3,474 karma · joined November 11, 2011
At that point of course it will also be much easier to limit all those overly broad claims.
The "Global Fund" mentioned in the article (98%+ financed by tax payers in the largest industrialized nations) is one of those vehicles - it has financed (some of the worst and most corrupt) governments in developing countries for more than 10 years.
Besides that, the "Global Fund" is certainly one of the biggest marketing shows on this planet. It calls itself a "financing instrument", what it actually does is receiving $3-4B p.a. tax payers monies, and disbursing those (after a 10%+ "cut" for running a "secretariat" in Geneva full with people getting paid $300K+) to entities in developing countries that are de-facto controlled by the local governments (please note that the "Global Fund" does not select which "programs" & countries are financed - this is done by an external "expert panel"). It has done that over almost a decade with nearly zero oversight on what and where the monies were spent, an almost complete lack of functioning management systems or any accountability (at one point in time a few years ago existing internal controlling & risk management system were "switched off" when they showed too many problems and any institutional oversight was kept at bay by not funding the function or keeping the posts vacant for very long periods or even firing the incumbent(s) - as the BBC showed this month - when those actually do their jobs).
The "Global Fund's" biggest claim "saving lives" doesn't stand minimal scrutiny. In short, it's like the HMCR (the UK's IRS) would claim that it saves millions of lives every year because hospitals / the NHS are financed with taxes. Another visualisation of this claim would be - if you give $10 to the Red Cross you have saved millions of lives (the "Global Fund" does not report "results" it shows "results" of programs contributed to - the official new speak is "influenced by" - often these "results" are non-measurable / non-impact and have been double / triple / quadruple counted in the past). It does all that at 8-10 times the "cost" of comparable organisations (yes other government funded financing organisations exist), i.e. disbursing $1M through the "Global Fund" costs 700%-1000% more than doing that in other ways. This does not count in the "slack" lost until the monies reach the implementing agencies / NGOs that do the actual work (medical aid, training people, creating & running health infrastructures, reducing poverty, saving lives). Another way of looking at this: Funds provided to the "Global Fund" are actually diverted away from the implementing agencies / entities (a lot could be said about this as well - only so much - even UN agencies like government agencies have to comply with at least basic accountability rules).
Anybody looking beyond the shiny surface gets threatened, press and oversight muffled, staff trying to do their job fired and their lives destroyed. Those looking "the other way" often for up to 10 times the salaries they would "normally earn" got promoted for years and received glorious "performance reviews". When the whole "show" became too smelly a few years ago, more than 1/3 of the staff were removed with scapegoating a few (while some of the biggest "culprits" were already before that moved to senior posts in other organisations), those "part of the system" leaving with golden handshakes and millions in pensions and quickly found/finding themselves on new posts again.
Like with similar "constructs" anyone looking deeper into this is hitting an invisible wall of silence.
And since a few years it is officially possible to count military aid into the development aid statistics.
With the "Global Fund" it would already help if people like Bill Gates would ask the right questions or sometimes any questions at all.
see https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Bisha.TI89...
or
http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/02/15/nostalgia-ti-89-calc...
For a good overview of novelty wind energy approaches (taken with a grain of salt) - http://barnardonwind.com/2013/06/03/good-and-bad-bets-new-wi...
- Old type base load power stations run with coal or other fossil, nuclear e.a. 24h/day but only contributing energy a few days a month (high estimate). IMHO they are only running because it's such a great business for the large power supplier conglomerates (otherwise they would have long replaced them with more efficient, quick starting solutions) - rough guess 2-3 are wasting comparable electric energy per day and there are 1000+ of those power stations around the globe.
- 100M+ people having their office computer(s) running at least 8h/5days-week but rarely using them or using computers 10-20 times more powerful than their applications are requiring. Alternative approach - using operating systems that require the latest, high powerful computers just to display some glossy windows, but are solely used for text processing e.a. - rough guess 3-5M of those equal to the amount of energy used for BitCoin production.
with these two examples alone you already have at least 400-500 times the energy used for BitCoin production each day just puffing away into hot air and I'm sure there are plenty more examples available.
We are wasting energy (and depleting limited resources) on a very large scale every day and only because it's such a great business today (not calculated at true cost) seemingly nobody needs to care about tomorrow.
If this continues, soon someone might claim that Gerdt von Bassewitz invented space travel (Peter and Anneli's Journey to the Moon - the German title is actually nicer - translated: Little Peter's travel to the Moon -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_Anneli%27s_Journey_to... )
Ideas come in thousands and if not executed are not worth a dime. Doing it is the hard part and that's why companies building things generally get paid / make more money than science fiction book writers.
As this place in Texas has over the last 10 years built an industry around the IP cases going to trial there (with e.g. short-term office rental rates as high as in NYC) - maybe those are cases that are not "supporting" their continuing gold rush.
None of that of course touches on the fundamental flaw in the system that IP cases are so exorbitantly expensive that most have to pay those modern "highwaymen" even when knowing that their demands are most of the time completely without base and are solely a legalized form of extortion.
Just consider how you feel, when you worked for years and developed / invented a large scale real-world solution and those crooks with IP / patents originally being provided to protect their work on bicycles and abacuses are lining up outside your office all claiming that they would have done all the work.
So the first step to cure this must be a protection of business that have invested substantial time and money into their products, are bona fide and actually running a business based on their work, to be able to defend themselves against such frivolous law abuses.
High incarceration rates most often indicate that governments are only in power by threatening their people or spreading fear. On top of that you see a (most likely) strong effect / high prisoner numbers created by the "commercialization" of putting people into prison - countries where prisons are run as a business.
Guaranteed prisoner numbers or occupancy levels agreed in such contracts (another demonstration that business ethics don't exist anymore) strongly contribute to high numbers and IMHO also express that governments in countries were such contracts / approaches are allowed have completely lost touch to their population.
In developed countries there are two diametrically opposite examples to where governments are trending towards in the moment:
The UK currently considering to play catch-up with the US by also privatizing prison "services" and guaranteeing inmate numbers / occupancy levels.
On the other side Sweden that just recently closed 4 prisons because they were not needed anymore.
are you estimating the market for such (Cloud-IDE) tools being currently $465M or did I misunderstood that - interesting when now the first key (legacy) development IDE providers (MS - VS) are moving towards that approach as well.
One of the more creative ones I've seen recently is creating a really long-term data storage (Giga-Year) based on QR-Codes - http://vimeo.com/77028789
help with your printer - $45 per help - $2 per minute (guess that will always be more than the printer was actually retailing for)
General computer help $10 (per incident) $2 per minute
maybe contact your printer / computer support team first - many today have online / real-time chat features now for free.
The selling of costume jewellery via hosting aka tupperware parties was kind of popular with high-income families about 15+ years ago - at that time products sold were the Bulgari / high price style of objects redone with false stones as costume jewellery.
Now this is basically the same concept with similar products catering for a different population group (lower income - less market knowledge).
The companies, like with many others selling products via such a scheme, after the pyramid has grown to a certain size, become stagnant or disappear (after those in at the beginning have cashed out).
Have a look at the people and particularly their previous companies mentioned in the article to know what this model is about. First buy low and find many that sell / buy high for you - after a while it quickly becomes a seemingly today very popular model - FABI (find a bigger idiot)
https://travis-ci.org/jashkenas/underscore
(funnily enough also been produced on a bluebox.net machine)
nevertheless overall this looks very promising - great UI design
https://www.gov.uk/transformation (fully responsive design pages together with new service backends delivered with Agile / Scrum)
and the teams doing it: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ (they are hiring more than a dozen people in the moment)
...and as salaries are normally paid besides tax free also tax equalized (the US is demanding income taxes from all citizens wherever they live including UN staff - the UN covers these taxes for US citizens and a handful other countries) the US pays itself back (via income tax) a nice discount of certainly 10% of its contributions to the UN.
a side note: It is generally accepted that the US government pays the highest salaries compared to other government agencies worldwide. This is the reason why the U.N. uses the US government scales and pays as their base (highest salaries of all member states) - of course before they put their "gravy" on it and more than double it.
- Non-mortgage sales of houses/flats in the highest price areas in central London (e.g. SW1 / SW3, SWxx plus parts of inner, East and North London) are now more than 80% (that is most likely the cash figures referred to) - people / non-first time buyers are shelling out funds here of almost always more than £1M for small flats - houses from £2M - both up to £30M and more)
- The total number of property sales is about 50%-60% of the volume of pre-2008/9 sales.
Given the broad scale of house prices in London (e.g. £1M - £30M+) and similar high prices in some of the fringe areas (where top price areas also command house prices > £20M), IMHO this only means that there is massive (almost tax-free) inflation-hedging for many that are profiting from the gains of the financial markets in the last years / decades - in other words £1M is the new £100K from e.g 20 years ago.
While the times might have passed when buyers showed up with bags full of cash and could legally buy real estate in the UK / London - no questions asked rendering all global money laundering regulations nil and driving property prices up to previously unseen levels (the commonly used cliché would be a Russian "business-man", but same applies to anywhere where people got hold of truckloads of cash from whatever sources), the UK/London is still a tax heaven for many, particularly European buyers (e.g. Germans because of loopholes in tax legislations / double taxation laws can reduce their taxes massively some close to zero).
Besides the above I believe the following key drivers are visible:
- Central locations in mega-cities like London are getting more and more expensive by the sheer demand (more people than 20 years ago, globalisation) and limited supply.
- Since years in the UK, many, that have made huge profits in financial markets, have exchanged those into tangible assets like property - another indicator for that would be land / country estates with large amounts of land all selling at multiples of years ago. This is not the first time this has happened, in centuries before whole areas in London were built by financial investors / people that have profited from massive financial gains e.g. on the stock exchange. IMHO this also clearly demonstrate that many of those DO very well know they are trading hot air.
- Most of the middle-class children/20s today will be substantially poorer than their parents as they will not be able to participate / gain profits e.g. in housing, but instead will have to pay substantial amounts of their income (if not inheriting a property) for living / housing expenses. One more reason for this is also that huge financial profits today are not shared as broadly as these were e.g. 10 years ago via bonus pays, salaries.
Generally speaking (all the above epitomized) - if you don't have the money to live comfortably in London but have to work for it, London becomes less-and-less attractive now even to middle class people with income levels beyond £150K p.a. - others in services jobs, nurses, teachers, etc are since years not able to live in London anymore - add the changes in living subsidies since April this year when the UK started to "deport" low income families from London to Manchester, Birmingham, the North, the recent Red Cross figures of more than 100 Million people in Europe having no money to buy food and you get a more holistic picture what actually is happening.