kopo

Well it's good to see. The transition from the "endless growth" and scale story to a sustainablity story is going to cause major tension given much more than just the financial stakes involved.

There is no point talking about controlling the world's temperature if every exec in a corporation is programmed by the stock market to robotically keep things mindlessly scaling.

But from experience I also know the exec class when under attack are well trained to just get defensive/batton down the hatches and do nothing. They will change their minds only when everyone is on the same page solution wise.

So rather than just be satisfied with the Us Vs them narratives, focus has to shift to solutions. The Chinese have to be pushed to have these discussions in the open about what they want and why it's good.

You can rewind to the birth of MTV 15 years before that.

"I Want My MTV" by Tannenbaum and Marks is a great book. Think of it as the bible of what a successful marketing execs wants to achieve.

It's not a common tactic. It is the BASIS of consumer culture. Give people what they want. Target their senses not their minds.

It's how you get everything from the global spread of Pepsi to McDonalds to Starbucks to Apple to Hollywood to the Kardashians having 200 million teenage girls globally wanting to grow up to be like them.

Consumer culture is based on giving people what they want. And labeling it Freedom.

Ceremony and tradition, parades and costume, medals and ribbons exist for what reason?

I think the quote goes recognition and praise trumps sex and money.

Guys join the army for what? Loose their lives for what?

I would guess the internet/social media/news media info overload environment.

Usually anyone dealing with too much info have to be trained to handle it - soldiers/pilots/ER docs/air traffic controllers etc etc. Most people who have to deal with it without the training just break down.

Kids are esp vulnerable as they are targeted specifically with all kinds of info.

I teach part time and see a lot of anxiety and depression. The current thinking about this is to not take away the internet but the device. The device makes us face these environments alone. But it you put the kid in a group setting...class room or a living room with internet access the way they handle the overload changes. They feel safer and less depressed/anxious about the negative triggers. Still lot of research needs to be done though...

Well it has existed throughout history.

We haven't discovered great ways of winning wars or building empire without being inefficient and treating people like pawns.

Our history books don't spend time making us think about the morale of the front line soldiers in Alexander/Genghis Khan/Napolean/Stalin's armies. Instead we have entire shelves of books devoted to the mindlessly ambitious guys at the top of the food chain.

We make Edison an icon and give Marconi a Nobel, but if you know your history, these guys ended up at the top of the food chain because they were ruthless. It hardly mattered what Oppenheimer/Einstein/Feynman thought about the nuclear bomb. Because they were the "factory".

Much like the "factory" of people at the pentagon/wall st/google/facebook etc.

We still haven't figured out a good way to keep "factories" running or expand/defend empires without propping up mindlessly ambitious people. The inequality rates suggest our faith in them is at an all time high.

Our current default method much like the cold war or a chimp troupe, is to keep mindlessly ambitious people at the top of the food chain constantly paranoid about each other. Ofcourse we can do better. But the agency isn't there yet. For example, Facebook could turn into a Wikipedia type entity by tomorrow if the "factory" of workers revolt.

This is really cool. Maybe it's my age but I am slightly out of the loop when it comes to dev's livestreaming. Didn't realize it was a thing.

For some reason, it's reminding me of SOLE (self organized learning environment) classrooms being tried out in the UK. Put a BIG problem on the board. Get a couple kids to sit in front of a SINGLE large screen and work it out. Provide internet access. And the teacher just hangs in the background not teaching, but observing/guiding/keeping things on track. This is taking it to another level with the number of people watching/learning/contributing etc.

Found this cool vid explaining things - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuNj_rqx04o

Wow! I haven't seen projections that look that clear. I can't tell how they are even doing this. What are they projecting the light on? Is there a person in some spl black suit standing there?

November elections are going to be very interesting. I think Bernie and the next generation of Bernie's who manage to also connect with some part of the rural votebase can take us in the right direction. Fingers crossed.

People just have to be told what direction we can head in.

I like the way Yanis Varoufakis frames the matter - do you want a Matrix style future where the machines control you or a Star Trek kind of future where the machines take care of all the mundane BS and we get to go places we haven't gone before.

I don't think there is a big debate about what people will choose. We just have to get the mindlessly ambitious minority of the population with god emperor delusions to behave themselves.

Privacy issues aren't my number one priority. I have lost count of the number of times people misunderstand me thanks to not knowing I am deaf or believing it, or me misunderstanding them.

And as a techie I am not too bothered by Google and MS using my data to sell me stuff.

What bothers me much more about is the dark architectural decisions that misguide/divides people or get them addicted to their streams and devices screwing their lives up.

I am deaf. Been waiting for something like this for a long time, that I can use day to day hooked up to google/bing speech rec api's.

Right now getting people to speak into a phone and getting the text creates a pretty unnatural (and usually short) interaction.

Well put. All the regulation and change Ralph Nader and co managed to make happen didn't take more than a few hundred motivated people - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OWxc_kYmPTE

People are "lazy and don't care" is dialogue you hear from people who don't have the experience of getting things done.

Well since we still don't have any great explaination for the 200 year old double slit experiment, how do you know it is photons moving around? Could be star sized tsunami waves of light trashing about collapsing into photons when finally measured.