The future is super high touch service that happens to sell you product along the way. Everything else will be Amazon.
(Source: jayparkinsonmd)
Some very insightful stuff here. You can already see deflation at work in the drop offs in commodity futures like oil and crops - where big harvests have combined with dropping consumer spending.
This seems to point towards another QE - to ramp out of this stall and to shrink the deficit through a fiscal response. But the fact that the banks are sitting $1 T USD seems to point against further QE creating any kind of movement.
How do we change things on the demand side? There’s still growth… demand has to ramp sometime.
You know, I’m sympathetic to a great deal of Libertarian sentiment, but there is a point at which the real life complexities of human motivations and actions bump up against the reductionist thinking of classical economics. There are a lot of reasons people do things, not just money. Captial is not, in fact, a universal fungible marker of value. There are other economies at work in the world.
One of the best explorations about the relationship between complexity and speed in a long time. People often think simplification makes things faster, but the truth is that complexity, the kind possessed by complex adaptive systems that function on multiple levels *potentiate* speed. Fractal systems with nested feedback loops make, fast, purposive behavior possible.
If you think about what was in the theaters at the time, the cuts and tone of this aren’t so astonishing in the wake of Kustom Kar Kommandos, 2001, or the Wild Bunch (Ok, so it predates those two by a year or so). But it seems to tap the zeitgeist, the idea of computing technology simplifying things. These are the things Toffler is already talking about in best sellers like Future Shock
This piece is thinking about information and data as *paper,* conflating the information with the substrate its stored on. Once information is *digital*, people start mining it, cross-tabulating it, feeding it back into itself, all of which creates more… information. What are needed, of course, are tools for dealing with complexity. Tools for thinking through it. Semiotic and semantic tools for context and significance.
Yet there’s a stridency here, a tone of deadness and terror, the feeling of being on the edge of a great precipice. Nobody could see Google from here, or the Phoenix Program, or genome mapping, the sheer scale of the trajectory about the leap asymptotically into the bandwidth saturated skies of the smarter planet and the labyrinths deep beneath its surface.
“Paperwork Explosion” (by HensonCompany)
In 1967, Henson was contracted by IBM to make a film extolling the virtues of their new technology, the MT/ST, a primitive word processor. The film would explore how the MT/ST would help control the massive amount of documents generated by a typical business office. Paperwork Explosion, produced in October 1967, is a quick-cut montage of images and words illustrating the intensity and pace of modern business. Henson collaborated with Raymond Scott on the electronic sound track.“Machines should work. People should think.”
Why America’s insurance companies should invest in democratizing automotive AI in all its forms. This is thinking about public health in a new way, and one of the ways that our romanticized ”frontier mindset” has trouble mixing with a post-industrial, urbanized lifestyle
Imagine a Manhattan where all the surface traffic was rationalized and automated…
In the past 50 years, we’ve added about 7 years to our life expectancy here in the US. I call this the era of Modern Medicine.
From 1880 to 1960, we added 31 years. This was the era of Public Health. It was the simple things, like vaccines, antibiotics and clean water that added those 31 years. In essence, we saved the kids and life expectancy skyrocketed. Public Health has had 5 times greater of an impact on life expectancy than modern medicine with its pills, surgeries, and devices.
This above photo is what happens to a population’s life expectancy when young people die en masse. This is South Africa’s life expectancy. All was well until HIV struck and began killing off the young.
What can we learn from this?
In 2008, there were 37,261 people killed in car crashes in the United States. People aged 16 to 34 were disproportionately killed.
In 2008, there were 14,299 murders in America. People aged 17 to 44 were disproportionately affected.
In America, unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death until you hit age 44.
Imagine what would happen to our life expectancy in America if we saved 40,000 young people from dying prematurely? It would skyrocket and we would very likely have the highest life expectancy in the world.
That’s why I put my faith in Google and others trying to automate driving. If Google can figure out how to virtually eliminate automobile crashes, this would be as significant as an achievement as the invention of clean water, vaccines, and antibiotics. We should be showering money on those groups working on crash-proof cars. Imagine a world where we didn’t have nearly 40,000 people dying in a car crash! It’s very possible and super exciting to think about. All those people we’ve know who’ve died in crashes, they’d all still be alive, thanks to the internet. Amazing.
I don’t put my faith in modern medicine— it simply won’t touch that life expectancy curve because it’s focused on treating sickness, not prevention. When you save the olds, it doesn’t affect the life expectancy curve of a population nowhere nearly as much as saving young people. The best way to significantly improve our life expectancy in America is to save the kids through safer cars and changing the attitudes about homicide being an acceptable solution to a dispute.
Sugar: The Bitter Truth (by UCtelevision)
This may be the most important health story of the last 10 years. Absolutely astonishing - its a dense 90 minutes but worth every second. This is all part of the growing “real food” science revolution that continues to gain mainstream momentum. You’ll never look at processed food the same way after this.
If this idea gains traction - the soda is poisonous, not just bad but actively toxic, there isn’t a soccer mom in america that will give their kids this stuff. It will wind up with an age limit like alcohol and cigarettes. If the UK didn’t have such a collective sweet tooth, the NHS would have already done it in Britain.
The CPG universe faces a stark decision - reinvention or radical diminution engineered by outside regulatory forces.
/SG
