So, working on the creation of the acceptable limits of discourse, and the use of "independent" reports based on economic modeling to set and sustain those limits. Here is a flow chart (first draft). What have I missed?
It's good to have a really good handle on why it is "unravelling" (1). Might help us spot some of the hows of the unravelling before they quite arrive. No averting, that's a 20th century delusion... Anyway thanks to a smart and compassionate friend (who took me out to the coast last Tuesday, when I... Continue Reading →
I play a "Tardis" game. I'd scoop up various folks and bring em forward to the here and now; set them up in a London penthouse with a subscription to the FT, Economist, cable TV, a kindle with an unlimited download limit. I'd give them a month to come up with their analysis of where... Continue Reading →
The bang was big. In 16 July 1945, humans got to start using the power of the sun. First to fry people, but then – and this is not understood enough – with the hope (okay, maybe it was a bit of a fig-leaf) of the “peaceful use of nuclear explosions”. What's this, you say?... Continue Reading →
I thought I was cynical enough. Nope, not by a gazillion miles. Turns out both the US and the Russians were keen on using nukes for peace. Some of this I knew, but I didn't realise it was quite so extensive... "Project Plowshare was the overall United States term for the development of techniques to... Continue Reading →
This from the Big issue in the North 16-22 May Charlotte Hobson, author of The Vanishing Futurist was asked "Can you draw a line between Stalin and Putin? And she replied Varlam Shalamov, the great chronicler of Stalin's gulag observed that it was the mindset of the common criminals that dominated the camps - and... Continue Reading →
Ah, we have so many ways of distracting ourselves. Most of us do, anyway. I quite like this (though a brain is not a computer!) It is the same with a computer cache: there will be a hierarchy - from super-fast memory in the microprocessor itself all the way down to a hard drive (slow)... Continue Reading →
And here is the script that I more or less stumbled through. So, what is absorptive capacity? According to the seminal 1990 article by Cohen and Levinthal it's "a firm's ability to recognize the value of new information, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends" Extending this, Zahra and George (2002) say it is... Continue Reading →
So a fetish is a god we create and then forget that we created and get down to serious worshipping of. There's a rather good Doctor Who story from 1976, that was going to be called "The Day God Went Mad" but ended up being called "The Face of Evil" that outlines this with added... Continue Reading →
Oil companies. Doncha just love them? And they spend a lot of time trying to shape the public debate, shape the public mind. BP isn't doing arts sponsorship because they're a charity you know. Shell have been brilliant at their advertising for decades (see this post and this post). Esso (aka Exxon) have some new... Continue Reading →
