Here are my thoughts from reading the Tellus Institute’s Global Futures (their terms in italics).

Which outcome do you want?

Scenario A: Conventional World ? minor improvements, more of the same, increasingly insurmountable problems ? Fortress Worlds

Scenario B: Conventional World ? revolutions, Great Transitions ? Renaissance 2.0

How do you make your choice? By supporting the contributing causes.

Scenario A Contributing Causes:Scenario B Contributing …

How does the porn industry currently leverage social media, given its somewhat underground, brown paper bag nature, to service its needs? The likes of marketing, enabling and supporting tribes, etc.

I am assuming the industry already uses social media to some extent. I don’t know for sure.

Granted a wildly popular, obviously porn-related Facebook group or page may not be something many will display. And yet, there has to be …

“At the world climate change summit, few delegates paid attention to the tale of oil’s inevitable demise” writes Jeremy Leggett of The Guardian.

Of particular interest:

Here is the bottom line. At oil prices below around $70 a barrel, producing oil becomes uneconomic in many settings today. With the oil price where it currently languishes, at less than $50 a barrel – in a market where pricing has become completely …

“There’s a massive failure of imagination [in the newspaper industry].”

Read Made by Many’s Why we don’t subscribe to Rupert Murdoch, and why we need a new kind of money; on the newspaper/magazine industry’s approach to the web, the state of news content on the web and the social media age, making money from news content, and micropayments in the social media age.

Interesting idea about micropayments in …

Further to my post about hyper-stimulated cinema patrons in Singapore – patrons who felt the uncontrollable urge to talk and text incessantly during movies – I have now discovered the exact same behaviour during a keynote speech at a conference!

At the ad:tech Singapore opening keynote this week, I had the misfortune of sitting in front of a man and a woman who simply would not …

Another walk-by pickup at a bookshop:

The Tyranny of Dead Ideas – Letting go of the old ways of thinking to unleash a new prosperity by Matt Miller.

Today’s dead ideas:

The kids will earn more than we do.
Free trade is “good” (no matter how many people get hurt).
Your company should take care of you.
Taxes hurt the economy (and they are always too high).
Schools are a local …

The conventional practice of capitalism has many traits that make it similar to a religion:

Unquestionable dogma and “truths”. Profit at any cost is good.
Irrational beliefs required – the beliefs cannot be challenged by logic. Big is always better.
Compartmentalised short-term thinking – don’t think too much about wider implications.
Power belongs to the few. The rich and powerful “priests”.
The many work to benefit the few.
The many toils under the belief …

Many industrialised societies today suffer from a poverty of desire – for excellence, quality and craftsmanship. Their citizenry value cheap-and-plenty seemingly over every other considerations.

Can you desire what you don’t know?
Is it still poverty if you don’t know what you are missing?
So how do we passed down our desires in a given society? If parents and teachers don’t know or have forgotten how to tell quality from …

According to a Wired magazine article, UK vendors Vodaphone and Radio Shack both gave away netbooks to customer who sign up to wireless data accounts.

“… Computers are developing the same economics as mobile phones. Hardware is becoming a commodity. It is difficult to charge for.”

It was hard to imagine a mere decade ago that tangible, real, physical, see touch smellable hardware could be so quickly reduced …

When the Portuguese ruled what is now Malaysian Malacca in the 1500s, they imposed a tax that is calculated on the basis of a building’ s width. Consequently many houses were built narrow and deep, with high ceilings, so as to minimise on taxes. (See this link.)

The British government in the 1690s imposed a window tax, which led to buildings being modified to reduce the number …