Archive for the 'Economy' Category
West Readies Oil Plan in Case of Iran Crisis
January 9th, 2012Via: Reuters: Western powers this week readied a contingency plan to tap a record volume from emergency stockpiles to replace nearly all the Gulf oil that would be lost if Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, industry sources and diplomats told Reuters. They said senior executives of the International Energy Agency (IEA), which advises 28 […]
Google Backing Original Shows for YouTube — Lots of Them
January 8th, 2012Plug in and be lit up by the American Hologram. This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a […]
Paypal Founder Backs Blueseed, ‘Googleplex of the Sea’
January 7th, 2012Will there be… Plasmids? BioShock is set during 1960, in Rapture, a fictional underwater dystopian city; its history is revealed to the player through in-game audio recordings scattered throughout the game. Rapture was envisioned by the Objectivist business magnate, Andrew Ryan, as a laissez-faire utopia for society’s cultural and scientific elite to avoid the oppression […]
Japan ‘Dream Project’: 600 Acre Farm with Autonomous Robot Workers
January 7th, 2012Does anyone understand how LEDs are supposed to replace pesticides? Under an agriculture ministry plan, unmanned tractors will work fields where pesticides will have been replaced by LEDs keeping rice, wheat, soybeans, fruit and vegetables safe until robots can put them in boxes. Anyway, this sounds like it could have been lifted right out of […]
Microsoft Gets Patent for ‘Avoid Ghetto’ Technology
January 7th, 2012Via: CBS: Microsoft has been granted a patent for its “avoid ghetto” feature for GPS devices. A GPS device is used to find shortcuts and avoid traffic, but Microsoft’s patent states that a route can be plotted for pedestrians to avoid an “unsafe neighborhood or being in an open area that is subject to harsh […]
U.S. Savings Bonds Go Paperless
January 5th, 2012*chortle* Via: CBS News: U.S. savings bonds enclosed in birthday cards have been an American tradition for more than 70 years. But from now on, purchasers will have to be computer savvy. As of January 1, the U.S. Treasury declared that all bonds must be purchased online through the website www.treasurydirect.gov. The buyer can download […]
A Brief History of Plutocracy
January 5th, 2012Via: Robin Upton at Chaos Computer Club: This whistlestop re-telling of world economic history squeezes 12,000 years of history into 18 slides. Its focus is the changing nature of money and the rise of the monied class in US and Europe. It outlines how the modern system of banking was instituted, how international organising allowed […]
SOPA: Internet Giants Consider ‘Nuclear Option’
January 3rd, 2012Via: Cnet: The Internet’s most popular destinations, including eBay, Google, Facebook, and Twitter seem to view Hollywood-backed copyright legislation as an existential threat. It was Google co-founder Sergey Brin who warned that the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act “would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the […]
Shipping Container Home: Behold, the Reason for Nonsense Building Codes and Zoning Laws
January 2nd, 2012There’s a reason why they don’t mention where this is with any greater precision than, “California.” It’s because banks and maniac filth don’t get to draw as much energy from people who live in outlaw dwellings. Via: Fair Companies: Lulu is a single mom who’d gone back to school and didn’t have the time or […]
The Coming War on General Purpose Computation
January 1st, 2012Via: Cory Doctorow at Chaos Computer Club: The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of […]
