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Friday, June 04, 2004 |
 Nice. New 5.8 Ghz Motorola phones are now installed throughout the house. Wireless-only expansion phones with slim rechargers. Interchangeable bases. Strong signal. Very clear. Inexpensive. It's nice to get rid of those old 900 MHz phones with their weak signals, wirebound dedicated bases, etc.
4:31:55 PM 
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BBC. Violence and work stoppages in Karachi bring the city to a stand-still. Another example of how terrorism can bring general unrest.
11:56:18 AM
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Stephen Roach at Morgan Stanley goes very negative on the US economy in his most recent newsletter:
The American consumer has never — repeat, never — gone on a debt binge the likes of which has occurred in recent years. Household sector debt now exceeds 85% of GDP — an all-time high and about 20 percentage points higher than the ratio a decade ago ... (in combination with the housing asset bubble, a lack of off-setting business investment in the US, stagnant salaries, a rush towards ARMs, and impending rate hikes) it will take nothing short of a miracle to extricate the self-indulgent American consumer from this mess.
11:47:04 AM
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Here's another great seminar series in SF put on by the "Long Now Foundation." Next up, Bruce Sterling, "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole." This is a topic that give SF writers fits. Excellent.
Stewart Brand on the Singularity:
One reason the metaphor resonates is that it offers insight about the distortion we all feel from the pace of events these years. As one falls into a black hole, the fierce gravitational field of the singularity pulls the traveler into a long thin shape, like taffy. The more the accelerating future pulls at us, the more parts of us resist. The result is a kind of dismemberment.
Society itself could be dismembered, as some people ride the breaking wave of every-newer technology over the event horizon into invisibility, while others lag behind, feeling the powerful gravitational force of still-accelerating technology, but no longer able to see it. Thus the world would be comprehensible only to those near the leading edges of technology.
The Singularity is a frightening prospect for humanity. I assume that we will somehow dodge it or finesse it in reality, and one way to do that is to warn about it early and begin to build in correctives.
9:58:47 AM
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LOL. Wired and Terra/Lycos/Tripod teamed up to do blogs (although they are fairly low function in compared to the state of the art, except that they include an RSS 2.0 feed like this one for Bruce Sterling).
9:52:43 AM
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Scott Atran: In fact, study after study finds suicide terrorists and supporters to be more educated and economically well off than surrounding populations. They also tend to be well-adjusted in their families, liked by peers, and according to interrogators sincerely compassionate to those they see themselves helping. A report on The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism used by the Central and Defense Intelligence Agencies (CIA and DIA) finds "no psychological attribute or personality distinctive of terrorists." They do not act despairingly out of neediness or hopelessness, as many ordinary suicides do. If they did, they would be denounced as blasphemers and criminals.
8:55:46 AM
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Wow. SLTrib. President Bush confirmed Thursday that he had consulted a private lawyer to see if he needed legal advice to deal with the grand jury investigation into how the identity of an undercover CIA officer was revealed.
8:32:34 AM
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BBC. The new Korgo worm steals credit card data (I wonder why it took so long for someone to do this). Besides the proliferation of spam forwarding bots, this is the new financial incentive for virus creation (soft terrorism).
8:15:11 AM
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This is too rich. Enron energy traders caught on tape. "Burn, baby, burn. That's a beautiful thing," a trader sang about the massive fire (in California). I wonder if there is something similar going on in the oil industry trading rooms in response to al Qaeda attacks. Who am I kidding, of course there is. Another example of the growing ties between market action and our virtual market-state foe (al Qaeda).
8:03:30 AM
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LOL. We are getting close to Jesus day.
7:53:49 AM
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Guardian. Oil giants such as BP in Britain and ExxonMobil in the US have been making corporate history by notching up the largest profits ever. As Mr Gheit puts it: "Oil executives must be pinching themselves every morning when they wake up. They are not making money, they are printing it."
7:04:56 AM
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Mark Finnern (a great guy by the way) has some amazing speakers at his SF future salon. Worth looking into if you are a) have a curious intelligence and b) in the area. BTW: We need someone in Boston to put something like this together (I would love to, but I have way too many irons in the fire).
6:36:48 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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