choose.

If we want to understand, we need to go beyond our mood swings and learn of the complexity that exists.

Why mention that post on this blog? Because it addresses at a deep level how we can deal with the change surrounding us. We need to go beyond our emotions and look at the underlying complexity.

Why post it on that blog? Because the main focus is an encouragement to address the unseen complexity in order to create change in the place where an NPO is working.

Check out It’s complicated, Africa version.

Don’t project backward

Don’t ever make the mistake of projecting into the past what we know today about the result of an event. – from Prof. Gary Gallagher.

That’s a rough paraphrase of a comment by Prof. Gallagher in his course on the American Civil War from Great Courses.

That’s a powerful concept.

Continue reading “Don’t project backward”