Kickstarter

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pages: 163 words: 46,523

The Kickstarter Handbook: Real-Life Success Stories of Artists, Inventors, and Entrepreneurs by Steinberg, Don

3D printing, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, Kickstarter, multilevel marketing, Skype, TikTok, Y Combinator

People who are hip about all things Kickstarter occasionally refer to a campaign as, simply, “a Kickstarter.” A person who launches a campaign may also be called “a Kickstarter.” So, yeah, a Kickstarter can launch a Kickstarter on Kickstarter. Hey, it’s a flexible word, and the author and publisher of this book don’t have to pay a royalty every time we use it, so there you go. Most of the rest of the stuff that happens on Kickstarter can be described using normal, everyday English, and we don’t anticipate any confusion. So what are you waiting for? Let’s get this dance party started. As one Kickstarter campaign creator might say: there’s no time like the Present. IT’S EASY TO HEAR THE TALES of Kickstarter hauls so gargantuan that your eyes light up like silver dollars while the cash-register sound from Pink Floyd’s song “Money” plays in your head.

Born as a so-crazy-it-just-might-work notion, Kickstarter was quickly becoming a breeding ground to nurture more such outlandish ideas. But even then, Kickstarter had barely shifted into second gear. By 2011, Publishers Weekly magazine calculated that Kickstarter had become the No. 3 publisher of indie graphic novels in the United States, in terms of the number of book projects it funded. The 2012 Sundance Film Festival, a major showcase for independent films, featured seventeen movies that had received Kickstarter funding, amounting to 10 percent of the festival’s lineup. Early in 2012, Kickstarter announced that it expected to fund creative projects to the tune of $150 million for the year, a slightly larger sum than the 2012 fiscal year budget for the National Endowment for the Arts.

It gets a little squishy, though. Plenty of companies have been born because Kickstarter funding helped them produce their first gadget, or game, or clock, or smooth stones that control the temperature of your cup of coffee (this last was a real Kickstarter, called Coffee Joulies). “The idea of a creative project is a made-up one. It’s kind of a fuzzy line,” Kickstarter cofounder Yancey Strickler has acknowledged. The brass at Kickstarter feels that even if what you’re really doing is starting a company, and the product in your campaign is its genesis, Kickstarter wants the campaign to be about the product, not the company.


pages: 254 words: 61,387

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

Many Kickstarter projects underwent a similar transition from new and unproven idea to mainstream acceptance. The tabletop game Cards Against Humanity started as a Kickstarter project backed by several hundred people. So did Oculus Rift, which was a prototype in a garage when its Kickstarter launched. Pebble invented smartwatches with its string of Kickstarter projects. Hundreds of restaurants, movie theaters, galleries, and other public spaces are open today thanks to their backers and the platform. All these projects began as ideas just like Kickstarter itself. During Kickstarter’s first year, I reviewed nearly every project when it launched.

We said publicly that we’d never sell the company or take it public. We would do what was best for Kickstarter’s mission, not use it to do what was best for us. Unlike Silicon Valley companies burning through piles of cash, we stayed small and lived within our means. Kickstarter began operating profitably in its fourteenth month in business. A bit more than one hundred people work out of Kickstarter’s office, an old pencil factory in Brooklyn that the company bought years ago. Kickstarter doesn’t even have a landlord. It was this same independent spirit that led Kickstarter to become a public benefit corporation (PBC). A PBC is a for-profit company that’s legally committed to balancing shareholder interests with producing a positive benefit for society.

The Creative Independent has no advertising, charges nothing for its content, and has a full-time staff. Kickstarter pays for all of it. And yet there’s no Kickstarter logo anywhere. Kickstarter is listed in the site’s footer as its publisher, but otherwise derives no direct benefit. So why do it? Because The Creative Independent is a value-creating project according to the commitments in Kickstarter’s PBC charter. The site supports the creative community, provides resources and educational material for creative people, and elevates the work of artists and creators. These are values that Kickstarter is committed to growing, and The Creative Independent supports with distinction.


pages: 184 words: 53,625

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

Yet there is nothing in Kickstarter’s DNA that says it has to be a for-profit company. We could easily decide as a society that the $200 million Kickstarter is disbursing is not nearly enough to support the kind of creative innovation we need in our culture. At which point, the government could create its own Kickstarter and promote it via its own channels, or it could use taxpayer dollars as matching grants to amplify the effect of each Kickstarter donation. This, in a nutshell, is the difference between a libertarian and a peer-progressive approach. The libertarian looks at Kickstarter and says, “Great, now we can do away with the NEA.”

But Krupnick was facing this dilemma in 2010, which meant that he had another option: a website named Kickstarter. Founded in April 2009 by Perry Chen, Charles Adler, and Yancey Strickler, Kickstarter is perhaps the most successful of a new generation of “crowdfunding” sites that organize financial support for creative or charitable causes through distributed networks of small donors. On Kickstarter, artists upload short descriptions of their projects: a book of poetry that’s only half completed, a song cycle that has yet to be recorded, a script for a short film that needs a crew to get produced. Kickstarter’s founders defined “creative” quite broadly: technological creativity is welcome, as are innovations in such fields as food or design.

To a traditional economist, there’s something baffling about the lack of an “upside” in the Kickstarter donation. By strict utilitarian standards, the vast majority of Kickstarter donors are wildly overpaying for the product. No music video—however long, however large the typeface they use to thank donors personally in the credits—is worth a hundred dollars, particularly a music video by an unknown director that hasn’t, technically, been made yet. So why does the contribution get made? The return on the Kickstarter investment can’t be measured by the conventional yardstick of utilitarian economic theory.


pages: 297 words: 90,806

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier

cloud computing, crowdsourcing, game design, Google Hangouts, gravity well, imposter syndrome, index card, inventory management, iterative process, Kickstarter, pirate software, side project, SimCity, spice trade, trade route

Double Fine had found a fourth option: Kickstarter, a “crowdfunding” website that had launched in 2009. Using this website, creators could pitch directly to their fans: You give us money; we’ll give you something cool. During Kickstarter’s first couple of years, users of the site were hobbyists, hoping to earn a few thousand dollars to shoot short films or build neat folding tables. In 2011, however, the projects started getting bigger, and in February 2012, Double Fine launched a Kickstarter for a point-and-click adventure game called the Double Fine Adventure.* It shattered every record. Previous Kickstarters had been lucky to break six figures; Double Fine raised $1 million in twenty-four hours.

Then Josh Sawyer and Adam Brennecke came to Urquhart with an ultimatum: they wanted to launch a Kickstarter. They preferred to do it with Obsidian, but if Urquhart continued to stonewall, they’d quit, start their own company, and do it themselves. To sweeten the pot, Sawyer added that he’d be happy to keep working on pitches for publishers, as long as someone at the company started planning a Kickstarter. It helped that other Obsidian veterans had also expressed a great deal of interest in crowdfunding, including Chris Avellone, who had been publicly praising Kickstarter for months, even going as far as to poll Obsidian fans about what kind of project they’d want to help fund.* Urquhart relented, and within the next few days, Adam Brennecke was locking himself alone in an office, trying to come up with the perfect Kickstarter.

What you’d have found instead was dozens of people mashing F5 on their keyboards, watching the Project Eternity Kickstarter raise hundreds of dollars per minute. In the afternoon, realizing that they weren’t going to get much work done, Feargus Urquhart took a group of staff and went to Dave & Buster’s across the street, where they ordered a round of beers and proceeded to stare silently at their phones, refreshing Kickstarter. By the end of the day they’d hit $700,000. The next few weeks were a whirlwind of fundraising, updates, and interviews. Project Eternity raised its original goal of $1.1 million a day after the Kickstarter went live, but Urquhart and his crew weren’t content settling for the minimum—they wanted to raise as much as possible.


pages: 561 words: 163,916

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

All of the hardest stuff (Optics, display panels, and interface hardware) is done, right now I am working on how it actually fits together, and figuring out the best way to make a head mount . . . The goal is to start a Kickstarter project on June 1st that will end on July 1st, shipping afterwards as soon as possible. I won’t make a penny of profit off this project, the goal is to pay for the costs of parts, manufacturing, shipping, and credit card/Kickstarter fees with about $10 left over for a celebratory pizza and beer. I need help, though . . .” After listing a few of the things he needed help with (a logo, ideas for the Kickstarter video, etc.), Luckey published the post on MTBS3D. He felt hopeful—hopeful that this might be “the kind of thing that jumpstarts a bigger VR community.”

“I saw you tweeted about Ouya,” Iribe said. “The reaction to their Kickstarter . . . I mean, it’s just . . . crazy.” Bleszinski couldn’t help but nod in agreement. There was just no other valid reaction. It was crazy.6,7 Ouya’s Kickstarter campaign went live on the morning of July 10. In just eight hours, on the heels of over eight thousand backers, the campaign surpassed its fund-raising goal of $950,000.8 Even crazier: Ouya would end up raising $8,596,474 (from 63,416 backers) by the end of its thirty-day run.9 Iribe knew it was unrealistic to envision Oculus’s Kickstarter campaign achieving that same kind of runaway success.

Iribe texted Antonov late at night on August 4. “Dillon’s resigning from Autodesk on Monday and joining Oculus!” “You don’t think it’s a bit early?” Antonov replied. “What will he be doing a month from now, when the Kickstarter is over and we don’t yet have SDK & Kits to give out? I guess organizing forums and Korean community?” “Localizing Kickstarter, press release, first press event, etc.,” Iribe said. “We need Korean devs buying Kickstarter kits.” “Well that is obvious . . . just to me it sounds like part a part time job until kits actually ship. Right now we are in a hype-spin marketing wave; but then we’ll need to buckle down and actually get it all ready . . .


pages: 238 words: 73,824

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

Underground VC Kickstarter solves three huge problems for entrepreneurs. First, it simply moves revenues forward in time, to right when they’re needed. One of the reasons startups traditionally have to raise money at the start is to pay for product development, tooling, purchasing components, and manufacturing, all of which they’ll presumably get back later when they sell the products. But if they can turn those sales into presales, which is essentially what Kickstarter does, they’ll have the money when they need it and won’t have to raise venture capital or take out a loan. Second, Kickstarter turns customers into a community.

But the degrees of separation they connect are the real magic, reflecting latent knowledge about people’s desires that can be identified only by the combination of the people they know and ideas that are compelling enough to pass along (what social scientists call memetic). How did you come to hear of your first Kickstarter project (assuming you have)? Was it a friend who thought you might be interested? The feed of someone whom you follow on social media? Coverage in the news in some area you follow? The point is that you probably didn’t go to Kickstarter looking for it. It found you. And if you responded, you were the right target audience even though nobody might have been able to guess that beforehand. So Kickstarter is not just money-raising, it’s market research. It surfaces demand that could often not be found any other way.

In short, a few Maker-style entrepreneurs had outdesigned, out-marketed, and outpriced one of the biggest electronics companies in the world. And then, thanks to Kickstarter, they got ready to out-sell Sony, too. The Pebble team set a Kickstarter target of $100,000. It reached that in just two hours (I was one of those early backers). And then it kept on going. By the end of the first day, it had passed $1 million. By the end of the first week, it had broken the previous Kickstarter record of $3.34 million. After a little more than three weeks, Pebble had already passed $10 million in backing and had pre-sold 85,000 watches.


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

The experience is not a simple transaction like buying a work of art at a gallery or an album off iTunes. It’s deeper and richer. The first Kickstarter projects raised $1,000, $5,000, even $25,000. But the audience for participating in the creative process proved both larger and more willing to invest than the founders had imagined. Between its launch in 2009 and October 2012, successful Kickstarter projects raised a total of $316 million, mostly for art and music. If Kickstarter continues to grow at this rate, it will soon rival the National Endowment for the Arts, which had an operating budget of $146 million for 2012. But Kickstarter doesn’t finance just art and music. A campaign for new watches based on the iPod nano music player (you snap it into a special wrist band) raised nearly $1 million; the resulting products, TikTok and LunaTik, sold tens of thousands for their designer, Scott Wilson, at his company Minimal in Chicago.

Charles Adler presentation in the author’s Parsons course Design at the Edge, spring 2012; Carlye Adler, “How Kickstarter Became a Lab for Daring Prototypes and Ingenious Products, Wired, March 18, 2011, accessed September 11, 2012, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/ ff_kickstarter/2/. 86 All transactions are handled: Yancey Strickler, “Amazon Payments and US-Only” Kickstarter Blog post, October 3, 2009, http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/amazon-payments-and-us-only, accessed September 11, 2012. 86 On one level Chen, Strickler: Charles Adler: personal interviews with the author. Charles Adler presentation in the author’s Parsons course Design at the Edge, spring 2012. 87 The first Kickstarter projects: Ibid. 87 Between its launch in 2009 and October 2012: http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats, accessed October 4, 2012. 87 which had an operating budget: http://www.arts.gov/about/budget/ appropriationshistory.html, accessed October 19, 2012. 87 A campaign for new watches: “Transform Your iPod Nano into the World’s Coolest Multi-Touch Watches with TikTok + LunaTik by Scott Wilson and MINIMAL,” Kickstarter campaign site, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ 1104350651/tiktok-lunatik-multi-touch-watch-kits. 87 San Francisco–based studio raised: “Doublefine Adventure,” Kickstarter campaign page, accessed September 11, 2012, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doublefine/ double-fine-adventure?

Charles Adler presentation in the author’s Parsons course Design at the Edge, spring 2012. 87 The first Kickstarter projects: Ibid. 87 Between its launch in 2009 and October 2012: http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats, accessed October 4, 2012. 87 which had an operating budget: http://www.arts.gov/about/budget/ appropriationshistory.html, accessed October 19, 2012. 87 A campaign for new watches: “Transform Your iPod Nano into the World’s Coolest Multi-Touch Watches with TikTok + LunaTik by Scott Wilson and MINIMAL,” Kickstarter campaign site, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ 1104350651/tiktok-lunatik-multi-touch-watch-kits. 87 San Francisco–based studio raised: “Doublefine Adventure,” Kickstarter campaign page, accessed September 11, 2012, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doublefine/ double-fine-adventure?ref=live. 88 JOBS Act, new legislation: Mark Landler, “Obama Signs Bill to Promote Start-Up Investments,” New York Times, April 5, 2012, accessed September 11, 2012, hhtp://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/us/politics/obama-signs-bill-to-ease-investing-in-start-ups.html; Ryan Caldbeck, “How the JOBS Act Could Change Startup Investing Forever,” TechCrunch, March 16, 2012, accessed September 11, 2012, http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/16/ crowdfundingstartups/. 88 We all hold a number: I am deeply indebted to my wife, Leslie M.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

“I’m thrilled that you’re writing”: Yochai Benkler, discussion with authors, December 2, 2016. “What’s interesting is that if you teach”: Ibid. “Benkler’s dream”: Benkler, “Carr-Benkler Wager Revisited.” “Kickstarter is not a store”: Strickler, Chen, and Adler, “Kickstarter Is Not a Store.” “public benefit corporation”: Yancey Strickler, Perry Chen, and Charles Adler, “Kickstarter Is Now a Benefit Corporation,” Kickstarter (blog), September 21, 2015. www.kickstarter.com. Kickstarter’s charter boldly: “Charter,” July 2017. www.kickstarter.com. “We told people”: Perry Chen, discussion with authors, March 10, 2017. A study at the University of Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business, “Wharton Crowdfunding Study,” July 2017. www.crowdfunding.wharton.upenn.edu.

Kickstarter’s charter boldly, and in plain English, paints a picture of a very different kind of new power behemoth: • Kickstarter will care for the health of its ecosystem and integrity of its systems. • Kickstarter will never sell user data to third parties. It will zealously defend the privacy rights and personal data of the people who use its service, including in its dealings with government entities… • Kickstarter will not cover every possible future contingency, or claim rights and powers just because it can or because doing so is industry standard. • Kickstarter will not lobby or campaign for public policies unless they align with its mission and values, regardless of possible economic benefits to the company

Amazon: Different Ideas of What Is ‘Handmade,’ ” Forbes, October 10, 2015. Their network allows anyone: Meetup, July 2017. www.meetup.com. So now Meetup’s primary business model: Meetup, “Organizer Subscription Pricing,” July 2017. www.meetup.com. “Kickstarter is not a store”: Yancey Strickler, Perry Chen, and Charles Adler, “Kickstarter Is Not a Store,” The Kickstarter (blog), September 20, 2012. www.kickstarter.com. In fact, the celebrated venture capital firm: Alyson Shontell, “Why Legendary Investor Fred Wilson Didn’t Invest in Airbnb When It Was Just a Tiny Startup,” Business Insider, March 21, 2014. “When we rate each other”: Tom Slee, “The Shape of Airbnb’s Business (II),” Tom Slee (blog), June 9, 2014. www.tomslee.net.


pages: 302 words: 73,581

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary

3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, fake it until you make it, frictionless, game design, gamification, growth hacking, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, search costs, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, software as a service, software is eating the world, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, TaskRabbit, the long tail, the payments system, too big to fail, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Wave and Pay

Encouraging producers to spread their creation at the point of production drives growth for many content platforms. Some platforms like Instagram, Kickstarter and SurveyMonkey actively encourage this as part of the user workflow. 3.The spread of the unit helps to complete an incomplete interaction. An unanswered question on Quora is a spreadable unit demanding social feedback in the form of an answer. A fresh survey on SurveyMonkey needs responses. A Kickstarter project is a bid to potential funders to come over to Kickstarter and fund the project. While not necessarily a requirement for all spreadable units, the incompleteness of the interaction creates an active call to action for the recipient, prompting them to act.

Agoda allows only users who have already booked and stayed at hotels through them to rate those particular hotels. This prevents users from entering false reviews, a problem that is often associated with TripAdvisor. Agoda’s social curation system is designed to manage curation rights. KICK-STARTING SOCIAL CURATION SYSTEMS Social curation doesn’t kick-start on its own. Many social curation systems are built on editorial curation efforts. Platforms like Quora and Medium have succeeded in building highly effective social curation systems by starting editorially and building a culture of quality on the platform. The creation of culture is especially important when sampling judgment is subjective.

This strategy works when the following design considerations are satisfied by the platform: 1.The platform offers a compelling organic incentive for producers to bring consumers onto the platform. 2.The ‘off-platform’ influence and following of the average individual producer is significant enough to attract a large number of consumers to the platform. 3.The platform allows producers to interact with their followers (consumers) in a much more efficient way than currently allowed by alternative channels. TOOLS TO HARVEST FOLLOWERS One of the most common manifestations of this strategy is seen in the launch of platforms like Kickstarter and Udemy. These platforms allow producers to ‘harvest’ their existing connections and followers on other networks like email, social networks, and blogs. Kickstarter allows project creators to raise funding from their connections and followers. Skillshare allows teachers to teach a course to their followers (and subsequently others). These ‘follower harvesting’ use cases offer compelling incentives for producers to bring in their following.


pages: 140 words: 91,067

Money, Real Quick: The Story of M-PESA by Tonny K. Omwansa, Nicholas P. Sullivan, The Guardian

Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, cashless society, cloud computing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, democratizing finance, digital divide, disruptive innovation, end-to-end encryption, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, income per capita, Kibera, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, microcredit, mobile money, Network effects, new economy, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, software as a service, tontine, transaction costs

The smaller, more portable, manually-operated Hip Pump, which alternates pull- and push-pumping, costs about $40. Since it entered the Kenyan market in 1998, KickStart has sold over 64,500 pumps (and over 178,500 worldwide). KickStart’s surveys, conducted two months and 18 months after purchase, document a dramatic impact. Purchasing households experience an average 1100% rise in farm income— from $100/yr. to $1100/yr.—and a 200-300% rise in HHI income, in the first year of pump ownership. KickStart has faced two main impediments in selling its pumps. One is a lack of finance; the second is lack of access to a water source. Most smallholder farmers who lack access to a stream or pond can reach water by digging a 5- to 60-foot well.

These crops yield low financial returns and are primarily stored to feed the household. Early adopters of KickStart pumps, as with any technology, were better educated and more financially secure, and thus less risk averse. For many farmers, $40 or $105 is an unimaginable expenditure; for others, it seems possible and certainly desirable given the quick returns on investment, but difficult to come up with the money. So KickStart has leveraged M-PESA to design and develop a mobile layaway service: Tone Kwa Tone Pata Pump (Swahili for “Drop by Drop Gets the Pump”). Years ago, KickStart noticed that informal cash layaway was occurring, as many local agricultural retailers who had good relationships with farmers would set up layaway programs.

Tone Kwa Tone Pata Pump (Drop by Drop Gets the Pump): Mobile Layaway A similar product, in that it sets a target and enforces illiquidity until the target is reached, comes from a product manufacturer. KickStart is an NGO whose mission is to identify profitable business opportunities open to thousands of very poor people; then design, manufacture and mass market simple moneymaking tools that unlock these business opportunities. KickStart’s best-selling product is a metal, pedal-powered pump aptly named the Super MoneyMaker, which allows a single smallholder farmer ******ebook converter DEMO Watermarks******* working with a partner to irrigate up to two acres in eight hours—a 16-fold increase in efficiency over manual irrigation methods.


pages: 216 words: 61,061

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed by Alexis Ohanian

Airbnb, barriers to entry, carbon-based life, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, Hans Rosling, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Occupy movement, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, software is eating the world, Startup school, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, unpaid internship, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

My low-cost staple was hummus. The Armenian way. 6. Note to Mark: If you’re reading this, it’d better not count as billable time. 7. That would be the aforementioned Kiko.com, undone by Gmail’s web calendar. 8. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-watch-for-iphone-and-android 9. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/pebble-smartwatch-breaks-kickstarter-record-in-five-days/ 10. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1610300135/brooklyns-cool-colonie-restaurant-coming-soon-to-b?ref=search 11. Yoda, in Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back (1980). There’s a good chance, based on my reader demographic, that you may not know this movie very well.

A friend and fellow startup dude, Chris Dixon, describes the extreme version of this by saying, “The next big thing will start out looking like a toy.”3 One example of this would be Kickstarter. Their first project, Drawing for Dollars, surpassed its humble twenty-dollar goal by raising thirty-five dollars, which came from three backers who bought artwork from an artist in Long Island City.4 Less than three years later, a team using the same platform raised ten million dollars in preorders for a futuristic watch called Pebble.5 The idea of a group of people pitching in to make something come to fruition is hardly novel, but the way the Kickstarter team leveraged the Internet to pitch to millions of people simultaneously (as opposed to a coterie of traditional investors) certainly was.

Granted, these watches look awesome, and the “dream team” they’d assembled was a bright group of Canadians from the University of Waterloo, but even founder Eric Migicovsky was surprised when the campaign raised more than ten million dollars from about sixty-eight thousand people worldwide ($10,266,845, to be exact).8 They actually capped preorder requests in order to satisfy expectations, but not before nearly every publication that covers tech or gadgets gushed about their unprecedented Kickstarter campaign. I know this team well, not only because I was there in the room for their Y Combinator interview but also because I ended up managing the team that does their social media. That started just after their monumental launch on Kickstarter, which shattered all previous fund-raising records for the site—in five days.9 We watched a global consumer frenzy grow around this product after investors had responded so lukewarmly (remember, even other founders can be wrong).


pages: 368 words: 96,825

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Census Bureau.” 3 Devin Thorpe, “Why Crowdfunding Will Explode in 2013,” Forbes, October 15, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/devinthorpe/2012/10/15/get-ready-here-it-comes-crowdfunding-will-explode-in-2013/. 4 Victoria Silchenko, “Why Crowdfunding Is The Next Big Thing: Let’s Talk Numbers,” Huffington Post, October 22, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victoria-silchenko/why-crowdfunding-is-the-n_b_1990230.html. 5 Laurie Kulikowski, “How Equity Crowdfunding Can Swell to a $300 Billion Industry,” The Street, January 14, 2013, http://www.thestreet.com/story/11811196/1/how-equity-crowdfunding-can-swell-to-a-300-billion-industry.html. 6 “Floating Pool Project Is Fully Funded And New Yorkers Everywhere Should Celebrate,” Huffington Post, July 12, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/12/floating-pool-project-is-fully-funded_n_3587814.html. 7 AI with Joshua Klein, 2013. 8 Dan Leone, “Planetary Resources Raises $1.5M for Crowdfunded Space Telescope,” Space.com, July 14, 2013, http://www.space.com/21953-planetary-resources-crowdfunded-space-telescope.html. 9 For a good breakdown of these rules, please see http://www.cfira.org. 10 AI with Chance Barnett, 2013. 11 This information sits on a banner across the top of their landing page: https://www.crowdfunder.com, our numbers were gathered in June 2014. 12 See http://blog.angel.co/post/59121578519/wow-uber. 13 Tomio Geron, “AngelList, With SecondMarket, Opens Deals to Small Investors for as Little as $1K,” Forbes, December 19, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/12/19/angellist-with-secondmarket-opens-deals-to-small-investors-for-as-little-as-1k/. 14 John McDermott, “Pebble ‘Smartwatch’ Funding Soars on Kickstarter,” Inc., April 20, 2012, http://www.inc.com/john-mcdermott/pebble-smartwatch-funding-sets-kickstarter-record.html. 15 Dara Kerr, “World’s first public space telescope gets Kickstarter goal,” CNET, July 1, 2013, http://www.cnet.com/news/worlds-first-public-space-telescope-gets-kickstarter-goal/. 16 McDermott, “Pebble ‘Smartwatch’ Funding Soars on Kickstarter.” 17 See https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/let-s-build-a-goddamn-tesla-museum--5. 18 Kerr, “World’s first public space telescope gets Kickstarter goal.” 19 Cade Metz, “Facebook Buys VR Startup Oculus for $2 Billion,” Wired, March 25, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/03/facebook-acquires-oculus/. 20 All Indiegogo stats come from AIs with founders Danae Ringelmann and Slava Rubin, conducted in 2013. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 AI with Eric Migicovsky, 2013. 24 See www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/abrahamlin109275.html. 25 Eric Gilbert and Tanushree Mitra, “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter,” CSCW’14, February 15, 2014, http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw14.crowdfunding.mitra.pdf. 26 AI with Ringelmann and Rubin, 2013. 27 AI with Migicovsky. 28 AI with Ringelmann and Rubin. 29 AI with Migicovsky.

PART THREE: THE BOLD CROWD Chapter Seven: Crowdsourcing: Marketplace of the Rising Billion 1 Netcraft Web Server Survey, Netcraft, Accessed June 2014, http://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-survey/. 2 AI with Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart. 3 Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdfunding,” Wired, 2006, http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds_pr.html. 4 Rob Hof, “Second Life’s First Millionaire,” Bloomberg Businessweek, November 26, 2006, http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2006/11/second_lifes_fi.html. 5 Jeff Howe, “Crowdsourcing: A Definition,” Crowdsourcing, http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2006/06/crowdsourcing_a.html. 6 “Statistics,” Kiva, http://www.kiva.org/about/stats. 7 Rob Walker, “The Trivialities and Transcendence of Kickstarter,” New York Times, August 5, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/magazine/the-trivialities-and-transcendence-of-kickstarter.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 8 “Stats,” Kickstarter, https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats. 9 Doug Gross, “Google boss: Entire world will be online by 2020,” CNN, April 15, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/15/tech/web/eric-schmidt-internet/. 10 “Global entertainment and media outlook 2013–2017,” PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2013, https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/global-entertainment-media-outlook/. 11 Freelancer Case Study based on a series of AIs. 12 Quoted from AI: Matt Barrie. 13 Tongal Case Study based on a series of AIs with James DeJulio. 14 reCAPTCHA and Duolingo Case Study based on a series of AIs with Luis von Ahn. 15 During the completion of this book, a Bay Area startup called Vicarious wrote an AI program able to solve (i.e., read) CAPTCHAs with an accuracy of 90 percent.

By 2013 that number had jumped to $526,460,675 in loans from 1,047,653 Kiva lenders while maintaining a 98.96 percent repayment rate.6 This was also the same time when crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter came into being, giving birth to a new way to raise money for creative projects. Want to make a movie? Cut a new CD? Design a new kind of watch? Just put a video up on either of these sites and ask the crowd for the money. It didn’t take long before theNew York Times started calling Kickstarter “the people’s NEA [National Endowment for the Arts],” and well, they weren’t kidding.7 In 2010, the site raised over $27 million and funded 3,910 projects.


pages: 260 words: 76,223

Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It. by Mitch Joel

3D printing, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, behavioural economics, call centre, clockwatching, cloud computing, content marketing, digital nomad, do what you love, Firefox, future of work, gamification, ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, place-making, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, vertical integration, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Does this truly have an effect on business? Consider this last piece of data from the Kickstarter world: In February 2012, Yancey Strickler (one of Kickstarter’s co-founders) said in an interview with Talking Points Memo that Kickstarter was on course to disburse over $150 million to its various projects in 2012. To put this into perspective, the National Endowment for the Arts had a fiscal 2012 budget of $146 million. On top of that, several Kickstarter projects have topped $1 million in funding from backers. As Kickstarter’s popularity continues to grow and inspires new and exciting entrepreneurs, we’re starting to see that businesses that create powerful direct relationships based on value can achieve staggering financial results.

Without knowing if there would be a market for Pen Type-A and not having the resources to turn this design concept into any semblance of a serious business model, they turned to one of the hottest online destinations, Kickstarter, to get a feel for the potential market. If you don’t know about Kickstarter, well, now’s the time for you to find out: Kickstarter is a simple crowdfunding platform that allows individuals to post their creative projects (everything from music and film to technology and journalism) and to start an online threshold-pledge system for the funding of the project. It is, without question, the most interesting thing happening online right now. In short: If you can’t get a movie deal, you can post your project to Kickstarter, define the budget, and invite anybody and everybody who thinks it’s a good idea to become a backer.

Many people have great ideas that can be explained in simple three-minute online videos, but very few people have the skills to then execute the ideas successfully. Kickstarter has reduced the mountain between ideation and execution into the proverbial molehill. Now, by posting their ideas with a clear financial structure on Kickstarter, businesses can find out—in short order—if there really is a market for their wares. Kickstarter is a New York startup that was founded in April 2009. According to Wikipedia, the company has raised more than $275 million for more than sixty-five thousand projects since it got started. Even more impressive, Kickstarter has a project success rate of close to 45 percent. (Success is defined by whether the project met or surpassed the threshold set by the project organizers or creators.)


pages: 360 words: 101,038

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

By far the most disruptive and powerful technological tool behind the revenge of tabletop games has been Kickstarter. Since the crowdfunding service began in 2009, it has quickly become the de facto launchpad for tens of thousands of board and card games, large and small. At any given time there are roughly two hundred new tabletop game projects raising money on Kickstarter, and roughly half reach their fund-raising goal. Tabletop games are one of the most popular projects on Kickstarter, in terms of both dollars raised and the success of fund-raising campaigns. Kickstarter does not regularly break down its statistics for the games category (which includes both video and tabletop games), but in 2013 the company told the New York Times that tabletop game projects raised $52.1 million that year, compared to $45.3 million for video games.

Kickstarter does not regularly break down its statistics for the games category (which includes both video and tabletop games), but in 2013 the company told the New York Times that tabletop game projects raised $52.1 million that year, compared to $45.3 million for video games. Kickstarter has done more to fuel the creation of games than anyone since Milton Bradley. Almost every single designer I spoke with for this book had launched games on Kickstarter. There are certainly runaway successes, such as the silly card game Exploding Kittens, which raised over $8 million in a matter of days, but most projects raise a few thousand dollars to pay for a game’s production. Some games start out small on Kickstarter, and eventually grow huge. One of the first to do this was Cards Against Humanity.

Over the next few years, they worked to develop the game, and took early prototypes to board game industry trade shows, including Germany’s massive Essen Spiel, where they learned about Kickstarter. When they launched their Kickstarter campaign in late May 2015, the goal was to raise €29,000 to fund Deal: American Dream. I met Vernaza with just six days left, and only €20,000 raised. “No one tells you how much Kickstarter is a ride,” he said, as he unrolled a prototype board for the game and set up the cards. “It’s really a ride.” Deal: American Dream sets competing criminal networks against each other in the drug-producing and -consuming markets of the Americas.


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The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing by Lisa Gansky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bike sharing, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, diversification, Firefox, fixed income, Google Earth, impact investing, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, planned obsolescence, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social web, software as a service, TaskRabbit, the built environment, the long tail, vertical integration, walkable city, yield management, young professional, Zipcar

If you do, they’ll love you for it. And think you’re cool, too. CASE STUDY: Kickstarter In April 2009, a new way to fund creative ideas and projects made a splash on the Internet. Designers, filmmakers, journalists, inventors, artists, and other creatives flocked to Kickstarter, a platform for soliciting small yet consequential monetary contributions from donors. Kickstarter is powered by a unique funding method that is not about personal investing: project creators maintain 100 percent ownership of their intellectual property. Starting a project on Kickstarter is free, but currently projects are posted by invitation only, and must be based in the United States.

Even if the funding goal is surpassed, projects can accept pledges until the funding deadline arrives. Kickstarter applies a fee of 5 percent to the amount raised. The caveat: if a funding goal isn’t achieved, all pledges are canceled, and no money changes hands. As donors and artists bring their own social networks to the site, the potential for donors to find new interesting projects, and for artists to reach more donors, naturally builds. Perry reports that Kickstarter is increasing the number of projects and the volume of its transactions at a rate of about 20 percent a month. Kickstarter has momentum, a growing following, angel investors, and a big idea—perfect ingredients for success in the Mesh.

—DENISE CARUSO, former New York Times technology columnist; senior research scholar, Carnegie Mellon University “Gansky lucidly describes how a new generation of companies make their community’s passion, intelligence, and resources a core part of the business itself. Kickstarter is honored to be included as part of this new movement.” —PERRY CHEN, cofounder and CEO, Kickstarter “At ThredUP, we fully embrace what Gansky calls the Mesh and are rapidly growing our service, community base, brand, and ecosystem around a new business model dedicated to extending the life of kids’ clothing and making parents very happy!” —JAMES REINHART, cofounder and CEO, ThredUp “Crushpad is a true Mesh business.


pages: 240 words: 78,436

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

The future of platforms 215 10 See, for example, Bloomberg article dated 2 May 2016 on universal basic income: www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-05-02/a-basic-income-should-be-the-nextbig-thing. 11 www.theverge.com/2014/9/30/6874353/reddit-50-million-funding-give-users-10percent-stock-equity and www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2moyiz/serious_ how_should_reddit_inc_distribute_a/. 12 21 September 2015, Kickstarter blog, www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-now-abenefit-corporation?ref=charter. 13 Kickstarter fulfilment report, www.kickstarter.com/fulfillment. 14 At the time of writing, the Singapore Autonomous Vehicle Initiative (SAVI) is running live trials of autonomous cars. 15 Moore’s law states that computer processing power doubles every two years. 16 Sharetribe promises to have your platform business running in a few minutes without the need for a developer . . . give it a go at www.sharetribe.com/. 17 J.

This could enable the emergence of more flexible platform-based organizations, where value and equity are shared in a simple and effective way with their contributing participants and the wider ecosystem. A few sharing economy platforms have recently taken a stance to address the profit conundrum. Benefit Corporations include Etsy, Juno, and Kickstarter, which reincorporated as a benefit corporation in 2015.12 Kickstarter’s mission is driven first by how well they bring creative projects to life before The future of platforms 211 the size of their profits. Kickstarter measures project success rates (typically only 9% of projects fail to deliver results)13 as a key driver of added value. It is also very possible that more open, decentralized platforms, with shared governance models, as advocated by many within the sharing economy movement, are able to scale and offer successful alternatives not controlled by large corporations.

(commercial organization), Kiva (not-for-profit organization), Kickstarter (public-benefit corporation), Reddit (community). Sides: the distinct and diverse groups of customers or entities being connected by the platform. For two-sided platforms, they are typically segmented into two groups: one on the supply side (often called producers) and the other on the demand side (often called users or consumers). They are jointly called ‘platform participants’. • Producers: individuals, communities, businesses or entities delivering value created on and/or through the platform. For example, eBay sellers, Kiva borrowers, Kickstarter creators, Reddit content contributors.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

But it Should Be,” Money Talking, WNYC, January 16, 2015, http://www.wnyc.org/story/failure-not-an-option-but-it-should-be/. 286 Three had no investment at all from VCs: Bryce Roberts, “Helluva Lifestyle Business You Got There,” Medium, January 31, 2017, https://medium.com/strong-words/helluva-lifestyle-business-you-got-there-e1ebd3104a95. 286 which he called indie.vc: Bryce Roberts, “We Invest in Real Businesses,” indie.vc, retrieved April 3, 2017, http://www.indie.vc. 287 tens of millions in distribution: Jason Fried, “Jason Fried on Valuations, Basecamp, and Why He’s No Longer Poking the World in the Eye,” interview with Mixergy, April 4, 2016, https://mixergy.com/interviews/basecamp-with-jason-fried/. 287 “if growth is not immediate and meteoric”: Marc Hedlund, “Indie.vc, and focus,” Skyliner (blog), December 14, 2016, https://blog.skyliner.io/indie-vc-and-focus-8e833d8680d4. 289 “faster than any company in Silicon Valley”: Hank Green, “Introducing the Internet Creators Guild,” June 15, 2016, https://medium.com/internet-creators-guild/introducing-the-internet-creators-guild-e0db6867e0c3. 290 at the Vatican in November 2016: Fortune +Time Global Forum 2016, “The 21st Century Challenge: Forging a New Social Compact,” Rome and Vatican City, December 2–3, 2016, http://www.fortuneconferences.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Fortune-Time-Global-Forum-2016-Working-Group-Solutions. pdf. 290 by $165 billion: Google, Economic Im-pact, United States 2015, retrieved Dec-ember 12, 2016, https://economicimpact. google.com/#/. 290 more than 60% of their traffic came from search: Nathan Safran, “Organic Search Is Actually Responsible for 64% of Your Web Traffic (Thought Experiment),” July 10, 2014, https://www.conductor.com/blog/2014/07/organic-search-actually-responsible-64-web-traffic/. 291 commissioned a report: Yancey Strickler, “Kickstarter’s Impact on the Creative Economy,” The Kickstarter Blog, July 28, 2016, https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarters-impact-on-the-creative-economy. 291 have gone on to great success: Amy Feldman, “Ten of the Most Successful Companies Built on Kickstarter,” Forbes, April 14, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2016/04/14/ten-of-the-most-successful-companies-built-on-kickstarter/#4dec455f69e8. 292 register as a public benefit corporation: Yancey Strickler, Perry Chen, and Charles Adler, “Kickstarter Is Now a Benefit Corporation,” The Kickstarter Blog, September 21, 2015, https://www.kick starter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-now-a-benefit-corporation. 292 regular cash distributions to their shareholders: Joshua Brustein, “Kickstarter Just Did Something Tech Startups Never Do: It Paid a Dividend,” Bloomberg, June 17, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-17/kickstarter-just-did-something-tech-startups-never-do-it-paid-a-dividend. 292 shareholder value primacy has no legal basis: Lynn Stout, The Shareholder Value Myth (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2012). 292 argues otherwise: Leo E.

One project, Oculus, was later sold to Facebook for $2 billion, of which Kickstarter received nothing. (Unfortunately, neither did any of the project’s backers. It would have set a great precedent if, having won big, the Oculus founders had treated their initial backers as if they had been investors, letting them in on some of the windfall.) While the absolute numbers are far smaller than those for Google, Kickstarter’s ratio of value captured to value created is far better. Since Kickstarter charges a fee of only 5%, that means the company’s total lifetime revenues were roughly $250 million, a tiny fraction of the value created. Because Kickstarter is a private company, and Yancey Strickler, its cofounder and CEO, made clear that he has no plans for the company to sell or go public, it’s impossible to estimate what Kickstarter would be worth if it were to do so.

Because Kickstarter is a private company, and Yancey Strickler, its cofounder and CEO, made clear that he has no plans for the company to sell or go public, it’s impossible to estimate what Kickstarter would be worth if it were to do so. But Kickstarter is in the game for the long haul, committed to creating value for its participants rather than extracting it. Kickstarter has gone so far as to register as a public benefit corporation, a designation that places a legal requirement on the company to consider its impact on society and not just on shareholders. Kickstarter’s founders told their venture capital investors from the start that they have no plan to exit, and have instead put in place a mechanism for making regular cash distributions to their shareholders, just like Basecamp and the indie.vc companies.


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

Among the over 26,000 projects successfully funded on Kickstarter since its inception in 2008, a third have been music albums, another third film or video, and about a tenth writing and publishing projects.20 Not one of these projects needed a big studio, big record label, or big publisher to back them.21 Approximately one-tenth of the films premiering at Sundance Film Festival in 2012 were at least partially funded on Kickstarter, leading David Carr to remark in the New York Times that “at Sundance Kickstarter resembled a movie studio, but without the egos.”22 And Kickstarter is just one of several crowd-sourced funding sites. Others include Indiegogo.com, focused on funding indie films, and PledgeMusic.com, for musicians. After the Great Unknowns’ second album, Andy went back to academia. Kickstarter had given them enough funding to make another album but not enough to cover the marketing and touring expenses the band would accrue when promoting the album professionally.

The book is available for purchase at http://www.bulldozingtheway.com/. 16. https://buy.louisck.net/news/a-statement-from-louis-c-k 17. https://buy.louisck.net/purchase/live-at-the-beacon-theater 18. http://www.gq.com/entertainment/tv/blogs/the-stream/2012/03/aziz-ansari-dangerously-delicious-standup-online.html 19. http://bigthink.com/ideas/42326 20. Kickstarter statistics are constantly updated at http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats. 21. http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/10000-successful-projects 22. http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/at-sundance-kickstarter-resembled-a-movie-studio-but-without-the-egos/ 23. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22madmen-t.html 24. Levine, Free Ride, 141. 25. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/02/i_paid_4_million_for_this_.html 26. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/164/major-league-baseball-advanced-media-bam 27.

In a June 2012 interview, he said, “our first album didn’t sell enough to attract any labels, but we wanted to make another album.” So the band went to a site called Kickstarter, which enables artists to crowd source funding for their ventures. The band raised $8,612 from 149 backers, a sum that would let the group get together and professionally record and release an album. It’s a perfect story about the End of Big: a small band with a small audience that creates music without any of the normal channels for production, distribution, marketing or monetization. “Kickstarter helped us have it both ways, in a sense: we could do a serious album, somewhat harboring the hope that it would arouse a lot of interest and lead to great new opportunities, but keep up other jobs.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Take just one example: Johnson thinks that a site like Kickstarter offers a much better model of funding arts than, say, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); in fact, he thinks it’s just a matter of time before Kickstarter overtakes the NEA. “The question with Kickstarter, given its growth rate, is not whether it could rival the NEA in its support of the creative arts. The new question is whether it will grow to be ten times the size of the NEA.” Elsewhere in the book, Johnson writes that he doesn’t want to scrap the NEA, only to make it work more like Kickstarter; what’s most interesting about his argument, however, is that he doesn’t spell out why the NEA should become like Kickstarter and what makes the latter’s model superior.

Elsewhere in the book, Johnson writes that he doesn’t want to scrap the NEA, only to make it work more like Kickstarter; what’s most interesting about his argument, however, is that he doesn’t spell out why the NEA should become like Kickstarter and what makes the latter’s model superior. Perhaps, Johnson simply doesn’t have to, as his audience can anticipate the argument that is implied: the Kickstarter approach is simply better because it comes from “the Internet.” This odd and shortsighted claim focuses on the mechanics of the platform rather than on the substance of what institutions like the NEA actually do. Kickstarter works as follows: creators—they can be start-ups that want to build a cool app or new gadget or artists who want to make a music video—post their fund-raising appeals on the site; if and when enough people chip in, the creators get the money to embark on their project.

Now, this is a very different model from the top-down hierarchical model of the NEA, in which a bunch of artsy bureaucrats make all the decisions as to what art to fund. But the fact that Kickstarter offers a more efficient platform for some projects to raise more money more effectively—bypassing the bureaucrats and increasing participation—does not mean it will yield better, more innovative art or support art that, in our age of cat videos, might seem old-fashioned and unnecessary. Sites like Kickstarter tend to favor populist projects, which may or may not be good for the arts overall. The same logic applies to other governmental and quasi-governmental institutions as well: if the National Endowment for Democracy worked like Kickstarter, it would have to spend all its money on funding projects like the highly viral Kony 2012 campaign, which, all things considered, may only be of secondary importance to both democracy promotion and US foreign policy as a whole.


pages: 190 words: 52,865

Full Stack Web Development With Backbone.js by Patrick Mulder

Airbnb, business logic, create, read, update, delete, Debian, functional programming, Kickstarter, MVC pattern, node package manager, Ruby on Rails, side project, single page application, web application, WebSocket

The Bigger Picture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Before You Get Started Backbonify Your Stack Using npm Local Backbone.js Backbone.js via Content Delivery Networks Modules, Packages, and Servers CommonJS Modules Beyond index.html Browserify Combining Express.js and Stitch When Things Go Wrong Conclusion 1 2 2 4 5 6 8 9 10 13 15 16 2. Kick-Starting Application Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Creating a Wireframe Decoupling State from the UI Models and Collections Views Backbone.js and MVC Preparing a Click Dummy Basic HTML and Style Building a Data Layer Basic Events Conclusion 18 19 21 22 22 24 24 26 31 34 3.

The widely popular RequireJS and Java‐ Script AMD module format will be discussed later in the book. For the next chapters, we’ll stay in the web browser. You will learn about the basic abstractions that Backbone.js provides, and we will discuss Munich Cinema, the main example application of the book. 16 | Chapter 1: The Bigger Picture CHAPTER 2 Kick-Starting Application Development Don’t make me think is mentioned by Steve Krug as the most important principle in designing user interfaces. When you browse a list of movies, for example, it is nice to initially see just the film posters and for the movie details to be visible only upon request. In a web browser, the user experience of browsing movies results involves processing events that result from input devices such as a mouse or keyboard.

The movies are the most important entities on the website, so we want to preserve the context to quickly switch from one movie to another. Therefore, we want to combine a list view of the movies with details views. There also needs to be an easy way to navigate back and forth between the movies. 18 | Chapter 2: Kick-Starting Application Development During our conversation with the designer, we decided that patrons like Mary would be interested to interact with Munich Cinema as follows: • It would be useful for them to be able to filter and search movies (e.g., by the same director or in the same genre) so that they can decide which movie to go see.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Keith has been a celebrated musical instrument designer for years, and he had an idea for a new kind of digital musical device called the QuNeo. Instead of going the usual route of pitching investors, he used Kickstarter to pitch his future customers directly. They loved the idea, and his QuNeo controller became one of Kickstarter’s fine early success stories. Hordes of customers lined up and prepaid for a device that didn’t exist yet, turning into pseudo-investors and customers at the same time. Kickstarter as a tool for funding product development isn’t perfect. It would be even better if it supported the creation of risk pools for multiple projects, and an insurance or risk management system for customers.

But it’s the sort of strategy a Siren Server must resort to in order to retain an arm’s-length, risk-free state of being. Here is the question and answer about the policy from the Kickstarter website: How will Kickstarter know whether something is a simulation or rendering [ . . . instead of a photograph of a physical prototype]? We may not know. We do only a quick review to make sure a project meets our guidelines. I would like to see Kickstarter grow to be larger than Amazon, since it embodies a more fundamental mechanism of overall economic growth. Instead of just driving prices down, it turns consumers into a priori funders of innovation.

That’s not to say there’s no role for startups that are compatible with humanistic computing ideals. Kickstarter is an example brought up earlier. Maybe a startup can introduce a new template for personal activity that can evolve to have the key benefits of a job even though it isn’t called a job. Kickstarter, Etsy, ancient eBay, and similar efforts are legitimate baby steps in that direction. (For that matter, so was Second Life, the now-somewhat-stale virtual world service in which people created, bought, and sold virtual stuff.) Such efforts are in harmony with the principles of humanistic computing. Even if Kickstarter becomes superhuge, however, even big like an Apple, it probably wouldn’t become big enough to compensate for the jobs to be lost to self-driving vehicles and automated manufacturing and resource extraction.


pages: 56 words: 16,788

The New Kingmakers by Stephen O'Grady

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, DevOps, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix Prize, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator

For developers that don’t wish to surrender any control, Kickstarter represents yet another funding option. Founded in 2008, Kickstarter is a crowd source funding platform that had attracted $175 million in contributions as of April 2012. The model is simple: for a commission of 5% on each project—and a few additional percentage points due Amazon for usage of their payments network—Kickstarter provides artists, filmmakers, developers, and others with a direct line to potential individual investors. Unlike traditional venture capital, however, Kickstarter claims no ownership stake in funded projects—all rights are retained by the project owners.

Unlike traditional venture capital, however, Kickstarter claims no ownership stake in funded projects—all rights are retained by the project owners. Though Kickstarter is by no means focused strictly on developers, they have been among the most impressive beneficiaries. Of the top projects by funds raised, the first three are video games. In March 2012, Double Fine Adventure set the record for Kickstarter projects, attracting $3.3 million in crowd-sourced financing. Number two on the list, Wasteland 2, raised just under $3 million, with third place Shadowrun Returns receiving $1.8 million. The Kickstarter model is less established than even seed-stage venture dollars, but it shows every sign of being a powerful funding option for developers moving forward.


pages: 330 words: 91,805

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

Trade School, “About,” http://tradeschool.coop/about. 7. Ibid. 8. Kickstarter, “Stats,” www.kickstarter.com/help/stats. 9. Accenture, “The ‘Greater’ Wealth Transfer: Capitalizing on the Intergenerational Shift in Wealth,” 2012, www.accenture.com/us-en/Pages/insight-capitalizing-intergenerational-shift-wealth-capital-markets-summary.aspx. 10. Adrianne Jeffries, “If You Back a Kickstarter Project That Sells for $2 Billion, Do You Deserve to Get Rich?” TheVerge.com, March 28, 2014, www.theverge.com/2014/3/28/5557120/what-if-oculus-rift-kickstarter-backers-had-gotten-equity. 11. Greg Belote, “What If Oculus Crowdfunded for Equity?

We’ll follow Caroline Woolard, a Brooklyn-based artist and organizer who founded the Trade School, a platform for participation in which anyone in the New York community could sign up to teach a one-session class, which was offered free to anyone who showed up to attend. She successfully raised money using Kickstarter several times. Kickstarter and Indiegogo (among others) let people contribute money to projects of all kinds without taking any equity. Instead of equity, donors are given a range of thank-you gifts depending on how much they’ve contributed. In 2010, Caroline co-founded a community experiment in a small storefront in Brooklyn, where people took classes in exchange for barter.

In exchange for instruction, teachers received everything from running shoes to mixed CDs, from letters to a stranger to cheddar cheese.”6 A year later, the Trade School decided to turn to Kickstarter again to raise $9,000 to repeat the experiment for a longer period of time and to pay for some materials and a staff coordinator. Successful for a second time, the idea attracted attention from cities around the world. Trade Schools were opening in Oakland, Singapore, London, New Delhi, Sherbrooke, Jamaica, Purchase, Guadalajara, Cardiff, San Francisco, Bangkok, Paris, San Francisco, New Haven, and Milan, and all of them were seeking advice and support of the original group in Brooklyn. So the team turned back to Kickstarter to raise $10,000 to reimburse the freelance engineers and designers building an open-source Web platform that would make the lives of volunteers in all those cities much easier.7 Since 2009 Kickstarter has funneled nearly $1.4 billion to more than 70,000 projects, which are usually small, one-of-a-kind efforts.8 It’s great for pilots or small projects, but not enough to get a platform through the controlled kernel phase.


pages: 375 words: 88,306

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Between 2009 and 2015, close to nine million people pledged close to $2 billion for hundreds of thousands of projects on Kickstarter, and the word has entered the lexicon of popular culture. Every day, hundreds of people decide they are going to “Kickstart” their projects. What’s in it for the funders? Part of it is the pure joy of seeing a cool idea receive the funding it needs to get off the ground. Part of it has to do with getting early access to cool new things. However, even if the project is a commercial venture, investing in a Kickstarter gives you no ownership stake. I spoke to Kickstarter’s founder and CEO Yancey Strickler about this in spring 2014, and at the time he asserted that he had no intention of taking the platform into the “capital for equity” realm.

In fact, late in 2015, the company reaffirmed its position by becoming a benefit corporation, renewing its longstanding commitment to supporting the arts and culture, and articulating other values and commitments it intended to live by.43 If one looks at the composition of projects funded on Kickstarter, some of the “gift” motivations become clearer. A large percentage of Kickstarter projects are those that would have traditionally been funded by a foundation or a wealthy local business looking to support the arts, or through a charity walk, or by a group of friends. As Brian Meece, the founder and CEO of Kickstarter competitor RocketHub told me in 2013, crowdfunding is a social event, and a successful project is one that is curated in the same way you would a good party. In many ways, thus, the psychology of funding projects on Kickstarter is much more social than commercial.

The platform ensures that the well-heeled OneFineStay guests will enjoy all the amenities they might expect from a high-end hotel, including cleaning, fresh linens (on a daily basis if needed) and 24/7 guest services. In other words, while the space may be supplied by crowd, the hospitality is not provided by the homeowners but rather by the platform itself. Funding: Kickstarter, Kiva, Funding Circle, AngelList The peer-to-peer financing arena provides additional examples along the gift-market spectrum. The quintessential crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, for example, provides a way for people to fund a wide variety of projects, be it a new film or performance, the development of a new app, or a new product. A typical sequence of funding works like this. First, creative entrepreneurs launch their project with a funding goal.


pages: 428 words: 103,544

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

Two brothers in Syracuse, New York, even launched a Kickstarter campaign in the hope of being paid $400 to film themselves terrifying their neighbors at Halloween. These disparate campaigns have one thing in common: they received precisely zero support. Not one of these people was able to persuade strangers, friends, or even their own families to kick in so much as a cent. My inspiration and source for these tales of Kickstarter failure is Silvio Lorusso, an artist and designer based in Venice. Lorusso’s website, Kickended.com, searched Kickstarter for all the projects that have received absolutely no funding.

I have never read a media report or blog post about the attempts of the young and ambitious band Stereotypical Daydream to raise $8,000 on Kickstarter to record an album. (“Our band has tried many different ways of saving money to record a legitimate album in a professional studio. Unfortunately, we still have not saved enough.”) It probably will not surprise you to hear that the Stereotypical Daydream Kickstarter campaign brought them zero dollars closer to their goal. On the other hand, I’ve heard quite a lot about the Pebble watch, the Coolest cooler, and even that potato salad. If I didn’t know better, I might form unrealistic expectations about what running a Kickstarter campaign might achieve. This isn’t just about Kickstarter, of course.

* * * — Surely there is no easier way to raise some cash than through Kickstarter? The crowdfunding website enjoyed a breakthrough moment in 2012 when the Pebble, an early smartwatch, raised over $10 million. In 2014, a project to make a picnic cooler raised an extraordinary $13 million. Admittedly, the Coolest cooler was the Swiss Army knife of cool boxes. It has a built-in USB charger, cocktail blender, and speakers, attracting a thundering herd of backers. The Pebble smartwatch had its revenge in 2015, as a fresh campaign raised more than $20 million for a new and better watch. In some ways, though, Zack “Danger” Brown’s Kickstarter achievement was more impressive than any of these.


pages: 243 words: 61,237

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink

always be closing, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, Elisha Otis, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, out of africa, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, Upton Sinclair, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Robert Atkinson, “It’s the Digital Economy, Stupid,” Fast Company, January 8, 2009. 9. Carl Franzen, “Kickstarter Expects to Provide More Funding to the Arts Than NEA,” Talking Points Memo, February 24, 2012, available at http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/kickstarter-expects-to-provide-more-funding-to-the-arts-than-nea.php; Carl Franzen, “NEA Weighs In on Kickstarter Funding Debate,” Talking Points Memo, February 27, 2012, available at http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/the-nea-responds-to-kickstarter-funding-debate.php. That said, Kickstarter has a high failure rate. Roughly half the projects that seek funding don’t succeed in reaching their target.

Some three-quarters of a million Americans now say that eBay serves as their primary or secondary source of income.8 Meanwhile, many entrepreneurs find fund-raising easier thanks to Kickstarter, which allows them to post the basics of their creative projects—films, music, visual art, fashion—and try to sell their ideas to funders. Since Kickstarter launched in 2009, 1.8 million people have funded twenty thousand projects with more than $200 million. In just three years, Kickstarter surpassed the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts as the largest backer of arts projects in the United States.9 While the Web has enabled more micro-entrepreneurs to flourish, its overall impact might soon seem quaint compared with the smartphone.

Roughly half the projects that seek funding don’t succeed in reaching their target. See Samantha Murphy, “About 41% of Kickstarter Projects Fail,” Mashable Tech, June 12, 2012, available at http://mashable.com/2012/06/12/kickstarter-failures/. 10. Comments at Wired Business Conference, New York City, May 1, 2012. 11. Michael Mandel, “Where the Jobs Are: The App Economy,” TechNet white paper, February 7, 2012, available at http://www.technet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/TechNet-App-Economy-Jobs-Study.pdf. 12. Michael DeGusta, “Are Smart Phones Spreading Faster Than Any Technology in Human History?” Technology Review, May 9, 2012. 13.


pages: 371 words: 108,317

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

Korean pop dance video “Gangnam Style”: Officialpsy, “Psy—Gangnam Style M/V,” YouTube, July 15, 2012, accessed August 19, 2015, https://goo.gl/LoetL. 9 million fans to fund 88,000 projects: “Stats,” Kickstarter, accessed June 25, 2015. raise more than $34 billion each year: “Global Crowdfunding Market to Reach $34.4B in 2015, Predicts Massolution’s 2015 CF Industry Report,” Crowdsourcing.org, April 7, 2015. about 20,000 people who raised: “The Year in Kickstarter 2013,” Kickstarter, January 9, 2014. unless the total amount is raised: “Creator Handbook: Funding,” Kickstarter, accessed July 31, 2015. highest grossing Kickstarter campaign: Pebble Time is currently the most funded Kickstarter, with $20,338,986 to date. “Most Funded,” Kickstarter, accessed August 18, 2015. 40 percent of all projects succeed: “Stats: Projects and Dollars Success Rate,” Kickstarter, accessed July 31, 2015.

The technology of sharing enables the power of one fan who is willing to prepay an artist or author to be aggregated (with little effort) together with hundreds of other fans into a significant pool of money. The most renowned crowdfunder is Kickstarter, which in the seven years since it was launched has enabled 9 million fans to fund 88,000 projects. Kickstarter is one of about 450 crowdfunding platforms worldwide; others, such as Indiegogo, are almost as prolific. Altogether, crowdfunding platforms raise more than $34 billion each year for projects that would not have been funded in any other way. In 2013, I was one of about 20,000 people who raised money from fans on Kickstarter. A few friends and I created a full-color graphic novel—or what used to be called a comic book for grown-ups.

A few friends and I created a full-color graphic novel—or what used to be called a comic book for grown-ups. We calculated we needed $40,000 to pay writers and artists to create and print the second volume of our story, called The Silver Cord. So we went onto Kickstarter and made a short video pitch for what we wanted the money for. Kickstarter runs an ingenious escrow service so that the full grant (in our case $40,000) is not handed over to the creators until and unless the total amount is raised. If the drive is even a dollar short at the end of 30 days, the money is returned immediately to the funders and the fund-raisers (us) get nothing. This protects the fans, since an insufficiently funded project is doomed to fail; it also employs the classic network economics of turning your fans into your chief marketers, since once they contribute they become motivated to make sure you reach your goal by recruiting their friends to your campaign.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Here are just a few of the non-obvious keys we learned. Find the MED for Kickstarter Traffic If you want to raise a lot of money on Kickstarter, you need to drive a lot of traffic to your project. And you want that traffic to be comprised of prospective backers of your project. Applying the concept of MED (“minimum effective dose” from The 4-Hour Body), we knew we needed to discover and focus on the best traffic sources. My friend Clay Hebert is a Kickstarter expert. One of the things he taught me is a simple trick using bit.ly tracking. Bit.ly is a link shortening service used by millions of people . . . and Kickstarter. If you add a + to the end of any bit.ly URL, you can see stats related to that link.

Based on this data, we decided to focus all of our attention on just two goals: Getting coverage on the right blogs Activating our networks to create buzz on Facebook, Twitter, and email We knew that if we did this, we would be listed in Kickstarter’s Popular Projects sections, which is how you get people who are browsing Kickstarter to check out and back your project. Find Relevant Bloggers Using Google Images Start by looking at who covered Kickstarter projects similar to yours. You can do this by using a simple Google Images hack. If you drag and drop any image file into the search bar at images.google.com, you’ll be shown every website that has ever posted that image. Pretty cool, huh? Here’s the process your VA will use: Find 10 Kickstarter projects similar to yours, and for each, do the following:Right-click and save-to-desktop 2 to 3 images.

Some platforms require “all-or-nothing” funding goals; others permit partial funding; some raise money for completed projects; some, like Patreon, fund ongoing projects. Patreon supporters might fund a monthly magazine, or a video series, or an artist’s salary. The most famous and largest crowdfunder is Kickstarter, which has raised $2.5 billion for more than 100,000 projects. The average number of supporters for a successful Kickstarter project is 241 funders—far less than 1,000. That means if you have 1,000 true fans, you can do a crowdfunding campaign, because by definition a true fan will become a Kickstarter funder. (Although the success of your campaign is dependent on what you ask of your fans). The truth is that cultivating 1,000 true fans is time-consuming, sometimes nerve-wracking, and not for everyone.


pages: 52 words: 14,333

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising by Ryan Holiday

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, data science, growth hacking, Hacker News, iterative process, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, market design, minimum viable product, Multics, Paul Graham, pets.com, post-work, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Wozniak, Travis Kalanick

We all find ourselves in the same position: needing to do more with less and finding, increasingly, that the old strategies no longer generate results. So in this book, I am going to take you through a new cycle, a much more fluid and iterative process. A growth hacker doesn’t see marketing as something one does, but rather as something one builds into the product itself. The product is then kick-started, shared, and optimized (with these steps repeated multiple times) on its way to massive and rapid growth. The chapters of this book follow that structure. But first, let’s make a clean break between the old and the new. What Is Growth Hacking? The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself.

They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a start-up from nothing to something. But don’t worry, I’m not going to belabor definitions in this book. What’s important is we’re all trying to grow our business, launch our website, sell tickets for our event, or fund our Kickstarter project. And the way we do it, today, is fundamentally different from how it used to be done. Instead of launching products with multimillion-dollar marketing budgets, the growth hackers we will follow in this book began their work at start-ups with little to no resources. Forced to innovate and motivated to try new things, growth hackers like these have built some of these companies into billion-dollar brands.

With the collapse or crumbling of some of the behemoth companies and the rapid rise of start-ups, apps, and websites, marketing will need to get smaller—it will need to change its priorities. When you get right down to it, the real skill for marketers today isn’t going to be helping some big boring company grow 1 percent a year but to create a totally new brand from nothing using next to no resources. Whether that’s a Kickstarter project you’re trying to fund or a new app, the thinking is the same: how do you get, maintain, and multiply attention in a scalable and efficient way? Thankfully, growth hacking isn’t some proprietary technical process shrouded in secrecy. In fact, it has grown and developed in the course of very public conversations.


pages: 366 words: 94,209

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Interview with Scott Heiferman, conducted by e-mail, September 2014. 53. Sarah Lacy, “Pando in 2014: Looking Back on an Exhausting, Transformational Year,” pando.com, December 25, 2014. 54. Max Chafkin, “True to Its Roots: Why Kickstarter Won’t Sell,” fastcompany.com, March 18, 2013. 55. “Kickstarter Is a Benefit Corporation,” kickstarter.com, September 21, 2015. 56. J. D. Alois, “Neil Young’s Pono Music Is Now Equity Crowdfunding Following $6.2 Million Kickstarter Hit,” crowdfundinsider.com, August 13, 2014. 57. Mike Masnick, “Larry Lessig Launches Crowdfunded SuperPAC to Try to End SuperPACs,” techdirt.com, May 1, 2014. 58. Jeremy Parish, “How Star Citizen Became the Most Successful Crowd Funded Game of All Time,” wdc.com, January 13, 2015. 59.

“In the Internet industry, you’re basically a custodian of your own idea for maybe three to five years and then you’re supposed to sell. That’s insanity,”54 Kickstarter cofounder Perry Chen told Fast Company when he was trying to explain his platform’s approach to venture funding. He and Yancey Strickler started the now-famous crowdfunding site with $10 million in 2009 but made investors agree up front never to sell their shares. “We hope that we can return some of these funds to shareholders through some kind of profit sharing or dividend,” Chen explained, “and that’s it.” Six years later, in 2015, Strickler still enjoyed enough authority over the direction of the company to turn Kickstarter into a benefit corporation.55 None of his shareholders objected.

He’s offering his investors something that’s anathema to conventional thinking: a way of participating in living commerce, a sustainable mission, and a continual flow of dividends. It treats money less like ice than like water. Besides, if the Kickstarter platform works as planned, there will be a whole lot less need for venture capital at all. Kickstarter, and other crowdfunding sites such as IndieGogo and Quirky, seek to democratize fund-raising. They give small businesses and independent creators a way to bypass investment by instead seeking funding in advance from their future customers. It’s how a musician like Amanda Palmer funds her tours and albums, Neil Young funded development of his high-fidelity digital music device Pono,56 and Lawrence Lessig funded his super PAC, Mayday.57 Individuals have raised a few hundred dollars to produce products from coloring books to news articles.


pages: 188 words: 9,226

Collaborative Futures by Mike Linksvayer, Michael Mandiberg, Mushon Zer-Aviv

4chan, AGPL, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative economy, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Debian, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, informal economy, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lolcat, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, Network effects, optical character recognition, packet switching, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, stealth mode startup, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

There was a total breakdown in communication, trust, transparency, etc <www.maryrobine ekowal.com/journal/my-very-bad-experience-with-fundablecom/> <boingboing.net/2009/08/22/fundable-rips-off-hu.html>. Kickstarter Kickstarter.com has taken up this concept of crowdfunding with what seems to be significant initial success. The premise is simple: an individual defines a project that needs funding, defines rewards for different levels of contribution, and sets a funding goal. If that pledges meet the funding goal, the money is collected from pledgers, distributed to the project creator, who uses the funding to make the project. If the project does not reach the funding goal by the deadline, no money is transferred. Most projects aim for between $2,000 and $10,000. Kickstarter pledges are not donations, as most of the contributions are associated with tangible rewards, nor are they a form of micro-venture capital, as funders retain no equity in the funded project.

At the end of their first year, they gave out a number of awards including the project with the most contributors, the project that raised the most money, and the project that reached their goal the fastest, but the award that might be most telling is for the “Most Prolific Backer”: 93 “Jonas Landin, Kickstarter ’s Most Prolific Backer, has pledged to an amazing 56 projects. What motivates him? “It feels really nice to be able to partially fund some one who has an idea they want to realize.” <blog.kickstarter.com/post/318287579/the-kickstarter-awards-by-the-numbers> One curious conundrum arose when Diaspora sought only to raise $10,000 to develop an open source social networking platform ended their campaign with $200,642. <www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-thepersonally-controlled-do-it-all-distr> Their fundraiser came at the same time as a wave of Facebook privacy roll-backs, perfectly matching the simmering discontent with Facebook to their privacy focused project.

Kickstarter pledges are not donations, as most of the contributions are associated with tangible rewards, nor are they a form of micro-venture capital, as funders retain no equity in the funded project. While crowdfunding need not limited in topic, Kickstarter is focused almost exclusively on funding creative and community focused projects. Part of their goal is to create a lively community of makers who support each other. At the end of their first year, they gave out a number of awards including the project with the most contributors, the project that raised the most money, and the project that reached their goal the fastest, but the award that might be most telling is for the “Most Prolific Backer”: 93 “Jonas Landin, Kickstarter ’s Most Prolific Backer, has pledged to an amazing 56 projects.


pages: 139 words: 35,022

Roads and Bridges by Nadia Eghbal

AGPL, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, Debian, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, GnuPG, Guido van Rossum, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, leftpad, Marc Andreessen, market design, Network effects, platform as a service, pull request, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software is eating the world, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Tragedy of the Commons, Y Combinator

Musicians make a name for themselves through YouTube or Soundcloud instead of big record labels. Creative people fund their ideas through crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter or Patreon. Similarly, these infrastructure projects sprang from passionate, creative developers who thought I could do this better, collaborating to build and release code to the world. The difference is that millions of people rely on this code to lead functional daily lives. Because code is less charismatic than a hit YouTube video or Kickstarter campaign, there is little public awareness of and appreciation for this work. As a result, there is not nearly enough institutional suppo rt for the output that sparked an information revolution.

There are two major sources of funding at the moment: software companies and other developers. Crowdfunding Some development work gets funded through crowdfunding campaigns, such as Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Bountysource, the aforementioned open source bounty website, also has a platform called Salt, dedicated to crowdfunding open source projects. Andrew Godwin, a London-based Django core developer, successfully raised £17,952 (roughly $25,000) from 507 backers on Kickstarter to fund database work for Django. The project was fully funded in less than four hours. Of his decision to raise funds for an open source project, Godwin wrote: A lot of open source code gets done for free.

At the other end of the lifecycle, some projects are meant to decline as other, better solutions take their place. Digital infrastructure is distributed across hundreds of projects, large and small, built by individuals, groups and companies; it would be a behemoth task to catalog them all. It's hard to find funding...for the average developer (me) some of them are totally out of reach. [Kickstarter] only works if you either go viral or hire someone to do all of the marketing/design/promotions….Turning a project into a business is great too, but...these are all things that take away from development (which is the part I like to focus on). If I wanted to get a grant, I wouldn't even know where to start.[149] - Kyle Kemp, freelance developer and open source contributor Institutional efforts to support digital infrastructure There are some institutional efforts to collectively organize and help support open source projects.


pages: 329 words: 95,309

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank by Chris Skinner

algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, bank run, Basel III, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, demand response, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, gamification, Google Glasses, high net worth, informal economy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, margin call, mass affluent, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Pingit, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, quantitative easing, ransomware, reserve currency, RFID, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, software as a service, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, the long tail, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Crowdfunding differs from social lending in that it is investing for returns in new business start-ups and, like crowdsourcing, it pools the money of the masses into a nice venture fund to get things started. Much of the focus of crowdfunding has been around Kickstarter, the American leader in this space. Kickstarter provides a platform for funding by pre-selling your idea, rather than providing equity in the business. For example, you have a conceptual music idea, and you pre-sell the idea through Kickstarter with the hope of getting enough monies to fund the implementation of the idea (unlike other sites where you get an equity stake in the business). Kickstarter kicked off in business in April 2009 and, three years later, had seeded $200 million in funds across 50,000 projects.

Most of these projects are related to entertainment and the arts (about sixty percent of all projects), although some are technology and related fields. For example, in their most recent success, Kickstarter generated $10 million in funding for a new venture called Pebble. Pebble is a smartwatch that will connect to a smartphone. According to the Wall Street Journal, it raised more than $1 million in its first day on Kickstarter (April 17 2012) based upon an offer to pledge $115 to pre-order the watch. By mid-May 2012, Pebble had achieved its goal of raising $10.27 million. The funds were gained from 68,929 people, making it the most crowdfunded start-up ever in dollar terms at that time.

In addition, social media is creating new business models, some of which have already been mentioned such as SmartyPig. In this section, we look at some of these new financial service models and, in each section, pick a leader to focus upon in depth. There are many new financial service operations emerging using social media covering Capital Markets (Etoro, Stocktwits, etc), Corporate Banking (Funding Circle, Kickstarter, Market Invoice, Platform Black, The Receivables Exchange, etc), Retail Banking (Zopa, Moven, Simple, Bitcoin, etc), Payments (Currency Cloud, Square, mPowa, etc) and Insurance (Friendsurance). These sites are all newly launched in the past decade and are firmly based upon proven social models of finance.


pages: 389 words: 87,758

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

Jeremy Grant, “Temasek’s dealmaking reflects big bets on rise of the consumer,” Financial Times (London), April 14, 2014, www.ft.com/cms/s/0/79d9824e-bb9a-11e3-8d4a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz36evevz5a. 62. www.kiva.org/about. 63. “Stats,” Kickstarter, www.kickstarter.com/help/stats?Ref=footer. 64. Rob Thomas, “The Veronica Mars movie project,” Kickstarter, March 13, 2013, et seq., www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/the-veronica-mars-movie-project. 65. “Alibaba sells loan arm to Alipay parent in pre-IPO change,” Bloomberg News, August 12, 2014, www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-12/alibaba-sells-loan-arm-to-alipay-parent-in-pre-ipo-change.html. 66.

These are often of particular interest for smaller companies that do not have access to more traditional capital sources such as public markets and bank loans. Peer-to-peer lending and fund-raising platforms such as Kiva and Kickstarter know no national borders. Kiva, a web-based platform that allows users to lend money to people around the world, has reached over 1.2 million lenders, intermediating more than $600 million in loans.62 Since its founding in 2009, Kickstarter, a crowd-sourcing platform for creative projects—from movie documentaries to board games—has coordinated $1.3 billion in pledges from more than 6.9 million people.63 Among the notable projects funded on Kickstarter was the Veronica Mars movie, a sequel to the television show, which raised $5.7 million from more than ninety thousand “backers.”64 Alipay, the payment processing company launched in China by e-commerce giant Alibaba, has a unit that provides financing to small businesses.65 Exploit New Commercial Opportunities Companies with access to privileged sources of capital will have a clear competitive advantage.

C=251324&p=irol-newsarticle&ID=1769548. 50. Amy Dockser Marcus and Christopher Weaver, “Heart gadgets test privacy-law limits,” Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203937004578078820874744076. 51. Kiva website: www.kiva.org/about. 52. Kickstarter website: www.kickstarter.com/help/stats?ref=footer. 53. Martin Hirt and Paul Willmott, “Strategic principles for competing in the digital age,” McKinsey Quarterly, May 2014. 54. Amit Chowdhry, “WhatsApp hits 500 million users,” Forbes.com, April 22, 2014, www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2014/04/22/whatsapp-hits-500-million-users. 55.


pages: 316 words: 100,329

A Short Ride in the Jungle by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, digital map, Global Witness, Higgs boson, Kickstarter, Skype, South China Sea, trade route

Hopping with pain and fury I apologised, dragged her up and stamped on the kick-start. Nothing. Silence. Not even a pop. More than ten tries later it was clear there was no convincing her. Panther was going nowhere. Since it was getting dark and there was no traffic, I was going to have to drag her off the road and find somewhere to sling my hammock. But with a wall of mountain on one side and a steep drop on the other, there was nowhere to go. I walked back to Panther determinedly. 'Right girl, you're going to start this time, OK!' I said out loud. I gave the kick-start an extra hard kick and she choked into life.

I was far more likely to encounter mental demons than I was any man-eating big cats. As I stood up to leave at the end of the evening, George walked over to the bike to wish me goodbye. 'You're a brave girl,' he said. 'Good luck.' 'I'm not brave!' I retorted. 'I haven't done it yet. Tell me that when I've finished.' And with that I kick-started my bike and rode off into the Hanoi night. CHAPTER 3 GOING SOLO I awoke as the first glimmer of dawn broke through the hotel curtains. Vietnam rises early and already the street outside was humming with the noise of mopeds and the clatter of opening shutters. It was almost too much to comprehend that in a few hours I'd be zipping up my panniers, turning into the traffic and heading south.

His intentions were clear as gin. Amused and revolted in equal measure, I looked him in the eye and said in my clearest English, 'Look mate! Firstly I have a boyfriend, secondly I'm not that cheap and thirdly you are definitely not my type.' I'm sure he got the gist. Without hesitation I stamped the kick-start, gave him a wave and wheeled off leaving him standing there, still waving the crisp 500,000 dong note. Agreeing to lunchtime offers of a quickie from a stranger wasn't part of my 'Yes' rule. At Dong Loc, Vietnam is almost at its thinnest. Fifteen miles to the east is the ocean, forty miles westwards the impenetrable jungles of Laos.


Science...For Her! by Megan Amram

Albert Einstein, blood diamond, butterfly effect, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, double helix, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, pez dispenser, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Wall-E, wikimedia commons

It’s not easy to finagle, especially since America has been hemorrhaging money in the twenty-first century. That’s why the United States has turned to the crowd-sourcing fund-raising site Kickstarter to fill in the cracks! * * * National Debt by the United States Government * * * ABOUT THIS PROJECT: Hi you guys! Joe Biden and the rest of the gang here! :) We’re looking for some awesome people to help us Kickstart our dream project of having a functioning federal government! That’s where you come in: all we’re asking for is a little help. And twenty trillion dollars. As you may know, we (the United States government) are a little strapped for cash.

• Astrobiology • Carbon Dating • E-mail • Shakespearean Spam • E-male! • Which Dating Site Is Right for You? • This Spring’s Cutest Calling Cards to Leave on Your Serial Killer Victims! • Sexual Assault . . . and Pepper! . . . Spray! • Fun Ways to Freeze Your Eggs! • What I Imagine Porn Looks Like • Economic Technology • Kickstarter: Eliminate the National Debt Project • Electronic Music Women in Science “Trading Dungeons”: How to Spruce Up Your Basement Dungeon • Women in Science • How to Tell if You’re Upset Because You’re PMS-ing or Because You’re Caught in a Basement Dungeon • Hot or Not?! • Famous Women Scientists . . .

As the kids say, “LOL!” (Laugh On Line!) We may be the ones responsible for “this economy” in the first place but still. Uncle Sam may have gotten us into this mess, but WE WANT YOU . . . to GET US OUT! There is little if any funding available for small-to-midsize debt-based projects such as this. Through Kickstarter, with your support, the country that you live in can remain a free sovereign nation instead of having to sell Ohio to China, ’cause then Ohio would probably start speaking Chinese, and that’s FUCKED UP. A LITTLE BACKGROUND: For those of you who don’t know, the USA is the best! Originally from England, the United States government has been a major world power since it was founded in 1776.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

To capture the excitement of the moment, Schafer’s company streamed footage from their office, showing the staff as they followed the increasing Kickstarter pledges. In a cycle of hype, that made fans more excited—so they kept on loading and reloading Schafer’s Kickstarter page. Everyone wanted to see the instant the campaign tipped over from $999,999 to $1,000,000. And that, as it turns out, was a problem for Kickstarter’s existing design. “They’re all streaming it, saying ‘let’s all celebrate this moment, this is Kickstarter history,’” Ivy says. But he hadn’t yet optimized Kickstarter to deal with such crushing amounts of activity. His development team was pretty small; they’d been focused on all sorts of other design challenges.

But if suddenly thousands or millions of people start pounding away on your server? In that situation, unoptimized code can be ruinous. That’s what Lance Ivy found out when Kickstarter got popular. In 2012, three years after it was launched, Kickstarter started to get its first “million-dollar” campaigns. Among the first was a campaign by veteran video-game designer Tim Schafer to create Broken Age, his latest title. Schafer initially wanted to raise $400,000, a huge sum for Kickstarter at the time. But Schafer’s fan base rallied around the cause, and within 24 hours they had come close to raising a full $1 million. To capture the excitement of the moment, Schafer’s company streamed footage from their office, showing the staff as they followed the increasing Kickstarter pledges.

With so many people eagerly pounding away on the same page, they were inadvertently staging a “denial of service attack,” a flood of traffic that brings a server to a halt. “We went down,” Ivy says. “We went down multiple times.” Nobody minded, thank God. On the contrary, back in those days “breaking Kickstarter” was considered to be a mark of pride, a proof of your campaign’s viral success. But Ivy knew fans wouldn’t always be so forgiving, and that meant optimizing Kickstarter so it wouldn’t burn through so many resources when a campaign heated up. One key trick: They wrote code that auto-updated a campaign’s pledge amount in real time, so that rabid fans could sit and watch it tick upward without constantly refreshing the page.


pages: 302 words: 73,946

People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams by Jono Bacon

Airbnb, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bounce rate, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, content marketing, Debian, Firefox, gamification, if you build it, they will come, IKEA effect, imposter syndrome, Internet Archive, Jono Bacon, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, lateral thinking, Mark Shuttleworth, Minecraft, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, planetary scale, pull request, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Scaled Composites, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Virgin Galactic, Y Combinator

“Firefox Crop Circle,” FirefoxCropCircle.com, accessed November 30, 2018, https://firefoxcropcircle.com/circle/; “SpreadFirefox,” Mozilla Firefox, November 2013, https://blog.mozilla.org/press/files/2013/11/nytimes-firefox-final.pdf. 25. “Pebble Time—Awesome Smartwatch, No Compromises,” Kickstarter, accessed November 25, 2018, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-time-awesome-smartwatch-no-compromises/description; “Exploding Kittens,” Kickstarter, accessed November 25, 2018, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elanlee/exploding-kittens/description. 26. Haydn Taylor, “Minecraft Exceeds 90m Monthly Active Users,” Games Industry, October 2, 2018, https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-10-02-minecraft-exceeds-90-million-monthly-active-users. 27.

Kate Clark, “Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Artist Collaboration Platform HitRecord Raises $6.4m,” TechCrunch, January 31, 2019, https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/31/joseph-gordon-levitts-artist-collaboration-platform-hitrecord-raises-6-4m/. 15. “Star Citizen by Cloud Imperium Games Corporation,” Kickstarter, accessed November 1, 2018, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen; P. Ariyasinghe, “Star Citizen Hits $150 Million in Crowd Funding,” Neowin, May 20, 2017, https://www.neowin.net/news/star-citizen-hits-150-million-in-crowd-funding/. 16. Lizette Chapman and Eric Newcomer, “Software Maker Docker Is Raising Funding at $1.3 Billion Valuation,” Bloomberg, August 9, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-09/docker-is-said-to-be-raising-funding-at-1-3-billion-valuation. 17.

HITRECORD doesn’t just provide a rewarding way to make art with others, but everyone whose contribution is included in a final funded HITRECORD production is compensated (to date, nearly $3 million has been paid to the community).14 The value was clear. New businesses often see particularly interesting value in community. As an example, Star Citizen, a popular multiplayer space combat game used Kickstarter to raise $500,000 to build their game and have subsequently raised $150,000,000 in crowd-funded donations and have built a community of 1.8 million players.15 Other companies have used community growth as an opportunity to build market relevance, such as the cloud infrastructure company, Docker, who started out life relatively unknown, but built a passionate community around its technology that helped them to subsequently become a staple in the technology infrastructure industry.


pages: 324 words: 90,253

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

Money can always be created and, if necessary, dropped from the sky out of helicopters or other suitable flying machines. It's increasingly clear, however, that no amount of policy stimulus has returned Western economic growth to the rates enjoyed by my generation in decades past. While most of the debate regarding our current economic challenges focuses on the best cyclical measures to kick-start economic growth, this book offers something different: an analysis of what happens if the recovery simply fails to materialize or is substantially weaker than those seen in the past. Its mixture of economics, politics and history is deliberate. Without an understanding of the political and historical context, economics on its own threatens to become increasingly irrelevant.

Even as Japanese companies carry on repaying the debts built up in the 1980s, so the Japanese government year by year continues to add to public sector debt. Japan is caught in a trap. Private companies don't want to invest. An ageing population prefers not to spend. The resulting lack of demand inevitably puts pressure on government to spend more. Yet, too often, extra government spending, rather than kick-starting economic growth, has merely led to the construction of so-called ‘bridges to nowhere’, vanity projects that say more about the ‘pork barrel’ nature of political reality than about the strength or otherwise of the overall economy. One good example is the town of Hamada in Shimane prefecture. With a population of around 70,000 mostly elderly people, it benefits from the Hamada Marine Bridge – largely devoid of traffic – a university, a prison, an art museum for children, a ski resort and an aquarium, all of which represent gifts from current and future Japanese taxpayers.

However, back in 2010, most forecasters – including the Office for Budget Responsibility, the independent fiscal watchdog – concluded that loose monetary policy alone would lead to a decent recovery in economic activity that, in turn, would allow room for some kind of fiscal contraction without too much collateral damage. It wasn't so much reckless fiscal austerity that threw the UK economy off course but, rather, the impotence of monetary policy. Von Mises would have regarded this attempt to kick-start Western economies through ever more desperate monetary measures as the failed pursuit of illusory, not real, prosperity – claims on future economic activity that might never materialize. Yet our societies have not been prepared to make the ‘real’ versus ‘illusory’ distinction. We think we've discovered the secrets of ever rising prosperity partly because we're terrified of the consequences should prosperity crumble in our hands.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Seely Brown and Hagel call this “scalable learning,” and given the growth rates of ExOs, it is their only possible strategy. In the best cases, ExOs feature both—that is, ideas are developed bottom-up and get acceptance/ratification/support from the top. In the end, the best ideas win, regardless of who proposed them. In an effort to kick-start this kind of thinking, Adobe Systems recently launched the KickStart Innovation Workshop. Participating employees receive a red box containing a step-by-step startup guide and a pre-paid credit card with $1,000 in seed money, and are given forty-five days to experiment with and validate innovative ideas. Although they have access to coaching from some of the company’s top innovators, the rest is up to them.

Tools such as UserVoice, Unbounce and Google AdWords can accomplish this. Crowdfunding is a growing trend to help fund ideas using the web to assemble very large numbers of comparatively small investors—thus not only raising capital, but also reflecting the interest of the market. Two well-known examples of crowdfunding companies are Kickstarter and Indiegogo. In 2012 there was an estimated $2.8 billion raised via crowdfunding campaigns. By 2015 that number is expected to climb to $15 billion. The World Bank predicts crowdfunding to grow to $93 billion by 2025. In addition to raising enormous amounts of money for causes and startups, such platforms are also democratizing access to working capital.

The result has been an industry-wide transformation, allowing new entrants and hobbyists into the field, which has benefitted all players in the business, including Illumina. Though few industries have experienced such a stunning transformation as biotech, similar trends can also be seen in many other hardware arenas. Thus, while a basic 3D printer in 2007 cost nearly $40,000, the new Peachy Printer—recently funded on Kickstarter—is now available for just $100. And that’s only the start: Avi Reichental, CEO of market leader 3D Systems, sees no obstacles to bringing his company’s high-end 3D printers to market for just $399 within the next five years. Another example of this trend includes single-board computers for robotics and education, where the open sourced Raspberry Pi platform has proved transformative.


pages: 137 words: 44,363

Design Is a Job by Mike Monteiro

4chan, crowdsourcing, do what you love, index card, iterative process, John Gruber, Kickstarter, late fees, Steve Jobs

Approaching Pricing A few years ago I was fortunate enough to work with a company called Kickstart (not to be confused with Kickstarter, the excellent crowd-sourcing project funding service). Kickstart is an NGO (non-governmental organization) that designs and manufactures low-cost water pumps for use in impoverished agricultural areas of the world, mainly in Eastern Africa. They have an amazing track record of helping people lift themselves out of poverty by using these simple, easy-to-fix water pumps to irrigate crops. They create jobs. Here’s why I’m mentioning it: they don’t give away the pumps, like most NGOs would. They sell them. The Kickstart founders spent years working with NGOs who donated equipment and tools to those in need, only to return to the scene and find that the equipment had been scavenged for parts or was sitting unused and rusting away.

The Kickstart founders spent years working with NGOs who donated equipment and tools to those in need, only to return to the scene and find that the equipment had been scavenged for parts or was sitting unused and rusting away. People didn’t value (or need) what they had been given. So Kickstart decided to sell their pumps, marketing them as the “Super MoneyMaker.” The results were impressive. Instead of free hand-outs, the Super MoneyMaker became an item the poorest people in the world would save up for. Only people who actually planned to use one would buy one. When you pay for something with your own money, you value it more than when you get it for free.

See commencement fees developers 115 directing other designers 122 E Eames, Ray and Charles 9, 130 elevator pitches 15 enforcing contracts 55 engineers 116 establishing a feedback cycle 76, 80 ethical responsibilities 28 F feedback guidelines 78 firing people 127 G Gillum, Katie 87 Gruber, John 121 H Hall, Erika 2, 82, 110 I indemnity 54 information designers 113 intellectual property transfers 53 internal dysfunctions 62 invoice approval 92 K Kalman, Tibor 9, 130 Kickstart 33 kill fees. See termination fees L late payments 97 lawyers 47, 89, 98 leadership 124 Let’s Make Mistakes 87 Levine, Gabe 48 Licko, Zuzana 9, 130 lines of credits 98 lowballing 43 M maintaining relationships 16 marketers 118 market research 36 myth of the magical creative 6 N negative feedback 71 networking 15 O organizing client feedback 82 outbound client contacts 20 P Papanek, Victor 9, 130 payment milestones.


pages: 267 words: 72,552

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

The total market for peer-to-peer lending in China is estimated to have surpassed $100 billion in 2016. Kickstarter and its competitors, such as Indiegogo, offer a related service. Kickstarter alone has helped start-ups generate direct sales in excess of $3 billion, with one in three projects being successfully funded (and only about 15 percent of funded projects eventually failing). Recently, Kickstarter has teamed up with equity crowdfunding platform MicroVentures to offer backers a chance to buy equity in small businesses. What’s interesting is that Kickstarter built a platform for start-ups to go beyond a simple purchasing or funding transaction and offer comprehensive, rich, and continuous information to backers, quite a bit like an early data-rich market, so as to provide them with a lot of information in their decision-making and also keep them in the loop later.

General Electric and Siemens are decentralizing: “The Multinational Company Is in Trouble,” Economist, January 28, 2017, http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21715660-global-firms-are-surprisingly-vulnerable-attack-multinational-company-trouble. media giant Thomson Reuters aims to: Mary Johnson, “How to Kickstart Innovation at a Multinational Corporation,” Thomson Reuters blog, April 7, 2016, https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/kickstart-innovation-multinational-corporation. recruit the talent their firms required: Eben Harrell, “The Solution to the Skills Gap Could Already Be Inside Your Company,” Harvard Business Review, September 27, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-solution-to-the-skills-gap-could-already-be-inside-your-company.

But we may understand this case also as a metaphor for the rise and eventual fall of money-based markets, and the success of information intermediaries over monetary ones. We suggest this may happen throughout the financial services sector as finance capitalism is replaced by data capitalism. Venture capitalist Albert Wenger, whose firm has funded many successful start-ups in the financial sector from Kickstarter to SigFig, likens the fate of traditional banks in the age of rich data to another image of a tempest threatening a ship—a “Spanish Galleon full of raided gold sinking in a storm.” It has access to all the capital but lacks the insight, based on information, to circumnavigate the perilous weather


pages: 258 words: 74,942

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business by Paul Jarvis

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, big-box store, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, call centre, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital nomad, drop ship, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, follow your passion, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, growth hacking, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, index fund, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, passive investing, Paul Graham, pets.com, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, software as a service, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, uber lyft, web application, William MacAskill, Y Combinator, Y2K

Launching and Iterating in Tiny Steps 168 predictability, accessibility: George Whitesides, “Towards a Science of Simplicity,” TED Talks, February 2010, https://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_toward_a_science_of_simplicity. 170 the most-funded KickStarter project ever: “Pebble Time—Awesome Smartwatch, No Compromises,” Kickstarter, accessed October 9, 2017, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-time-awesome-smartwatch-no-compromises. 170( didn’t ensure Pebble’s long-term success): Lauren Goode, “Fitbit Bought Pebble for Much Less Than Originally Reported,” The Verge, February 22, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/22/14703108/fitbit-bought-pebble-for-23-millionw. 171 best suited for consumer-facing products: Olav Sorenson, “Could Crowdfunding Reshape Entrepreneurship?”

That’s why getting a working version of your product released as quickly as possible is important: your company needs to start generating cash flow and obtaining customer feedback. Andrew Mason founded Groupon as a basic website where he manually typed in deals and created PDFs to email to subscribers from Apple Mail. Pebble, a smartwatch, started with just a single explainer video and a Kickstarter campaign (no actual product, even) that raised more than $20 million to fund its development; Pebble was eventually sold to FitBit. Virgin started as a single Boeing 747 flying between Gatwick, England, and Newark, New Jersey. Once these startups were up and running, they were able to build from customer feedback and make positive changes.

Not so with Gather, however: Jeff decided to test his idea for his new product by creating a crowdfunding campaign for it. This approach, he felt, would see how much his audience wanted Gather; if they did, they would raise the capital he needed to build it without the need to give up control to investors. And because he’d already spent a decade building an audience that was ravenous for his Ugmonk brand, Jeff’s Kickstarter campaign was able to generate over $430,000 (surpassing his original funding goal by 2,394 percent), garnering him more than enough to cover all the costs required to put Gather into production. Jeff was now able to ramp up production to an existing audience for this product, and he got funding directly from that audience instead of from outside investors who might not have completely shared his vision.


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

David Bornstein, “Crowdfunding Clean Energy,” New York Times, March 6, 2013, http:// opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/crowd-funding-clean-energy/ (accessed March 6, 2013). 4. “Amazon Payment Fees,” Amazon, http://www.kickstarter.com/help/amazon (accessed June 11, 2013); “What Is Kickstarter?” Kickstarter, http://www.kickstarter.com/hello?ref=nav (accessed June 11, 2013). 5. “What Is Kickstarter?” 6. “Re-imagining US Solar Financing,” Bloomberg New Energy Finance (June 4, 2012) from David Bornstein, “Crowdfunding Clean Energy,” New York Times Opinion Pages, March 6, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/crowd-funding-clean-energy/?

Zopa, the U.K.’s first peer-to-peer lender, has processed loans of more than £414 million.2 Peer-to-peer social lenders brokered $1.8 billion in loans by the end of 2012, forcing the big banks to take notice.3 A more recent offshoot of peer-to-peer social lending is something called crowdfunding. Kickstarter, the leading crowdfunding enterprise, was launched in April 2009. Here’s how it works. Kickstarter goes around conventional investment vehicles and raises finance capital from the general public on the Internet. Originators of a project put their plan up on a site and pick a deadline by which the necessary funds have to be raised. If the goal is not reached by this deadline, no funds are collected. This provision ensures that the project has enough financing to at least make a go of the venture. The money pledged by donors is collected by Amazon payments. Kickstarter collects 5 percent of the funds raised and Amazon charges, on average, an additional 3 to 5 percent.4 Kickstarter, unlike traditional lenders, has no ownership in the ventures.

Kickstarter collects 5 percent of the funds raised and Amazon charges, on average, an additional 3 to 5 percent.4 Kickstarter, unlike traditional lenders, has no ownership in the ventures. It’s merely a facilitator. By November 2013, Kickstarter had fostered 51,000 projects with a 44 percent success rate. The projects had raised more than $871 million. Kickstarter limits the project funding to 13 categories—art, dance, design, fashion, films and video, food, games, music, photography, publishing, technology, and theater.5 Various crowdfunding platforms offer different forms of compensation. Donors can either pledge funds as gifts or receive the comparable value of the funds extended to the borrower in the form of goods or services once the project is up and running, or provide funds as a straight loan with interest, or invest in the project in return for equal shares.


pages: 209 words: 63,649

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

While this worked as a controlled pilot project, the next step is to understand the commercial viability of offshore OMEGA systems for a variety of uses, including biofuels production, wastewater treatment, and carbon sequestration. 3. Kickstarter: Crowdsourced Investment Kickstarter, an online platform for crowdfunding independent creative projects, launched in 2009 using secure online fundraising platforms (itself a recent disruptive technology). The platform recognized and filled a gap for creative entrepreneurs, designers, and other freelancers wanting to maintain creative control over their projects. The founders like to highlight this process as being rooted in the time of Mozart or Mark Twain, who solicited money from their communities and gave that community one of their finished products. Even so, Kickstarter’s inventive use of technology to harness the power of the creative community has enabled a crowd-sourced $789 million for 53,672 different projects, and in the process, Kickstarter has become one of the most influential bright spots in and beyond the tech world. 4.

Leaders of that economy, like HP and IBM, started with a foot still in manufacturing, creating hardware to store and manage information. Today, we see the early Purpose Economy stars anchored in Information Economy platforms; Facebook, which enables self-expression and community on a massive scale, is a great example. Kickstarter, which now provides more funding for the arts than the National Endowment for the Arts, is another. With the rise of the Information Economy, most companies eventually adopted information-driven systems and tools into their operations and products, such as GPS in cars and robotics in manufacturing.

As so many of Amanda’s fans offered up their homes and food freely, she realized that people felt her music was helping them, and that they wanted to help her in return. After her fan volunteered to pay her for the free album he’d burned, she decided to make her music free and to open up to her community, asking them to support her directly. She launched a Kickstarter campaign to support the making of her next album, and it generated nearly $1.2 million in contributions from 25 thousand people—the same number that her record label had considered so shabby. Amanda’s story perfectly expresses how people are looking for more personal domain in their lives, which she has achieved.


pages: 170 words: 51,205

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age by Cory Doctorow, Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Brewster Kahle, cloud computing, Dean Kamen, Edward Snowden, game design, general purpose technology, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, optical character recognition, plutocrats, pre–internet, profit maximization, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technological determinism, transfer pricing, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy

San Franciscans are ranked eighty-seventh in global payers; below Oslo, ranked eighty-sixth, where the average payment is $58.” Humble isn’t the only innovative collector of donations. Kickstarter uses “crowdfunding” to raise money for creators—people solicit funds to complete a project, and make a pitch (text and video) explaining why donors should trust them to use the money wisely. Then they specify premiums and gifts to be given to exceptional donors—give ten dollars and I’ll send you a postcard with a custom sketch; a hundred dollars gets you a custom portrait; ten thousand dollars gets you an original comic book starring you and your friends. Kickstarter has also been used as an effective means of collecting preorders before a production run: Give me fifteen dollars, and I’ll send you a book.

The event was meant to commemorate her twenty-eighth birthday, and she sought to raise $4,500 on Kickstarter from fans who got to watch her draw on a live video feed and received pieces of illustrated paper. She raised $25,805. In 2012, she sought $30,000 from her fans to rent a New York City storefront and paint nine giant paintings inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Within a week, she had $55,000. By the time the project ended, she had $64,799 (including the $8,000 per painting she took in for the seven canvases she sold as part of the highest-level Kickstarter reward). Like many painters through history, Crabapple relies on patrons to pay her bills—but her patrons number in the thousands, and she needn’t worry about the caprice or high-handedness of a few fat cats as she paints her way into history. 2.6 Does This Mean You Should Ditch Your Investor and Go Indie?

Two years ago, I conducted a crowdfunding campaign that raised over a million dollars in capital so that I could put out a record without a major label. People scratched their heads—why would this happen? How did she do it? The newspapers, the journalists, the bloggerati all weighed in. Was this the future of music? Was my Kickstarter “repeatable”? Am I a freak, an outlier, a strange charity case that an outlying public accidentally raised above the norm? Not from where I’m standing. There are many more of me—there already have been, and we are legion. It’s repeating as we speak. We are a new generation of artists, makers, supporters, and consumers who believe that the old system through which we exchanged content and money is dead.


pages: 271 words: 52,814

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy by Melanie Swan

23andMe, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, banking crisis, basic income, bioinformatics, bitcoin, blockchain, capital controls, cellular automata, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative editing, Conway's Game of Life, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital divide, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, friendly AI, Hernando de Soto, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, operational security, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, personalized medicine, post scarcity, power law, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, sharing economy, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, software as a service, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the long tail, Turing complete, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and Counterparty created a new venture, Medici, announced in October 2014, to provide a decentralized stock market for equity securities in the blockchain model.42 Crowdfunding Another prime example of how financial services are being reinvented with blockchain-based decentralized models is crowdfunding. The idea is that peer-to-peer fundraising models such as Kickstarter can supplant the need for traditional venture capital funding for startups. Where previously a centralized service like Kickstarter or Indiegogo was needed to enable a crowdfunding campaign, crowdfunding platforms powered by blockchain technology remove the need for an intermediary third party. Blockchain-based crowdfunding platforms make it possible for startups to raise funds by creating their own digital currencies and selling “cryptographic shares” to early backers.

A program or smart contract can be written that releases a payment when a specific value of a certain exchange good is triggered or when something transpires in the real world (e.g., a news event of some sort, or the winner of a sports match). Smart contracts could also be deployed in pledge systems like Kickstarter. Individuals make online pledges that are encoded in a blockchain, and if the entrepreneur’s fundraising goal is reached, only then will the Bitcoin funds be released from the investor wallets. No transaction is released until all funds are received. Further, the entrepreneur’s budget, spending, and burn rate could be tracked by the subsequent outflow transactions from the blockchain address that received the fundraising.

Sample list of Dapps Project name and URL Activity Centralized equivalent OpenBazaar https://openbazaar.org/ Buy/sell items in local physical world Craigslist LaZooz http://lazooz.org/ Ridesharing, including Zooz, a proof-of-movement coin Uber Twister http://twister.net.co/ Social networking, peer-to-peer microblogging66 Twitter/Facebook Gems http://getgems.org/ Social networking, token-based social messaging Twitter/SMS Bitmessage https://bitmessage.org Secure messaging (individual or broadcast) SMS services Storj http://storj.io/ File storage Dropbox Swarm https://www.swarm.co/ Koinify https://koinify.com/ bitFlyer http://fundflyer.bitflyer.jp/ Cryptocurrency crowdfunding platforms Kickstarter, Indiegogo venture capital funding In a collaborative white paper, another group offers a stronger-form definition of a Dapp.67 In their view, the Dapp must have three features. First, the application must be completely open source, operate autonomously with no entity controlling the majority of its tokens, and its data and records of operation must be cryptographically stored in a public, decentralized blockchain.


pages: 254 words: 79,052

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation by Chris Nodder

4chan, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, drop ship, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, game design, gamification, haute couture, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, late fees, lolcat, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, Netflix Prize, Nick Leeson, Occupy movement, Paradox of Choice, pets.com, price anchoring, recommendation engine, Rory Sutherland, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile

The Spore creature creator gave users a feeling of “owning” the character they developed before the full game was available. (spore.com/trial) Kickstarter’s whole business model could be described as making people feel ownership before they’ve bought a product, or indeed before it’s even been made. The idea is that you pledge money and become a backer of a proposed creative project. Obviously, if the project doesn’t meet its funding goals you aren’t billed. That means that if you want the product, it’s in your interest to persuade as many other people as you can that they too should get involved. With three hours to go, Double Fine had already easily become the highest financed Kickstarter project in the site’s history.

With three hours to go, Double Fine had already easily become the highest financed Kickstarter project in the site’s history. The Double Fine project pushed all the right pre-ownership buttons. (kickstarter.com) One example of a successful Kickstarter project is Double Fine Adventure, a point-and-click computer game. At the time of funding, backers knew only that Tim Schafer, the project’s leader, had a history of producing engaging adventure games. No work had been done on a script, character development, or any other aspects of the game. Based on nothing more than reputation and a promise to include backers in regular updates as the game development process progressed, Tim met his funding goal of $400,000 in just eight hours.

Based on nothing more than reputation and a promise to include backers in regular updates as the game development process progressed, Tim met his funding goal of $400,000 in just eight hours. Even he was surprised when funding topped the one million dollar mark within twenty-four hours. By the time the Kickstarter project closed, he had 87,142 backers for a total donation of more than $3.3 million. That left him 834 percent funded, and therefore he could add more characters and better technical effects, and release on more platforms and in more languages than he had ever intended. To increase the chances of success, most Kickstarter projects draw people in with escalating rewards for pledges at different levels of involvement. Double Fine Adventure promised a copy of the game to people pledging at the $15 level, with various stages including signed books and posters at $500 up to lunch and a tour of the offices at the $10,000 level.


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Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

In 2012, Globe CEO Ernest Cu backed a proposal from Minette Navarrete to create a separate investment vehicle called Kickstart Ventures, jointly owned by Singtel and the Ayala Corporation, the family-controlled conglomerate that constituted the other significant investor in Globe. One of Kickstart’s missions is to develop the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Philippines, a country with a young, technologically savvy population. Between 2012 and 2015 Kickstart made twenty investments in early-stage companies in the Philippines. Impressed by the progress, in early 2015 Cu convinced his board to set aside $50 million to expand Kickstart’s investment activities. Increasingly, companies have decided that this kind of corporate venture capital is critical given the pace and scale of change in the global market.

., 41 Hoffman, Reid, 49 HOPE acronym, 65 Horowitz, Ben, 206 House of Cards, 35 House of Payne, 98 Houston, Drew, 151 the how, changing in transformation A, 36–45 Huffington, Arianna, 27 Huffington Post, 27, 28 Humana, 183 Hundred Flowers Campaign, 117 Hurley, Chad, 97 HyperText Markup Language (HTML), 3 IBM, 8, 54, 132 Watson, 70, 204 ibrutinib, 19 Icahn, Carl, 15 ideas, sharing, 149 identity crises, 168–173, 193–197 IDEO, 61 Imbruvica, 19 industry entrant activity, 104–105, 112 Innosight, 61, 77, 93 Innov8, 143–144 innovation business model, 40–42 in business models, 20 catalysts in, 104–105 creating safe spaces for, 143–145 in established companies, 71–72 for improving today and creating tomorrow, 55 incumbents’ failure in, 14–15 pace of disruptions and, 4–5 physical environment and, 148 predictability and, 137–139 sharing ideas and, 149 simplifying experiments and, 148–149 Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage (Foster), 71 The Innovator’s Dilemma (Christensen), 14–15, 36, 71 The Innovator’s Extinction (Ulmer), 71–72 The Innovator’s Guide to Growth (Anthony, Johnson, Sinfield, and Altman), 62 Instagram, 48 Institute for Health Sciences, 204 Intel, 78–79 InterActive Corp, 49–50 interface management, 75, 80–87 arbitration in, 86–87 exchange teams in, 82–83 transfer pricing in, 85 internet browsers, 2–3, 47 media transformations from, 2–3 Intuit, 132–133 inverse mentors, 150–151 investment curiosity and funding of, 141 at Deseret, 30 estimating potential of existing, 119 at SingPost, 52–53 by venture capitalists, 103–104 iPhone, 4, 92–93, 104 iPod, 92–93 Israel, Simon, 53, 142 iTunes, 92–93 Janssen, Paul, 16 Janssen Pharmaceuticals, 16–22 business model innovation at, 42 postdisruption job to be done at, 39 Jarden Consumer Solutions (JCS), 130–131 Jasper, 143 Jassy, Andy, 53–54 Jensen, Michael, 177 job loss, 7 at Deseret, 30 at Media General, 157 Jobs, Steve, 4, 8 destruction by, 132 focus of, 116 influenced by Xerox, 13 Motorola and, 92–93 transformation journey of, 181–182 job to be done, 21 determining defensible postdisruption, 36–39 Johnson, Lyndon, 116 Johnson, Mark, 36, 53, 62, 109–110 Johnson & Johnson, 16–22, 177–178 Joyce, Jim, 64 Karim, Jawed, 97 Kay, Alan, 154 Kennedy, John F., 24, 115–116, 117, 132 Kickbox, 148–149 Kickstart Ventures, 143–144 Knewton, 56, 67 Knight, Wayne, 95 Knight Ridder, 97 Kodak, 1–2, 4, 11 Kodak Moments, 1–2 Koonin, Steve, 95 KPO, 51 KSL, 8, 9, 29, 68 Kuhn, Thomas, 68 Lafley, A.G., 124, 137 Lasseter, John, 4 Lazarus, Mark, 95 Lead and Disrupt (O’Reilly and Tushman), 53, 54 leaders and leadership commitment to transformation A implementation by, 43–45 conflict arbitration by, 86–87 conviction to persevere and, 24, 155–179 courage in decision making and, 91–113 on crises of commitment, 186–189 on crises of conflict, 189–193 curiosity in, 24, 135–154 discussion questions for, 210 in dual transformation, 23–24 exchange teams and, 83–84 exposing to new thinking, 145–147 focus and, 24, 115–133 greatest challenge facing current, 5, 11 hands-on involvement by, 44 in maintaining transformations, 162–163 mindsets for success in, 23–24 opportunity of disruption and, 11–12 overestimation of alignment by, 119 profiles of transformation, 182–186 purpose and, 176–178 understanding customer problems and the job to be done, 38–39 The Lean Startup (Ries), 65, 153 LeBlanc, Paul, 58 le Carré, John, 153 Lee, Christopher M., 67–68, 86–87 Lee Hsien Yang, 136 Lee Kuan Yew, 136 LegalZoom, 207 Lenovo, 92 Levitt, Ted, 37, 175 Lew, Allen, 144–145 Lim Ho Kee, 53 Linford, Jon, 84 LinkedIn, 49 Lin Media, 156 local maximums, 6 lunar module frame, 131–132 Lyft, 205 Lynch, Kevin, 32 Major League Baseball, 98–99 Manila Water, 117–128, 184–185 determining goals and boundaries at, 121–123 focus at, 142 growth gap determination at, 118–121 outcomes for, 127–128 strategic opportunity areas of, 123–127 Mao Zedong, 116–117 Marcial, Sharon, 127 margins, 122 “Marketing Myopia” (Levitt), 175 markets identifying constrained, 59–63 opened by disruptions, 5 Marriott, 8 Martin, George R.R., 5 Martin, Roger, 124, 140, 177 McClatchy, 97 McGrath, Rita, 65, 146 Meckling, William, 177 media companies founded after disruption in, 47–50 streaming, 33–36, 93–95 transformations in, 2–3 Media General, 155–157 Medicity, 183 Medtronic, 72–73, 74 Merck, 22 metrics, 42–43 microlenders, 73 Microsoft, 4, 49, 54 Mint, 132 mission statements, 177, 178 mobile phones, 3–5, 91–93 banking and, 151–152 shipping industry and, 202–203 Monte Carlo techniques, 98–99 moonshot, 24, 115–116, 131–132 Morton, Marshall, 155–156 motivation, 175–176 leaders on, 194 Motorola, 4–5, 92 M-PESA, 201 Mulally, Alan, 153–154 Mulcahy, Anne, 14, 86 multisystem operators (MSOs), 96, 98–99 Murdoch, Rupert, 97, 109 Myspace, 48, 97, 109 Narayen, Shantanu, 31–33 National Basketball Association, 98–99 National Science Foundation, 56 Navarrete, Minette, 143–144 Nestlé, 204 Netflix, 23, 97, 104 Amazon Web Services and, 54 business model innovation at, 40, 42, 146 business model of, 106 content creation at, 34–35 decision making at, 93–95, 102 early warning signs at, 108 metrics at, 43 postdisruption job to be done at, 39 transformation A at, 32–36 transformation B at, 69–70 transformation journey at, 181 net present value (NPV), 110 net promoter scores, 78 Netscape, 2–3, 47 News Corp, 48, 97 Newspaper Association of America, 3 newspapers.


pages: 324 words: 89,875

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

In fact, most of today’s biggest IPOs and acquisitions are platforms, as are almost all of the most successful startups. The list includes Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Waze, Uber, Lyft, Handy, Airbnb, Pinterest, Square, Social Finance, Kickstarter, and more. (See Figure 1.4 for examples of platform startups and their latest valuations.) The growth of platforms isn’t isolated to the United States either; platform companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and Rakuten have taken over China and much of Asia. Figure 1.4. Platform companies and recent valuations, January 2016.

—Fred Wilson, venture capitalist and founder of Union Square Ventures Fred Wilson, founder of Union Square Ventures (USV), is a renowned investor and venture capitalist. His firm has invested in many platform companies, including Twitter, Etsy, Lending Club, Tumblr, Foursquare, SoundCloud, and Kickstarter. To explain his company’s investment thesis, he has told what he called the “dentist office software story.” The story, “a modern day fable about defensibility in the software business,”1 begins with an entrepreneur who’s tired of having long waits at the dentist’s office. So, in typical entrepreneur fashion, this person decides to build management software for dentists’ offices.

USV realized it did not want to invest in commodity software, so Wilson and his partners asked, “What will provide defensibility?” The answer: “Networks of users, transactions, or data,” Wilson explained. “That led us to social media, to Delicious, Tumblr, and Twitter. And marketplaces like Etsy, Lending Club, and Kickstarter.” One of USV’s partners, Albert Wenger, has created an alternative ending for this story. In his version, a dentist named Hoff Reidman “decides that he wants to network with other dentists.” He creates a site called Dentistry.com. He hustles to get initial traction, and the site takes off.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

by 2015, a worldwide total of $34 billion: Ben Paynter, “How Will the Rise of Crowdfunding Reshape How We Give to Charity?” Fast Company, March 3, 2017, See: https://www.fastcompany.com/3068534/how-will-the-rise-of-crowdfunding-reshape-how-we-give-to-charity-2. Kickstarter: See: https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats. Pebble Time: John McDermott, “Pebble ‘Smartwatch’ Funding Soars on Kickstarter,” Inc., April 20, 2012. See: https://www.inc.com/john-mcdermott/pebble-smartwatch-funding-sets-kickstarter-record.html. $300 billion: Massolution/Crowdsourcing.org, 2015 CF Crowdfunding Industry Report. See: http://reports.crowdsourcing.org/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=54.

And while Marillion had to invent the entire back-end process that drove their campaign, today’s entrepreneurs can choose from any of the six hundred different crowdfunding platforms available in North America alone. Kickstarter, for example, one of the most popular reward-based platforms, has launched over 450,000 projects, with over $4.4 billion pledged to the site. It has also sped up the startup process considerably. The most successful Kickstarter campaign to date, a smart watch called Pebble Time, raised just over $20 million in little over a month—something that would have taken years to accomplish in Marillion’s day. And like many other digital platforms, crowdfunding is riding atop Moore’s Law and experiencing double-digit growth.

For those unfamiliar, crowdfunding is pretty straightforward. The “crowd” in question refers to the billions of people currently online. The funding part means asking that crowd for money. Typically, a crowdfunder presents their product or service to the world, usually via a video posted to a dedicated site like Kickstarter, and asks for money in one of four forms: as a loan (technically peer-to-peer lending), as an equity investment, in exchange for a reward (e.g., a T-shirt), or as an advanced purchase of the proposed product or service. And it can add up to a lot of money. The very first crowdfunding project took place in 1997, when the British prog-rock band Marillion raised $60,000 through online donations to finance a US tour.


pages: 294 words: 82,438

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World by Donald Sull, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, complexity theory, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, diversification, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, machine translation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, Network effects, obamacare, Paul Graham, performance metric, price anchoring, RAND corporation, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Startup school, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Wall-E, web application, Y Combinator, Zipcar

. [>] Indiegogo’s rules reflect: Kathy is grateful for the superb research help of Annie Case in comparing Indiegogo and Kickstarter. Christina Farr, “Indiegogo Founder Danae Ringelmann: ‘We Will Never Lose Sight of Our Vision to Democratize Finance,’” Venture Beat, February 21, 2014, http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/21/; Dan Schawbel, “Slava Rubin on How Indiegogo Has Created Jobs,” Forbes, October 4, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2012/10/04/; Jessica Hullinger, “Crowdfunding Clash: How Indiegogo Wants to Kick Kickstarter’s @$$,” Fiscal Times, May 30, 2014, http://thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/05/30. [>] Parenting is another domain: Diane Sonntag, “10 Golden Rules of Positive Parenting,” accessed July 31, 2014, http://www.babyzone.com/kids/positive-parenting_222185; Alyssa S.

Police officers use them to determine whether a suicide note is authentic. Even female hyenas apply them when deciding on a mate. Because these rules define the boundaries of inclusion or exclusion, they sometimes take the form of negative prohibitions, like the “thou shalt nots” of the Ten Commandments. Employees at Kickstarter, the crowdfunding website, for example, had rules to screen every potential project and reject those that did not fit one of its categories, like movies, art, or books. Although they live on the wrong side of the law, professional burglars, like judges, also rely on boundary rules. The choice of which house to enter is a high-stakes decision for burglars.

The prior chapters describe how people initially learn rules—by using common approaches such as personal experience, applying analogies, and negotiating, and in a systematic way by identifying what moves the needles and where the bottlenecks lie. In contrast, this chapter focuses on how people and organizations can improve their initial rules, and accelerate their process for doing so. The hero of our first example, Shannon Turley, did not have the benefit of this book to kick-start his initial simple rules, but he has been remarkably successful at fine-tuning them. As an innovator in his profession, Shannon demonstrates how people can successfully refine and enhance their rules. CRAFTING BETTER SIMPLE RULES Shannon Turley was a not-so-talented athlete at Virginia Tech, class of 2000.


pages: 411 words: 80,925

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

In this sense, the nouveau riche, just like their counterparts in earlier Roman, Greek, and Egyptian civilizations, bought and consumed goods for self-advertisement as much as, if not more than, utility. What interests us the most is not the luxury status or elitist side of conspicuous consumption that Veblen referenced, but the excessive mass consumption binge kick-started in the 1920s that exploded in the mid-1950s. We refer to the endless acquisition of more stuff in ever greater amounts as “hyper-consumerism,” a force so strong that there are now more shopping malls than high schools in America.2 There is now more than sixteen square feet of shopping mall for every man, woman, and child in the United States.3 Our challenge is not the fundamental consumer principle in itself but the blurred line between necessity and convenience; the intoxicating addiction of defining so much of our lives through ownership; and the never-ending list of things we “have to have.”

Pastor Jerry Falwell railed against video games, the Internet, and “godless” movies, and former vice president Dan Quayle’s and the media’s rant against Murphy Brown turned into a political circus. But today it is this generation of “valueless” children that is changing the world with sophisticated inventions such as Meraki (a low-cost Internet service for poor communities), new funding models such as Kickstarter (a “crowdfunding” model for creative projects), powerful online networks such as Meetup (an online platform that makes it easy for anyone with shared interests to organize local face-to-face groups), and community tools such as WordPress (an open-source blogging software). All these ventures were founded by entrepreneurs under thirty.

Like Chris Hughes on Obama’s campaign, Gallop also knew she had to make her initiative fun and avoid the “yawn factor” by adding a healthy dose of what she refers to as “competitive collaboration.” She launched IfWeRanTheWorld.com early in 2010. It’s essentially a crowdsourcing project based on the similar principles of microfunding sites such as Kiva or Kickstarter. People are motivated to do big things by taking all easy steps, microactions that in Gallop’s words “can bring about great leaps.” When you arrive at the site, you are asked to complete the statement, “If I ran the world, I would___.” Gallop illustrates how it works with a simple example. “The blank would be filled with something like ‘plant a garden to feed the local homeless.’ ” On the IfWeRanTheWorld platform, the user and the community all help break down the goal into microactions that friends, family, neighbors, businesses, celebrities, or total strangers can all help complete.


pages: 279 words: 71,542

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cal Newport, data science, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, financial independence, game design, Hacker News, index fund, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Money Mustache, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, price discrimination, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

., Catherine Clifford, “How Turning CrossFit into a Religion Made Its Atheist Founder Greg Glassman Rich,” CNBC, October 11, 2016, https://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/11/how-turning-crossfit-into-a-religion-made-its-founder-atheist-greg-glassman-rich.html. The Mouse Book Club provides a good example: For more on the Mouse Book Club, see https://mousebookclub.com. “mobilizing literature”: “About,” Mouse Books Kickstarter campaign, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mousebooks/mouse-books. “Damn! . . . If this guy is billing out”: “Unlock Your Inner Mr. T—by Mastering Metal,” Mr. Money Mustache (blog), April 16, 2012, http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/04/16/unlock-your-inner-mr-t-by-mastering-metal. “It was simply taken for granted”: Crawford, “Soulcraft.”

People are more eager than ever before to play Scrabble with neighbors, or trash-talk co-workers over poker, or line up in the Toronto cold for a table at Snakes & Lattes. The classic games that were popular in the pre-digital 1980s—Monopoly, Scrabble—remain popular sellers today, while the internet is fueling innovations in new game design (one of the most popular categories on Kickstarter is board games), leading to a renaissance in smarter, European-style strategy games—a movement best exemplified by the megahit Settlers of Catan, which has sold more than 22 million copies worldwide since it was first published in Germany in the mid-1990s. David Sax argues that this popularity is due in large part to the social experience of playing these games.

These examples can seem to place high-quality leisure into an antagonistic relationship with newer technologies, but as I hinted above, the reality is more complicated. A closer look at the Mouse Book Club makes clear that its existence depends on multiple technological innovations. Printing books requires capital. The project’s co-founders, David Dewane and Brian Chappell, raised this money with an online Kickstarter campaign that attracted over $50,000 in funding from more than 1,000 backers. These backers found their way to this campaign in part because of bloggers like me who directed their online followings toward the project. Another key aspect of the Mouse Book Club model is helping readers understand and discuss the books they’re sent, enabling them to maximize the value they receive from their reading experience.


pages: 400 words: 88,647

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

This doesn’t bother the 20-somethings; they just try to emulate Eric Migicovsky who, aged 27, launched Pebble, a start-up that makes smart watches which connect to phones and notify users about e-mails, text messages, incoming calls and social-media alerts. In early 2012, Migicovsky unveiled his project on Kickstarter, hoping to raise $100,000 in seed capital. Instead, he raised $10 million from over 68,000 backers, in just 4 weeks, making Pebble the largest crowdfunded project up to that point. Pebble has sold, mostly through its website, over 500,000 of its smart watches. To date, over 7 million individuals have pledged more than $1.3 billion to thousands of projects promoted on Kickstarter. Technologists and artists no longer need to rely on wealthy philanthropists such as Warren Buffett or Bill Gates for support; crowdfunding platforms allow even modest earners to invest.

And in the sharing economy, firms such as Airbnb (sharing homes), RelayRides (sharing cars) and ParkatmyHouse (sharing parking spaces) are taking advantage of the internet and social media to enable ordinary people to monetise their idle household assets. Many of these disruptive digital ventures are being launched by millennials (popularly known as generation recession), who can raise capital on crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, KissKissBankBank and MedStartr. Digital disrupters are not all young bootstrap entrepreneurs. Technology heavyweights including Apple, Google, Cisco and IBM are investing heavily in driverless cars, smart grids, connected homes and consumer medical devices. A massive shakeout in the automotive, construction, energy, health-care and other mature industries seems imminent.

A large number of open-source initiatives and crowdfunded projects are drastically bringing down the cost of 3D printers, making personalised manufacturing more affordable and accessible to more people. For instance, in May 2014, in an effort to make 3D printing accessible “to billions”, Autodesk, a design software provider, released Spark, an open-software platform that aims to make 3D printing simpler and more reliable. The same month, M3D, a start-up, raised a whopping $3.4 million on Kickstarter to produce a $300 super-easy-to-use 3D printer. One particularly impressive product of 3D printers is spare parts for fighter aircraft. In December 2013, BAE Systems, a British multinational defence and aerospace company, tested Tornado jets that had several 3D printed metal components in them.


pages: 182 words: 53,802

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks by Ann Pettifor

Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, The Chicago School, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail

Savings as a consequence, not precondition of credit When young people leave school, obtain a job, and at the end of the month earn income, they wrongly assume that their newfound income is the result of work, or economic activity. This leads to the widespread assumption that money exists as a consequence of economic activity. In fact, with very rare exceptions, it is credit that, when issued by the bank and deposited as new money in a firm’s account, kick-starts activity. It was probably a bank overdraft that helped pay the wage she earned in that first job. Hopefully, her employment created additional economic activity (because, for example, she helped produce and sell widgets) which in turn generated income and savings needed to reduce the overdraft, repay the debt and afford her wage.

A money-financed helicopter drop would require collaboration between the Treasury and the Bank of England. In keeping with its current operational independence, the process would begin with the BoE determining the size and timing of the helicopter drops.35 The People’s QE proposal is a type of programme in which the Bank of England would ‘… inject money into the UK economy that can kick-start economic activity in this country, reinvigorating government, local government, the private sector and household economies …’ To this end central bank money would be used to finance investment spending and lending. Primarily, central bank money would be used to finance the purchase of bonds issued by public sector institutions to directly finance government spending on infrastructure projects, or new money would be created to finance the lending of a green or public investment bank (as in Strategic QE and Green QE).36 Adair Turner’s Overt Monetary Financing (OMF) and Positive Money’s Sovereign Money Creation (SMC) both offer the option of distributing the newly created money directly to citizens, or using newly created central bank money to finance public investment spending.

Rising unemployment led to lower wages and incomes, and this in turn weakened demand for a nation’s goods and services. As a result, prices fell further, leading to more bankruptcies and unemployment … and the downward cycle became almost unstoppable. Expanding the public money creation ‘belt’ in a period of economic emaciation such as that described above will not kick-start investment and employment, or generate new income. Indeed, the world already has too much money – in the form of debt – as monetary reform activists repeatedly remind us. One reason private banks are not lending into the economy is that potential clients are already too heavily indebted. Another is that potential clients are refusing to borrow because they, while heavily indebted, are fearful of economic conditions because few customers are ‘coming through the door’.


pages: 248 words: 72,174

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau

Airbnb, big-box store, clean water, digital nomad, do what you love, fixed income, follow your passion, if you build it, they will come, index card, informal economy, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, late fees, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, price anchoring, Ralph Waldo Emerson, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, web application

It’s also the whole point: Since it’s so much easier to start a microbusiness, why do something different unless or until you know what you’re doing? Small is beautiful, and all things considered, small is often better. Unconventional Fundraising from Kickstarter to Car Loans What if you’ve thought it through and you do need to raise money somehow? Whenever possible, the best option is your own savings. You’ll be highly invested in the success of the project, and you won’t be in debt to anyone else. But if this isn’t possible, you can also consider “crowdraising” funds for your project through a service such as Kickstarter.com. Shannon Okey did this with a project to boost her craft publishing business. She asked for $5,000 and received $12,480 in twenty days thanks to a nice video and well-written copy.

“They looked at me like I was a silly, silly woman who couldn’t possibly know anything about running a business,” she said. The rejection turned into an opportunity. Taking the project on Kickstarter generated both funds and widespread interest in the project. Nearly three hundred backers came through with donations ranging from $10 to $500, leaving the project fully funded with capital to spare. Oh, and Shannon was not one for going quietly. After she reached the $10,000 level in her Kickstarter campaign, she printed out the front page of the site, wrapped the page around a lollipop, and sent it off to the bank’s underwriters. “I think they got the message,” she says.

An Offer You Can’t Refuse The step-by-step guide to creating a killer offer. 8. Launch! A trip to Hollywood from your living room or the corner coffee shop. 9. Hustling: The Gentle Art of Self-Promotion Advertising is like sex: Only losers pay for it. 10. Show Me the Money Unconventional fundraising from Kickstarter to unlikely car loans. PART III LEVERAGE AND NEXT STEPS 11. Moving On Up Tweaking your way to the bank: How small actions create big increases in income. 12. How to Franchise Yourself Instructions on cloning yourself for fun and profit. 13. Going Long Become as big as you want to be (and no bigger). 14.


pages: 210 words: 56,667

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

Eric Rosenbaum is one of the creators of MaKey MaKey, an “invention kit” that makes it easy to turn ordinary household objects into video game controllers (turn bananas into piano keys, create a joystick out of a pencil drawing). Eric and his business partner, Jay Silver, used Kickstarter to raise funds for their project. With an initial goal of $25,000, Rosenbaum and Silver ended up raising $568,106. What makes this case study interesting is how two fringe cultures of innovation—the open-source culture and the shanzhai culture of pirated innovation—collide. Through a strange series of events, Rosenbaum and Silver discovered a clone of their idea, called DemoHour, on a Chinese Kickstarter site. And the MaKey MaKey founders didn’t like it. It wasn’t so much that the Chinese borrowed elements of their idea: MaKey MaKey is open-source, which means it is available for change and iteration.

“But we shouldn’t be spending our public dollars and giving it away to international corporations,” they said. “We need to invest locally and in small businesses.” Rembert and Stuckert are focused on keeping the drumbeat of community hustle alive, making sure the town doesn’t slip back into dependency on big business. Their advice to others to kick-start community hustle? “You have to learn to be a catalyst and not a dictator. Having a charismatic personality certainly helps move things, but it’s less about one person. The biggest thing is learning how to get out of the way of things,” Stuckert told us. A lot of their process for engaging community has been about really asking people in town what they want Wilmington to become in the future.

To all of the fellow writers at Prufrock Coffee and Café Oberholz who commiserated with us during shared episodes of writers’ block, as well as Asi Sharabi, who provided a desk to work from when it was needed. And finally, heartfelt and enormous gratitude must go to Fran Smith for her kind, wise, and compassionate guidance along the way. A big thank-you to our Kickstarter backers who helped get this project off the ground—without a committed grassroots financing campaign, we never would have made it this far. To Laura Gamse, our talented filmmaker, who traveled with us to India and China and whose father diligently emailed us misfit material throughout the journey.


pages: 661 words: 185,701

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

A small portion of the revenue comes from advertisements on the website and lenders’ payments for website clicks and calls. Some unique risks inherent to LendingTree’s model include a lack of geographic and lender diversity—about 20 percent of LendingTree’s business passes through two lenders. Crowdfunding Creativity For information on Kickstarter, see www.kickstarter.com. Statistics on project funding through Kickstarter are available at https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats. The 8 percent fee for successful projects includes a payment processing fee of about 3 percent. Only about one-third of proposed projects are successful in reaching their funding targets. Interestingly, the areas in which project-funding success is at least 50 percent are related mostly to the performing arts—dance, music, and theater.

They also often enjoy unique rewards offered by project creators, which could include a copy of what is being produced (a CD, a DVD, a gadget, et cetera) or an experience unique to the project, such as a backstage pass for a music event, some form of participation in the creative process, or a meal. Kickstarter charges a fee of about 8 percent on successful projects. Through May 2021, Kickstarter had crowdfunded more than 200,000 projects to the tune of nearly $6 billion. Ma Yun (better known as Jack Ma), founder of Alibaba Another US-based crowdfunding website, Indiegogo, allows people to solicit funds for an idea, charity, or start-up business. Since its founding in 2008 and through December 2020, the website has provided about $1 billion in funding from over 11 million contributions for more than 650,000 projects. As with Kickstarter, backers mainly enjoy the satisfaction of making it possible for enterprising or creative ideas to be transformed into reality.

These sites allow for direct pitching of proposals to potential financiers but do not provide those financiers with equity stakes in the projects. One of the most prominent crowdfunding sites is Kickstarter, a US-based global crowdfunding platform launched in 2009. Anyone with creative ideas in approved areas can put their project proposal on the platform and set a funding goal. Funding on Kickstarter is all-or-nothing, which means no one is charged for a pledge toward a project unless it reaches its funding goal and is therefore deemed viable by the community. Backers are not investors, and their “return” is the satisfaction of seeing a project come to life.


pages: 170 words: 45,121

Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

collective bargaining, game design, Garrett Hardin, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Tragedy of the Commons

The temptation is to not want to use any space because (a) you can’t imagine that anybody doesn’t know what this site is, and (b) everyone’s clamoring to use the Home page space for other purposes. Take Kickstarter.com, for example. Because of their novel proposition, Kickstarter has a lot of ’splainin’ to do, so they wisely use a lot of Home page space to do it. Almost every element on the page helps explain or reinforce what the site is about. Kickstarter may not have a tagline (unless it’s “Bring creativity to life”) but they do put an admirable amount of effort into making sure people understand what they do and how it works. “What is Kickstarter?” is clearly the most prominent item in the primary navigation. ...but don’t use any more space than necessary.


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Allan Grant is a cofounder of hired.com: Billy Gallagher, “Hired Raises $15M in Series A at Valuation Around $60M,” TechCrunch, March 24, 2014, http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/24/hired-raises-15m-series-a/. Chris Cassano, a twenty-five-year-old from Florida: Chris Cassano, interviewed by Paul Vigna, June 12, 2014. He posted a description of it on Kickstarter: Chris Cassano, “Piper: A Hardware-Based Paper Wallet Printer and More,” Kickstarter, July 10, 2013, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/299052466/piper-a-hardware-based-paper-wallet-printer-and-mo. “Money’s great, too”: Nathan Lands, interviewed by Paul Vigna, June 13, 2014. According to surveys conducted by news site CoinDesk: “State of Bitcoin Q2 2014 Report Reveals Expanding Bitcoin Economy,” CoinDesk, July 10, 2014, http://www.coindesk.com/state-of-bitcoin-q2-2014-report-expanding-bitcoin-economy/.

It was the kind of on-a-lark thing only young people could do, and to his surprise, Beccy readily accepted the challenge. As if all that wasn’t challenging enough, the Craigs added another wrinkle: they would drive across the United States, fly to Europe, fly to Asia, and then fly back to Utah. They would pay for every stage of this round-the-world trip with bitcoin. They launched a Kickstarter project to fund the film, raised $72,000, bought themselves a little publicity, and hired a film crew. While it is reasonably feasible today, in 2015, to spend nothing but bitcoin for three months, this was mid-2013—just before a parade of well-known businesses announced they would accept bitcoin, as we’ll discuss in the next chapter.

It didn’t take him long to create a prototype-dedicated printer based on a Raspberry Pi, a tiny, inexpensive motherboard that came with in-built security protections, which were necessary to avoid the problem of inadvertently registering your code on your hard drive whenever you communicated with a less well-protected printer. He posted a description of it on Kickstarter and immediately sold twenty-five. That netted him about $4,000. In September of 2013, he got a call from Kenna, inviting him out to 20Mission. The unusual deal was that Cassano could live and work at 20Mission in exchange for a small stake in his company; Kenna would essentially act as an angel investor for Cassano.


pages: 336 words: 90,749

How to Fix Copyright by William Patry

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, barriers to entry, big-box store, borderless world, bread and circuses, business cycle, business intelligence, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lone genius, means of production, moral panic, new economy, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, search costs, semantic web, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The collectives thus break with the traditional model of passive financial donors: members are expected to do their part in spreading culture by also performing. The Kickstarter project is another example of crowd-sourced funding of creators.41 Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. Kickstarter helps artists, filmmakers, musicians, designers, writers, illustrators, explorers, curators, performers, and others to bring their projects to life. Kickstarter uses Amazon.com’s Flexible Payments Service so that individuals from around the world can pledge money to specific projects detailed on the site.

Information about the collective may be found here: http://www. clarinetcoco.com/. The collective is part of a larger collective effort, the Fractured Atlas, which helps artists and arts organizations function more effectively as businesses by providing access to funding, healthcare, and education. See http://www.fracturedatlas.org/site/ about. 41. See www.kickstarter.com. 42. The European Union, for example, launched 2009 as a year of creativity and innovation. See http://create2009.europa.eu/. 43. This publisher is not Oxford University Press. 44. See Robert Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce (2000, Harvard University Press). 45.

(Beatles song) 16 Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr. 19, 20 Hootie and the Blowfish 138 Hoover, Herbert 109 Horkheimer, Max 121 I Infopaq International A/S v. Danske Dagblades 213 iTunes 8 J Jagger. Mick 31 Jay-Z 98, 101–102, 178 Johnson, Mark 135 Johnson, Samuel 15 Jones, Alex 148 Justifications for copyright 8 K Kames, Lord 85 Karakunnel, Ben 261 Karp, Irwin 30 Kaspar clarinet mouthpieces 95 Keynes, John Maynard 90 Khan, Zorna 315 n. Kickstarter program 28 Kindle 9 321 Kretschmer, Martin 302 nn., 303 Kur, Annette 314 n. Kutiel, Ophir (“Kutiman”) 101 L Lady Gaga 9 Landes, William 103, 105 Lara Croft, Tomb Raider 22 Lennon, John 16, 95–96 Leval, Pierre 168, 196, 212 Litman, Jessica 299 nn. Little Nicky (terrible movie) 28 Lobbynomics 6 Lula da Silva 259 M Macaulay, Lord Thomas 70 Madison, James 131–132 Mallet, Sir Louis 85 Mamet, David 186 Manacles 91 Manet, Édouard 19 Marcellus, Robert 95 Marley, Bob 172 McCartney, Paul 16 Melos 30–31 Military bands 28 Mises, Ludwig von 39–40, 49 M&Ms 25 Model T cars 3 Monty Python 158 Moore, Joyce 8 Moore, Sam 8 Moses (Moshe Rabbeinu) 163 Mozart, Amadeus 15, 95, 100, 245 Mt.


pages: 307 words: 88,180

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

During China’s first internet boom of the late 1990s, Chinese companies looked to Silicon Valley for talent, funding, and even names for their infant startups. The country’s first search engine was the creation of Charles Zhang, a Chinese physicist with a Ph.D. from MIT. While in the United States Zhang had seen the early internet take off, and he wanted to kick-start that same process in his home country. Zhang used investments from his professors at MIT and returned to China, intent on building up the country’s core internet infrastructure. But after a meeting with Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang, Zhang switched his focus to creating a Chinese-language search engine and portal website.

The year was 2010, and Guo was responsible for the influential Zhongguancun (“jong-gwan-soon”) technology zone in northwest Beijing, an area that had long branded itself as China’s answer to Silicon Valley but had not really lived up to the title. Zhongguancun was chock-full of electronics markets selling low-end smartphones and pirated software but offered few innovative startups. Guo wanted to change that. To kick-start that process, he came to see me at the offices of my newly founded company, Sinovation Ventures. After spending a decade representing the most powerful American technology companies in China, in the fall of 2009 I left Google China to establish Sinovation, an early-stage incubator and angel investment fund for Chinese startups.

By giving robots the power of sight and the ability to move autonomously, AI will revolutionize manufacturing, putting third-world sweatshops stocked with armies of low-wage workers out of business. In doing so, it will cut away the bottom rungs on the ladder of economic development. It will deprive poor countries of the opportunity to kick-start economic growth through low-cost exports, the one proven route that has lifted countries like South Korea, China, and Singapore out of poverty. The large populations of young workers that once comprised the greatest advantage of poor countries will turn into a net liability, and a potentially destabilizing one.


pages: 421 words: 110,406

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

INDUSTRY EXAMPLES Agriculture John Deere, Intuit Fasal Communication and Networking LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Tinder, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat Consumer Goods Philips, McCormick Foods FlavorPrint Education Udemy, Skillshare, Coursera, edX, Duolingo Energy and Heavy Industry Nest, Tesla Powerwall, General Electric, EnerNOC Finance Bitcoin, Lending Club, Kickstarter Health Care Cohealo, SimplyInsured, Kaiser Permanente Gaming Xbox, Nintendo, PlayStation Labor and Professional Services Upwork, Fiverr, 99designs, Sittercity, LegalZoom Local Services Yelp, Foursquare, Groupon, Angie’s List Logistics and Delivery Munchery, Foodpanda, Haier Group Media Medium, Viki, YouTube, Wikipedia, Huffington Post, Kindle Publishing Operating Systems iOS, Android, MacOS, Microsoft Windows Retail Amazon, Alibaba, Walgreens, Burberry, Shopkick Transportation Uber, Waze, BlaBlaCar, GrabTaxi, Ola Cabs Travel Airbnb, TripAdvisor FIGURE 1.2.

Thus, in virtually every case, the core interaction starts with the creation of a value unit by the producer. Here are a few examples. On a marketplace like eBay or Airbnb, the product/service listing information is the value unit that is created by a seller and then served to buyers based on their search query or past interests. On a platform like Kickstarter, the project details constitute the value unit that enables potential backers to make a decision whether to fund it. Videos on YouTube, tweets on Twitter, profiles of professionals on LinkedIn, and listings of available cars on Uber are all value units. In each case, users are provided with a basis for deciding whether or not they want to proceed to some further exchange.

Create value units that will be relevant to at least one set of potential users. When these users are attracted to the platform, other sets of users who want to engage in interactions with them will follow. In many cases, the platform company takes the task of value creation upon itself by acting as the first producer. In addition to kickstarting the platform, this strategy allows the platform owner to define the kind and quality of value units they want to see on the platform, thereby encouraging a culture of high-quality contributions among subsequent producers.7 When Google launched its Android smartphone operating system to compete with Apple’s, it seeded the market by offering $5 million in prizes to developers who came up with the best apps in each of ten categories, including gaming, productivity, social networking, and entertainment.


pages: 268 words: 76,702

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

Part Two THE MONEY 4 The Money Men IF YOU WERE going to imagine an office designed to host some of the internet’s hottest start-ups, betaworks’s1 New York studio would be almost exactly what you’d picture. We’re in New York’s fashionable Meatpacking District, surrounded by designer shops, restaurants and bars, and just yards from the Hudson River. As you walk into the building you’re greeted with a wall of some of the biggest successes of the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, in which betaworks invested. There is a prototype Oculus Rift VR headset ($2.4 million raised), Hickies no-tie shoelaces ($580,000 raised), the Light Phone, an ultra-minimalist mobile phone ($415,000), and Sammy Screamer, a mobile alarm to ‘keep an eye on your stuff’ ($90,840), all on show as I visit.

It has invested in Twitter, in part through two companies who were eventually bought out by Twitter,2 Tumblr, and a number of other companies that make up the social internet. These have included bit.ly, the URL shortener (more important when web addresses counted towards your Twitter character limit) and analytics tool, and Giphy, the online gif repository now built into a number of social media tools. In addition to its Kickstarter investment, betaworks also backed the blogging network Medium (founded by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams) and the podcasting company Gimlet Media (now owned by Spotify).3 It’s also funded numerous analytics companies used by social media businesses and content creators, and even built the hit iPhone and Android games Dots and Two Dots, before spinning those out as a separate company.4 The way betaworks operates is by investing in companies when they’re still very small – sometimes taking them into their studios when they might still only have a handful of people (often the co-founders) working for them, and haven’t raised any money yet.

Wenger came to the VC game in a very similar way to Borthwick: he was president of del.icio.us, a service to share bookmarked websites (and so a precursor to Twitter and similar services), and then an angel investor in craft site Etsy and the social network Tumblr.13 USV currently invests in Soundcloud, Kickstarter, Stripe (a payments service), Foursquare and duolingo. It has exited investments including Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy and Zynga (maker of Farmville).14 But Wenger’s ability to spot what was coming, he tells me from the corner office of USV’s nineteenth-storey offices in Manhattan, just yards from the Flatiron Building, pre-dated most of the internet boom by a long way.


pages: 334 words: 100,201

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

The universe, he once wrote, was “the Sensorium of a Being incorporeal, living, and intelligent.”1 Early in the twentieth century, Einstein was so sure the universe was unchanging (at large scales) that he added a special constant to his theory of relativity to make it predict a stable universe. Is the idea of an eternal or unchanging universe satisfying? Not really, particularly if you have to smuggle in a creator to kick-start the process, as in “In the beginning there was nothing, then God made …” The logical glitch is obvious, though it has taken some sophisticated minds a long time to see it clearly. At the age of eighteen, Bertrand Russell gave up on the idea of a creator god after reading the following passage in the autobiography of John Stuart Mill: “My father taught me that the question, ‘Who made me?’

There were gradients of light, temperature, and density, down which free energy flowed, like water over a waterfall. Each star poured energy into the cold spaces around it, generating flows of heat, light, and chemical energy that could be used to build new forms of complexity in nearby regions. Those are the flows of free energy that allow life to flourish here on planet Earth. Gravity had kick-started the transformation of matter into stars by fusing protons despite the barrier created by their positive charges. This is a pattern we will see over and over again. It’s a bit like the cup of coffee that helps you get going in the morning. Chemists refer to this initial shot of energy as activation energy; it’s the energy of a lit match that starts a conflagration.

For the first time since plate tectonics had created the single supercontinent of Pangaea, two hundred and fifty million years ago, genes, organisms, information, and diseases could flow within a single worldwide system. The world historian Alfred Crosby described this ecological revolution as the “Columbian Exchange,” and he showed that globalization would transform the biosphere as much as it transformed human history.3 In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels argued that these changes kick-started modern capitalism. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

“Distributed Ledger Technology: Beyond blockchain,” 2016, p. 41, gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/492972/gs-16-1-distributed-ledger-technology.pdf. 8.Michael Del Castillo, “Prenup Built in Ethereum Smart Contract Rethinks Marriage Obligations,” CoinDesk, June 1, 2016. 9.Chrystia Freeland, “When Labor Is Flexible, And Paid Less,” International Herald-Tribune, June 28, 2013. 10.Stafford Beer, “What Is Cybernetics?”, Kybernetes, Volume 31, Issue 2, 2002. 11.Kickstarter exacts a 5 percent commission on successfully funded projects, kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter+basics. 12.Graham Rapier, “Yellen Reportedly Urges Central Banks to Study Blockchain, Bitcoin,” American Banker, June 6, 2016; see also Nathaniel Popper, “Central Banks Consider Bitcoin’s Technology, if Not Bitcoin,” New York Times, October 11, 2016. 13.Pete Rizzo, “Bank of Canada Demos Blockchain-Based Digital Dollar,” CoinDesk, June 16, 2016. 14.See, e.g., a proposal for London’s budget to be executed via blockchain.

The great cyberneticist Stafford Beer taught us that the “purpose of a system is what it does,” and if smart contracts work not to protect but to undermine working people, we must conclude that on some level this is what they are for.10 Nor are workers the only ones who might find the rug pulled out from under them in a world of smart contracts. Think of Kickstarter, for example. The crowdfunding site asks sponsors to pledge a sum of money toward a project (i.e. it is a box that contains value), and disburses that sum to the project originators only if the aggregate amount amassed in this way exceeds a preset threshold (and that box unlocks when certain conditions have been met). Kickstarter takes a cut for providing the platform on which pledges are aggregated and then paid out. But a well-designed smart contract framework would handle that whole process on a peer-to-peer basis, and do it for a relative pittance of Ether—a few pennies, against a few percentage points.11 A world of functioning smart contracts, then, holds existential peril for those intermediary enterprises like Kickstarter whose whole business model can effectively be boiled down to a single conditional statement.

But a well-designed smart contract framework would handle that whole process on a peer-to-peer basis, and do it for a relative pittance of Ether—a few pennies, against a few percentage points.11 A world of functioning smart contracts, then, holds existential peril for those intermediary enterprises like Kickstarter whose whole business model can effectively be boiled down to a single conditional statement. The complexity of the challenges we face spirals upward when smart contracts are applied to the physical world, via the intercession of networked objects. Some developers understand the blockchain not primarily as an end in its own right, but as an enabling payment and security infrastructure for capturing the value from situations and settings there’s no efficient way to monetize at present—something capable of “fractionalizing” industries, “liquifying” markets, and siphoning from the world that fraction of gain that has to date remained beyond the reach of the so-called sharing economy.


pages: 105 words: 34,444

The Open Revolution: New Rules for a New World by Rufus Pollock

Airbnb, Cambridge Analytica, discovery of penicillin, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, Free Software Foundation, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Live Aid, openstreetmap, packet switching, RAND corporation, Richard Stallman, software patent, speech recognition, tech billionaire

User-choice (the “Kickstarter” or “X-Factor” model) – say 10% – would allow some active consumer-choice in the allocation of funding to particular artists, projects or even general policies (supporting blues artists, for instance). Artists would propose projects, such as an album or new song, with a budget. Citizens would each be allocated “voting dollars” with which they could support such projects (with unused dollars being allocated proportionally). This would give the public some control over up-front funding, and has similarities to crowdfunding schemes such as Kickstarter or audience-voting on shows such as X-Factor.

For, ultimately, it is only by our collective, political action that we can effect the large-scale reforms we need. To find out more about what we can do to make an Open world and how you can get involved, visit: https://openrevolution.net/make-it-happen * * * Wikipedia is a hugely impressive voluntary effort, but it was kick-started commercially and it too has benefited from state spending: its content is largely collected from information already published elsewhere, much of it produced in state-supported academia (or in commercial contexts such as journalism). One way or another, a good deal of the Open material available to us today has been supported by governments and business.↩ Coda: The Original Copyfight Fifteen hundred years ago, in 6th-century Ireland, a dispute over the copying of a book led to a pitched battle.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

In May 2014, the Google engineer and libertarian activist Justine Tunney, who in 2013 tried to fund a private militia on Kickstarter,58 came up with the idea of replacing food stamps with Soylent, a “food product” that claims to “provide maximum nutrition with minimum effort.” “Give poor people @soylent so they can be healthy and productive. If you’re on food stamps, maybe you’re unhealthy and need to eat better,” Tunney tweeted, without bothering to check first with people on food stamps to see if they wanted to eat what the technology critic J. R. Hennessy calls “tasteless nutrition sludge.”59 No matter. In a month, Tunney had raised $1 million on Kickstarter for a repellent social experiment that brings to mind Soylent Green, the 1974 dystopian movie about a world in which the dominant food product was made of human remains.

As Peter Goodman, the former global editor of the Huffington Post, wrote to Arianna Huffington before very publicly quitting his job in March 2014, “there is a widespread sense on the team that the HuffPost is no longer fully committed to original reporting; that in a system governed largely by metrics, deep reporting and quality writing weigh in as a lack of productivity.”26 What Goodman calls “original reporting” has, according to the media reporter Joe Pompeo, been replaced by a Buzzfeed-like focus on social and mobile platforms where “people love sharing stories about health and meditation and exercise and sleep.”27 “The unfortunate fact is that online journalism can’t survive without a wealthy benefactor,”28 mourns the GigaOm columnist Mathew Ingram. And I’m afraid the same is increasingly becoming true of many unprofitable bookstores, too, which are desperately relying on crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo or Kickstarter to raise money from benefactors.29 And, of course, there is no lack of rich benefactors from Silicon Valley who are buying up the very old media that their revolution has destroyed. The poachers are now the gamekeepers. There is Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommate, Chris Hughes, a cofounder of Facebook, who bought the venerable New Republic magazine in 2012.

To put this into perspective, in 2009 all the content on the World Wide Web was estimated to have added up to about half a zettabyte of data.20 But, rather than infinite, the possibilities of most of the new electronic hardware at CES 2014 were really all the same. They were all devices greedy for the collection of networked data. These devices, some of which were being crowdfunded by networks like Indiegogo and Kickstarter, were designed to connect our dots—to know our movements, our taste, our physical fitness, our driving skills, our facial characteristics, above all where we’ve been, where we are, and where we are going. Wearable technology—what the Intel CEO Brian Krzanich in his keynote speech at the show called a “broad ecosystem of wearables”—dominated CES 2014.


pages: 416 words: 106,532

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

What grew out of the inability of entrepreneurs of small or obscure projects to gain access to the more traditional methods of raising capital was a new method for connecting them to all levels of investors. Crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and others positioned themselves online as a way for connecting entrepreneurs and investors. In exchange for investors pledging money, the project or company promised to return the fruits of its labor, depending on the amount a specific investor pledged. Recognizing that this platform was a fertile ground for scams, the sites implemented policies and procedures to protect investors. For instance, Kickstarter maintains investor funds in escrow until a project is funded to a sufficiently high level.

If not enough people invest, then funding stops and investors get their money back. Many projects have been funded by investors who simply wanted to see it become a reality, while others funded projects to receive the product. To get a feel for what Kickstarter can provide to investors interested in the bitcoin and blockchain space, simply type those terms into the search box on the Kickstarter site.8 Opportunities for investing in documentaries, books, games, and application development can be found. Fund a documentary on Bitcoin, for example, and on completion investors receive a DVD of that documentary. One of the most compelling aspects of crowdfunding was that it not only allowed dreamers to build their product or business, it allowed investors of all levels to participate in seeing these dreams come true.

As markets mature over time, there is more regulation on what information asset issuers must provide and by whom that information must be verified and audited. With cryptoassets, however, these standards are not yet in place. To get an idea of what havoc misleading asset issuers can create, we’ll examine an example from early equities markets. About 80 years after Tulipmania, in the early 1700s, the first international bull market came to rise.16 Kick-started by infamous entities such as John Law’s Mississippi Company in France and John Blunt’s South Sea Company in Britain, the equity markets were whipped into a buying frenzy fueled largely by duplicity. Both the Mississippi Company and South Sea Company had convoluted structures and were heavily marketed as pursuits to establish a presence and exploit trade in the burgeoning Americas, even though they had only marginal success in doing so.


pages: 390 words: 109,519

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Here is a representative but not exhaustive list of the social media platforms I think about, and that will be central to my concern in this book: social network sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Hi5, Ning, NextDoor, and Foursquare; blogging and microblogging providers like Twitter, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress, and Livejournal; photo- and image-sharing sites like Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest, Photobucket, DeviantArt, and Snapchat; video-sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion; discussion, opinion, and gossip tools like Reddit, Digg, Secret, and Whisper; dating and hookup apps like OK Cupid, Tinder, and Grindr; collaborative knowledge tools like Wikipedia, Ask, and Quora; app stores like iTunes and Google Play; live broadcasting apps like Facebook Live and Periscope.62 To those I would add a second set that, while they do not neatly fit the definition of platform, grapple with many of the same challenges of content moderation in platformlike ways: recommendation and rating sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor; exchange platforms that help share goods, services, funds, or labor, like Etsy, Kickstarter, Craigslist, Airbnb, and Uber; video game worlds like League of Legends, Second Life, and Minecraft; search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. At this point I should define the term that I have already relied on a great deal. Platform is a slippery term, in part because its meaning has changed over time, in part because it equates things that nevertheless differ in important and sometimes striking ways, and in part because it gets deployed strategically, by both stakeholders and critics.63 As a shorthand, “platform” too easily equates a site with the company that offers it, it implies that social media companies act with one mind, and it downplays the people involved.

As one Facebook manager fretted, “If you exist to make the world more ‘open and connected’ and you’re a content-sharing platform, the critical question to answer is why you’d ever delete anything, right? Because deleting things makes things less open, on its face.”4 This ambivalence haunts the edges of these guidelines, particularly between the statement of principles that begin the document and the specific rules that follow. Some minimize their intervention. Ning demurs, “We tidy up.” Kickstarter downplays, “We don’t curate projects based on taste. Instead, we do a quick check to make sure they meet these guidelines.”5 Of course, these disclaimers are cast into doubt somewhat by the lengthy lists of rules that follow. In other cases, the push and pull between intervening and not is even more clear: just as an example, after promising not to be “big brother” about reviewing user content (while retaining the right to do so when necessary), Delicious states, “We are also not your mother, but we do want you to be careful crossing the Internet.”

Slightly more permissive sites do not specify nudity, and by their silence implicitly allow it, but prohibit the “sexually explicit” or pornographic—leaving it to the user and the moderator to decide what counts as explicit. LinkedIn warns that “it is not okay to share obscene images or pornography on LinkedIn’s service.” The guidelines for Last.fm, Kickstarter, and Pinterest are similar. And a few platforms are more permissive still: Blogger, Tumblr, and Flickr allow explicit content and pornography. Especially for the more permissive platforms, anxieties around sexual content are evident. After allowing sexual content, Blogger immediately and vociferously prohibits “non-consensual or illegal sexual content . . . rape, incest, bestiality, or necrophilia . . . child sexual abuse imagery . . . pedophilia.”


pages: 452 words: 134,502

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Nobody wants to stick their neck out on their own, without an understanding that other lenders are likely to start lending, and that consumers are likely to consume. Just as the prisoners would optimize their respective outcomes were they able to confer and act in a binding unison by which they agreed to stay mum, so too would our economy be best off if all of the economic actors agreed that they’d spend together, and kick-start a real recovery. That’s another way of looking at some of the effects of deficit spending: a form of enforceable collective action, decided upon through the deliberation of our (somewhat) democratic governmental institutions. This is not to say that our government’s actions are determined in an altruistic fashion with the public welfare as decision makers’ highest end—quite frequently the opposite, in fact.

The defeat of SOPA was a true victory. But for those of us (un?)lucky enough to work as professional recording artists, the question that still looms is, how, or perhaps even if, we should be trying to make a living on our art. Do we forego labels and CD sales completely and take a leap of faith on Kickstarter? Do we have the kind of fan base that will support that? Is there a cloud-based model that is fair to artists? To be honest, though I consider myself both an activist and a musician, I actually find myself surprisingly UNinterested in learning the ins and outs of the music industry itself; both the one that is dying, and the new one that is being born.

Please email David Segal at David@DemandProgress.org if you want to receive direct updates as action pages and tools go live This Saturday, more than seventy representatives from leading tech companies and advocacy groups from across the political spectrum participated in a meeting to coordinate action against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The meeting, which included leaders from Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and reddit was remarkable for the array of participating organizations and its focus on how to mobilize to inspire millions of Americans to take action to tell Congress that this bill is deeply flawed. Representative Zoe Lofgren opened the meeting with an overview of the current state of the legislation, emphasizing the need for Americans to call their representatives EARLY THIS WEEK to voice their strong discontent with the bill: It is slated for a vote in the House Judiciary Committee on THURSDAY.


pages: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

He knew he was opening up a new way of computing, built for mobility, and would need his pocket computers to do just as many things as his desktop Macintosh computers were able to do. He would eventually call it the App Store. Doerr knew opportunity when it was in front of him. He tried to seize it. “Steve, I see what you’re doing. I see it. I want to be a part of this,” he said. “I want to put together a fund to kickstart this thing.” Doerr was falling back on his VC instincts. Every few years, investors like him would go to their institutional partners to pool millions of dollars in a new fund. Venture capitalists like Doerr would then use that money to purchase stakes in promising startups around the Valley. Like Bill Gates and his era of Windows-based applications, Doerr saw that an iPhone App Store would open a huge new field to programmers—whose startups he could fund.

Doerr knew how controlling Apple was under Jobs’s reign. Everything had to be perfect, from the industrial design led by Jonathan Ive—a dapper British lieutenant and longtime confidant of Jobs—to the software and apps under the direction of Scott Forstall, a fiery and talented executive leading Apple’s mobile operating system. Asking Doerr to kickstart a sea of new smartphone apps with a multimillion-dollar fund would create a wave of innovation much messier than Apple was used to dealing with. But Doerr wasn’t going to question an opportunity. He offered to raise $100 million from his limited partners, an unheard-of amount of money—especially one earmarked for funding a new form of program that was unproven and untested.

Meanwhile, Uber takes a 20 to 30 percent cut of every ride for providing the network that connects riders to drivers. “Everybody wins,” Geidt said. “It was honestly pretty much a no-brainer for the livery company operators, since the cars were just sitting there otherwise,” one early employee said. To kickstart demand, UberCab would dole out incentives to both drivers and riders, a method that proved to be one of the company’s most enduring marketing techniques. Riders, for instance, would get a free first trip upon signing up for the app. Drivers were promised hundreds of dollars in bonuses if they completed a minimum number of trips during the week.


pages: 295 words: 89,441

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley by Atsuo Inoue

Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, Apple II, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, business climate, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, fixed income, game design, George Floyd, hive mind, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Masayoshi Son, off grid, popular electronics, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TikTok, Vision Fund, WeWork

The three words could be completely nonsensical together, but could still produce good ideas, no matter how eccentric. For a historical precedent, the 19th-century poet Comte de Lautréamont (a contemporary of Rimbaud’s) would take two things which at first glance had nothing in common – say, a sewing machine and an umbrella – and then combine them to create a unique idea, effectively kick-starting the surrealist movement. Whilst manually turning the cards over, the thought occurred to Son that there should be a more systematic way of performing such a task – or better yet a way of getting a computer to do it. A computer would certainly be able to come up with inventions more easily and efficiently.

Son had only gambled in a casino once – when he was a student at Berkeley he had been to Las Vegas – and he had thrown all of his money away on the night. Ever since then he had resolved not to touch gambling, but the next few days in Las Vegas were equally as thrilling and an utter rush. Since the age of 19 what Son had wanted more than anything else was to kick-start the digital information revolution – and now it was finally happening. The 21st century and this new era would undoubtedly be led by Son Masayoshi and Bill Gates. In June 1998, Son and Gates met with Kim Dae-jung, the then president of South Korea. At the time the country was going through an economic crisis and Kim asked Son what the best way to rebuild the Korean economy would be.

The network system Son had in mind was capable of revolutionising the software business and even the lives of everyday citizens. Each individual instance of software could be instantly beamed anywhere in the world thanks to the IP network and supporting this infrastructure would be SoftBank, with its massive depository of titles and applications. Son was willing to do whatever it took to kick-start the digital information revolution and to this end he was willing to risk it all on the unproven pure IP network configuration, a vision shared by ‘mad scientist’ Tsutsui. The two were completely committed to revolutionising society in this sense. Of course, Son wasn’t so completely drunk on ambition he forgot to properly test the technology Tsutsui was developing, but when he sent what the two had been working on to top engineers around the world the feedback they got was unanimously negative.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Through Milner, Tiger gained exposure to other Russian internet stocks, including VKontakte, the clone of Facebook.[30] Through Tiger, conversely, Milner’s eyes were opened to the possibility of investing globally. “All of a sudden this whole world opened to me,” Milner said later. “Tiger was an inspiration.”[31] When U.S. venture capital kick-started China’s internet sector, there was a simple one-way flow of influence from the United States to Asia. With the kick-starting of “late-stage” or “growth” investing, the influence flows were more complex. In 1996, a maverick Korean Japanese outsider had demonstrated the king-making power of a $100 million investment. A few fast learners such as Sequoia had picked up on this example and started growth funds, but the 2000 Nasdaq crash took the wind out of this movement.[32] Then, in 2003, the lure of Chinese e-commerce prompted a New York hedge fund to move into private investing, and in 2004 and 2005 the New Yorkers went into partnership with a Russian, sharing their top-down, comparative approach—what they called “global arbitrage.”

All he could lose was one times his money.[25] What Khosla cared about were the bets that did pay off, and in the mid-1990s he fastened on an especially audacious and contrarian notion: that, with the coming of the internet, consumers would not be satisfied with a mere doubling or tripling in the capacity of traditional phone lines. Rather, they would clamor for a step change in bandwidth, involving routers that handled data flows a thousand times larger. While the telecom establishment snickered at this sci-fi babble, Khosla set out to kick-start the companies that would make the step change possible. The startups that Khosla backed are largely forgotten names: Juniper, Siara, Cerent. But they illustrate what venture capitalists do best and how they generate both wealth and progress. While incumbent telecom companies planned incremental upgrades, Khosla wagered on the idea of a big leap, even though he had no precise vision of what people would do with all the extra bandwidth.

The traditional accounts of economic growth need to make space for this phenomenon, which also explains China’s emergence as a top-flight technology power. Indeed, if the United States risks falling behind China in today’s technology race, this is precisely because Valley-inspired venture capital has kick-started China’s digital economy. Moreover, the Chinese venture industry has an advantage over its U.S. rival. It is more open to women. But that is to jump to the end of our story. To understand venture capitalists—to grasp how they think and why they matter—we must begin at the beginning. For, without this strange tribe of financiers, the orchards of the Santa Clara valley might never have been linked to silicon, and a staggering amount of wealth might never have been created.


pages: 245 words: 64,288

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

University of Cambridge. http://www.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/517352;jsessionid=62FE4CCB3807753999235E2EA54E5009 220LATEX– a document preparation system. http://www.latex-project.org/ Open at the source. Apple. http://www.apple.com/opensource/ 221 Kickstarter Expects To Provide More Funding To The Arts Than NEA, Carl Franzen, 2012. http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/kickstarter-expects-to-provide-more-funding-to-the-arts-than-nea.php 222 Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization, Marcin Jakubowski. TED. http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html 223 Jimmy Wales interviewed by Miller, Rob ‘Roblimo’.

But also Wikipedia, Creative Commons, many Flickr photos and videos on YouTube and Vimeo are released under some sort of free/open licenses. More recently, there has been a wave of Open Source projects throughout the whole spectrum, even physical objects such as flashlights, sensors, bicycles, solar panels, and 3D printers. Internet communities such as IndieGoGo and Kickstarter are great places to start directly supporting Open Source projects that will help you live a better life. The concept is simple. Somebody has a great idea that they would like to develop, they tell that to the community and ask for certain amount of money to complete or to continue the project.

You can choose which projects to support, and the amount of money you want to pledge. It gives you a sense of fulfilment and power. It makes you feel part of a community of like-minded people. And most of all, it is fair. There are no under-the-table-games, no special interests, no bribing of government officials. It is meritocracy at its best. To put things in perspective, Kickstarter is on track to distribute over $150 million dollars to its users’ projects in 2012, or more than entire fiscal year 2012 budget for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), which was $146 million.221 We cannot expect governments to solve all of our problems. Of course, it would be nice if public money were spent wisely and on programmes that helped everyone, operating at maximum efficiency.


pages: 265 words: 69,310

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

It’s why author Rachel Botsman can describe the Sharing Economy this way in a TED talk: At its core, it’s about empowerment. It’s about empowering people to make meaningful connections, connections that are enabling us to rediscover a humanness that we’ve lost somewhere along the way, by engaging in marketplaces like Airbnb, like Kickstarter, like Etsy, that are built on personal relationships versus empty transaction.1 It’s also why stories in the mainstream press tended to start off with the quirky and personal. Here is the Wall Street Journal: The hottest technology trend is apps that let anyone share anything, which is why Grace Lichaa recently found a group of strangers eating her home-cooked macaroni.

And so it goes with WeWork.7 Botsman and Owyang both extend the definition of the sharing economy to include companies largely outside the scope of this book. Coursera and others are challenging university education by providing massively open online courses (MOOCs), online marketplaces for products—such as eBay and Etsy—predate the rise of the Sharing Economy and its focus on “real-world” exchanges, and crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter can be seen as an extension of the peer-to-peer finance platforms. The Sharing Economy landscape is defined not only by what it includes, but by what kind of sharing organizations are missing. Sociologist Juliet Schor sums up the situation: There is great diversity among activities as well as baffling boundaries drawn by participants.

That’s one reason why Uber CEO Travis Kalanick admitted to undermining the fund-raising efforts of his main competitor, Lyft.38 The ridesharing model is a “two-sided marketplace” in which Uber manages the supply of both riders and drivers. The more riders on the platform, the better it is for drivers; the more drivers available, the better it is for riders. Getting this spiral kick-started is one of the challenges to any new entrant seeking to gain entrance. The technology component of the business is amortized over all the cities in which Uber operates, so its success in New York helps its business in San Diego. If the ridesharing market is indeed winner-take-all, then restructuring the transit system to accommodate Uber (allowing them to operate without the expenses and regulations to which taxi companies are subjected) amounts to handing over the taxi market to the company.


pages: 178 words: 43,631

Spoiled Brats: Short Stories by Simon Rich

dumpster diving, immigration reform, Kickstarter, Occupy movement, pattern recognition

The government had banned the beverage months ago, claiming its high caffeine and alcohol content caused liver damage. But he’d saved one can to drink on a special occasion. And now, for the first time since graduating, he finally had something worth celebrating. At 12:00 a.m. EST, he had officially achieved funding on Kickstarter for his jazz blog. Starting tomorrow, he’d be sticking it to the mainstream jazz media one post at a time. His parents had offered to get him an internship at Jazz Masters Monthly (they were friends with the editor in chief). But Rip wasn’t interested in working for a soulless place like that.

When they’d first started out, as seniors at Yale, they barely had enough songs for an EP. Now, the Fuzz had four self-released LPs under their belt. Their latest single—a reggae-inflected surf tune—had amassed more than twenty-five thousand plays on SoundCloud. And when they’d needed to raise five thousand dollars to record their latest album, they’d gotten it on Kickstarter in less than twenty days. No one had ever come to see them perform, though. At least, not anyone important. Tim tried not to stare, but it was difficult. The talent scout was tall and frighteningly thin, in a form-fitting charcoal suit. Club Trash served only beer and wine, but somehow he’d gotten hold of a martini.

“You can go to Columbia and we’ll work around your schedule.” “He’s going to Yale,” Death said. Sanjay began to dance. “You can’t do this,” Tim begged his drummer. “What about our fans?” “You have no fans,” Death informed him. “Oh yeah?” Tim said. “Then how did we raise five thousand dollars on Kickstarter?” “All the money came from Pete’s mom’s bridge club.” Tim winced. He’d always wondered why they had such a large Boca Raton fan base. “Pete’s going into finance,” Death told Tim. “He’s already been through four rounds of interviews.” “I was going to tell you,” Pete said. Tim’s eyes filled with bitter tears.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

“Veronica Mars: TV Series (2004–2007),” accessed February 8, 2017, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0412253. 262 To find out, they launched a campaign: Rob Thomas, “The Veronica Mars Movie Project,” Kickstarter, accessed February 8, 2017, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/the-veronica-mars-movie-project. 262 offer of rewards for different levels of support: Ibid. 262 within the first twelve hours: Sarah Rappaport, “Kickstarter Funding Brings ‘Veronica Mars’ Movie to Life,” CNBC, March 12, 2014, http://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/12/kickstarter-funding-brings-veronica-mars-movie-to-life.html. 262 The movie premiered on March 14, 2014: Business Wire, “Warner Bros.’

This continued interest intrigued the movie studio Warner Brothers, Bell, and the show’s creator, Rob Thomas. They wondered whether it meant that there would be sufficient demand for a Veronica Mars movie, even one that came out several years after the show had last aired. To find out, they launched a campaign on the popular crowdfunding site Kickstarter. The campaign included a short trailer for the proposed movie, videos from Bell and Thomas, and the offer of rewards for different levels of support.*** The campaign’s stated goal was to raise $2 million. It actually took in that amount within the first twelve hours and went on to generate $5.7 million in total.

(TV show), 17 Jeppesen, Lars Bo, 259 Jobs, Steve curation of iPhone platform, 165 Dropbox acquisition offer, 162 and iPhone apps, 151–53, 157, 163 joint-stock company, 320 journalism, See newspapers Joyce, James, 178 judges, parole granted by, 39–40 judgment, human as complement to computer power, 35 in decision-making loop, 53–56 flaws in, 37–42 and justification, 45 “superforecasters” and, 60–61 System 1/System 2 reasoning, 35–46 justification, 45 Kadakia, Payal, 178, 179, 184 Kaggle, 261 Kahneman, Daniel, 35–36, 43, 44, 56, 325 Kalanick, Travis, 200 Kapor, Mitch, 142 Katz, Michael, 141n Kaushik, Avinash, 45 Kay, Alan, 61 Kazaa, 144 Kehoe, Patrick J., 21 Keirstead, Karl, 143 kernel, 240 Keynes, John Maynard, 278–79, 287, 309–10 Khosla, Vinod, 94 Kickstarter, 262 “killer app,” 157 Kim, Pauline, 40–41 Kimberley Process, 289–90 kinases, 116–17 kitchen, automated, 94 Kiva Systems, 103 Klein, Gary, 56 knowledge access to, in second machine age, 18 markets and, 332 prediction markets and, 238 knowledge differentials, See information asymmetries Kodak, 131, 132 Kohavi, Ronny, 45, 51 Kohl’s, 62–63 Koike, Makoto, 79–80 Komatsu, 99 Koum, Jan, 140 Krawisz, Daniel, 304 Kurzweil, Ray, 308 Lakhani, Karim, 252–55, 259 landline telecommunications, 134–35 land title registry, 291 language learning styles, 67–69 Lasker, Edward, 2 Lawee, David, 166 law of one price, 156 Lea, Ed, 170 leadership, geeky, 244–45, 248–49 lead users, 265 LeCun, Yann, 73, 80, 121 ledger, See blockchain Legg, Shane, 71 Lehman, Bastian, 184 Lei Jun, 203 Leimkuhler, John F., 182 “lemons,” 207 Lending Club, 263 level 5 autonomy, 82 leveraging of assets, O2O platforms for, 196–97 Levinovitz, Alan, 3 Levinson, Art, 152 libraries, 229–32 Library of Congress, 231 links, 233 Linq, 290–91 Linux, 240–45, 248, 249, 260 liquidity and network effects, 206 O2O platforms as engines of, 192–96 Livermore, Shaw, 22–23 locking in users, 217 lodging; See also Airbnb differences between Airbnb and hotels, 222–23 Priceline and, 223–24 “Logic Theorist” program, 69 Long, Tim, 204 Los Angeles, California hotel occupancy rates, 221–22 Postmates in, 185 Uber’s effect on taxi service, 201 LTE networks, 96 Luca, Michael, 209n Lyft, 186, 201, 208, 218 Ma, Jack, 7 machine age, See second machine age machine intelligence mind as counterpart to, 15 superiority to System 1 reasoning, 38–41 machine learning, 66–86; See also artificial intelligence AlphaGo and, 73 back-office work and, 82–83 early attempts, 67–74 in Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, 48–51 O2O business data and, 194 statistical pattern recognition and, 72–74 machine(s); See also artificial intelligence; robotics; standard partnership and business process reengineering, 32–33 and creativity, 110–19 defined, 14 human connection in digitized world, 122–24 human judgment and, 34–45 new mind-machine partnership, 46–62 and uniquely human domains, 110–26 Mad Men (TV drama), 48 Madrigal, Alexis, 295–96 magazines ad revenue (late 1990s), 130 ad revenue (2013), 132–33 new content platforms’ effect on revenue, 139 MakerBot, 273 maker movement, 271–72 Makhijani, Vish, 324–25 malls, 131, 134 Malone, Tom, 311, 313 management/managers continued importance of, 320–23 and economics of the firm, 309 as portion of US workforce, 321 in post-standard partnership world, 323–26 manufacturing electricity’s effect on, 19–24 robotics in, 102 transition from molds to 3D printing, 104–7 Manyika, James, 332 Manzi, Jim, 62–63 Marchant, Jo, 66n Marcus, Gary, 5, 71 marginal costs bundling and, 147 of computer storage, 136 of digital copies, 136, 137 of perishing inventory, 180, 181 of platforms, 137 of platforms vs. products, 147, 220 and Uber’s market value, 219 marginal utility, 258–59 “Market for ‘Lemons,’ The” (Akerlof), 207 market research, 13–14, 261–63 market(s) centrally planned economies vs., 235–37 companies and, 309–11 costs inherent in, 310–11 as crowd, 235–39 information asymmetries and, 206–7 prediction markets, 237–39 production costs vs. coordination costs, 313–14 Markowitz, Henry, 268 Marshall, Matt, 62 Martin, Andrew, 40–41 Marx, Karl, 279 Masaka, Makoto, 79–80 “Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search” (Nature article), 4 Maugham, Somerset, 110 Mazzella, Frédéric, 190 McCarthy, John, 67 McClatchy Company, 132 McDonald’s, 92 McElheren, Kristina, 42 McKinsey Global Institute, 332 Mechanical Turk, 260 Medallion Fund, 267 medical devices crowd-designed, 272–75 3D printing and, 106 medical diagnosis, 123–24 Meehl, Paul, 41–42, 53–54, 56, 81 MegaBLAST, 253, 254 Menger, Carl, 25 Men’s Fitness, 132 Merton, Robert K., 189 Metallica, 144 Microsoft core capabilities, 15 machine learning, 79 proprietary software, 240 as stack, 295 Windows Phone platform, 167–68 Microsoft Research, 84 Milgrom, Paul, 315n milking systems, 101 Mims, Christopher, 325 mind, human as counterpart to machine intelligence, 15 undetected biases in, 42–45 Minsky, Marvin, 73, 113 Mitchell, Alan, 11, 12 MIT Media Lab, 272 mobile telephones, 129–30, 134–35 Mocan, Naci, 40 molds, 104–5 Moley Robotics, 94 Momentum Machines, 94 Moody’s, 134 Moore, John, 315 Moore’s law, 308 and Cambrian Explosion of robotics, 97–98 defined, 35 neural networks and, 75 System 2 reasoning and, 46 and 3D printing, 107 Morozov, Evgeny, 297 Mt.


pages: 381 words: 120,361

Sunfall by Jim Al-Khalili

airport security, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bletchley Park, Carrington event, cosmological constant, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Attenborough, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, imposter syndrome, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off grid, pattern recognition, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Turing test

But the subject matter now was far more important than a theoretical curiosity about the structure of dark matter. ‘But,’ continued Qiang, ‘if this liquid core gets disturbed, the magnetic field gets weaker. And right now, turbulent vortices thousands of kilometres below our feet are disrupting its smooth circular flow. ‘So, my question is this: if we really had to, is there a way of kick-starting the core again? How could we deliver a massive boost of energy to the right spots at the right time to push the liquid metal in the right direction?’ Marc was intrigued. ‘I guess it’s a bit like sticking your finger into emptying bathwater above the plughole and stirring it to recover the steady circular vortex after it has been messed up.’

What if you aimed multiple beams of neutralinos down into the ground from different locations around the planet, all meeting at one point deep in the core? They would each travel through the Earth as though it were completely transparent, but if they met … He tried to do the calculations in his head to determine how big a bang that would make. Big enough to kick-start the Earth’s core again? He couldn’t tell whether the idea was even feasible; he knew too little about geophysics. It was certainly a daring idea. Actually, scratch that, it was a crazy idea. Even if it worked, it would take years to put it into practice. He realized Qiang was still staring at him, waiting for him to say something.

As far as he could see, it would, even if successful, be at best just a temporary fix – deflecting coronal mass ejections was not a permanent solution to the loss of the magnetosphere. The planet’s atmosphere would continue to be gradually eroded by the solar wind. Over time, the entire biosphere would suffocate and die. No, the only hope for humanity was to kick-start the Earth’s core again and bring the magnetosphere back to life. It was then that Qiang let out a quiet whoop of triumph, snapping Marc out of his reverie. He turned back from the screen. ‘OK, I’m happy with the numbers,’ Qiang said, deftly touching and swiping to one side the virtual displays floating around his head, then removed his visor and gloves.


pages: 161 words: 44,488

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology by William Mougayar

Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business logic, business process, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, fixed income, Ford Model T, global value chain, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, market clearing, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, smart contracts, social web, software as a service, too big to fail, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, web application, Yochai Benkler

Special thanks to Wiley executive editor Bill Falloon, who believed we could do this faster than humanly possible, and to Kevin Barrett Kane at The Frontispiece who designed and produced the book in the nick of time. Finally, much appreciation to the group of friends who helped support this book's Kickstarter campaign in February 2016, which made its production feasible. I could not have done this without you, and without the support of Margot Atwell and John Dimatos from Kickstarter. One of a kind, Most Generous Supporter: Brad Feld (Foundry Group). Really GENEROUS Supporters: Jim Orlando (OMERS Ventures), Ryan Selkis (DCG), Matthew Spoke (Deloitte). Super SPECIAL Supporters: Kevin Magee, Piet Van Overbeke, Christian Gheorghe, Jon Bradford.

Some of these exchanges even offer foreign currency exchange services in real-time between a variety of cryptocurrencies and popular currencies, such the U.S. dollar, Canadian dollar, Euro, British pound, and Japanese yen. Already, these are more capabilities than what the average bank user can do without visiting a branch. If you are running a crowdfunding campaign (such as on Kickstarter), you are also required to link your bank account. At the completion of a successful campaign, your earnings are automatically deposited into that account. When you link your ApplePay account to checkout and pay for items in seconds, the money is actually coming directly from one of your bank or credit card accounts.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Cheap, effective 3-D printers have made prototyping a breeze; knowledge once accessible only inside large corporations or academic institutions can now be found through online courseware or within communities like DIYbio, a collection of citizen scientists who engage in the kind of genetic experiments that were only recently the stuff of expensive, exclusive laboratories.19 Finally, crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have built nearly frictionless platforms for raising money to develop anything from small art projects to major consumer appliances. These are real-time examples of emergence in action. They allow creators to test the validity of that unique information—a water bottle turned Super Soaker!

Ozzie also made the suggestion that Geiger counters strapped to cars could collect more data, more quickly, than those carried by hand. Bonner, Franken, and a team at Tokyo HackerSpace set to work designing and building a new type of Geiger counter, the bGeigie, which fits in a container about the size of a bento box and includes a GPS receiver. All of the pieces were now in place. With nearly $37,000 from a Kickstarter campaign and additional funding from Reid Hoffman, Digital Garage, and The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Safecast began deploying Geiger counters and gathering data from citizen scientists across Japan. By March 2016 the project had collected more than fifty million data points, all available under a Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication, which places them in the public domain.

The developers often share the inner workings of the game and even allow fans to use copyrighted content to create videos or other derivative goods. It’s very hard to see where the company ends and the customer begins in these systems. You see pull at work not only with parts and labor, but with financial capital as well. Kickstarter allows people to raise what they want in a fashion that’s far more agile and responsive than traditional fund-raising methods. Crowdfunding demonstrates that the same logic behind Amazon Web Services—the “distributed computing” division—works for the aggregation of financial capital as well. People often associate crowdfunding with dubious ideas for new products, but Experiment.com shows that the same system can be used to fund serious scientific research.17 Beyond crowdfunding, crowdsourcing also provides independent creators with affordable options for extending their resources.


pages: 268 words: 74,724

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank by John Tamny

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, business logic, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Michael Milken, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, NetJets, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, War on Poverty, yield curve

Returning to Spike Lee, his early successes made him bankable in Hollywood. But in 2014, he turned to Kickstarter to attain $1.25 million in financing for Da Sweet Blood of Jesus. Kickstarter is a website where the creative go to find investors for their projects. They set a number they’d like to raise, and if successful they find individuals eager to “crowd-source” whatever project it is they seek funds for. The investors acquire a stake in the creative dream of others who need credit to animate their dreams. Capitalism is always and everywhere a two-way street. Explaining his utilization of Kickstarter to The Economist, Lee observed that traditional movie studios “are looking for tent-pole movies, movies that make a billion dollars, open on the same day all around the world.

., 49, 53 Johnson, Mark, 153 Jones, Jesse, 167 “junk bonds,” 37–40, 126 Kalanick, Travis, 12, 13 Karlgaard, Rich, 160 Kashgar, 138 Kauffman Foundation, 175 Keaton, Diane, 24 Kelly, Jason, 126 Kennedy, John F., 49–50, 169 Kennedy, Robert F., 34 Keynesian economics, 78–82, 88, 93–96, 140–41 Keynes, John Maynard, 78, 147 Kickstarter, 110 Kiffin, Lane, 20 Kinski, Nastassja, 24 Knowledge and Power (Gilder), 57 Kohli, Shweta, 107 Kohn, Donald, 156 Kornbluth, Walter, 22 labor as credit, 15–21 Laffer, Arthur, 55, 137, 157, 158 Laffer curves, 50, 54–55 Lawrence, Jennifer, 37–38 Lee, Spike, 109, 110 Lending Club, 107–8 Leubsdorf, Ben, 156 Levy, Eugene, 22 Lewis, Nathan, 72, 137, 141–42, 144 LewRockwell.com website, 94 Lisa computer, 30 Lombard Street (Bagehot), 46 Luck, Andrew, 16–17 McAdams, Hall, 89–90, 104 McConnell, Mitch, 51 Mack, John J., 123, 130 Madoff, Bernard, 163 Mann, Windsor, 78 Margolis, Eric, 94, 96 market “bubbles,” 56–63 market forces and government spending, 59–60 price of goods versus price of dollars, 1–2 von Mises on, 20, 152 market intervention and the Fed, 159–61 Mazursky, Paul, 24 Medicare, 53, 78, 174 Merrill Lynch, 120 Metro public transit, 10–11 Meyer, Urban, 17–18 Microsoft, 30–31, 125, 143, 155 Milken, Michael, 38–40, 114, 126 Mill, John Stuart, 76 Mindich, Eric, 45–46 Mission Asset Fund, 107 mobile phones, 53–54 monetarism, 135–36, 138 money and Chinese economy, 135–36, 137 and economic activity, 3, 136–37, 140, 143 and gold standard, 68 and the Great Depression, 141–43, 147, 168 market monetarism, 138–39 as measure of wealth, 67–68 monetarism, 135–36, 138 “money multipliers” and “fractional lending,” 87–90 private money supplies, 144–45 and stable currency, 137, 144 Money and Foreign Exchange After 1914 (Cassel), 119 Moore, Gordon, 31 Moore, Stephen, 50–51 Morgan, J.


pages: 251 words: 76,225

The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, clean water, commoditize, desegregation, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, means of production, microaggression, Nelson Mandela, Skype, the long tail, women in the workforce

I am imperfect, and I am tired, and now that I’m in my midthirties I’ve been able to see the cycles of rage and erasure happen time and time again, and yes, it gets frustrating. As opportunities for women in geek spaces have risen, so too has the backlash. Anita Sarkeesian’s popular Tropes vs. Women in Video Games video education series about problematic depictions of women in video games raised nearly $160,000 on Kickstarter and simultaneously made her one of the largest targets of abuse on the internet—no small feat considering how vast the rage of the online beast can be. A single forum post by a spurned ex-boyfriend triggered an internet deluge of threats against game creator Zoe Quinn, which rapidly organized itself under the Gamergate hashtag, an online mob ostensibly about “ethics in gaming journalism” that primarily targeted women for harassment.

I’m ordering an overpriced drink that I’ll be writing off as a business expense, because I’ll likely lose 30 percent of that $7,000 to taxes in a few months. While I wait, I overhear a successful self-published author talking to a group of folks about how self-publishing can make everyone big money, and how traditional publishing is fucked. I’ve heard this a thousand times. Kickstarter is the key, he says. You can pre-fund all that work ahead of time, and generate income. He boasts about how he gave this advice to many underadvanced authors, folks paid “these seven-thousand, ten-thousand-dollar advances,” who were obviously small, silly fish. He sounds like a self-help guru. He makes writing books sound like a get-rich-quick scheme.

Unlike novels, marketing communications like emails and web pages and direct mailings can be written rather quickly, so I know that this process of fail again, fail better can work, ultimately. The trouble is that publishing doesn’t give you twelve failures to fuel a success. Publishing gives you one shot, maybe two, and then it’s back to the self-publishing mines or Kickstarter to prove your worth. Which I am okay with doing, but really? Publishing is a broken beast, still churning along with the same payment schedules and margins and advances it had, what, a hundred years ago? I run into the same issue at large companies that insist that marketing has always been done this way, that we’ve always sent out direct marketing pieces and why do we have to change even though the people who buy our products have totally revolutionized the way they purchase goods?


pages: 261 words: 71,349

The Introvert Entrepreneur: Amplify Your Strengths and Create Success on Your Own Terms by Beth Buelow

do what you love, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Skype, solopreneur, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh

We were observers of each other’s professional practices, we taught together, I’d read her work. We had tested the waters of a professional relationship in many small ways before agreeing to a more significant affiliation. What did you learn through the process of doing a successful Kickstarter campaign that would be useful to an introvert entrepreneur considering a similar endeavor? I was emotionally unprepared for how vulnerable I would feel with such a public “ask” as a Kickstarter campaign. I resisted reading about “how to conduct a successful campaign” and participated full out, from the heart, with my most authentic voice. After thirty years as a public figure it was a roller coaster ride asking for contributions to fulfill a double dream.

After thirty years as a public figure it was a roller coaster ride asking for contributions to fulfill a double dream. Deanna and I both reached out to our shared and individual communities. I was overwhelmed with the outpouring of support and affirmation. Still am every time I think about it. And the process that Kickstarter funded is already helping me make a bigger difference in the way I am able to teach and offer processes. Preparing for a public “ask” or making such a “strong offer,” as author Patti Digh likes to call it, requires emotional preparation. I do not usually define myself by much external assessment. That said—there were a few days when the program was inert that my confidence was impacted.

See also Tribe authenticity with, 49 business expansion with, 221 FUDs and, 35 networking with, 94 Fripp, Patricia, 21 Frisch, Max, 158 FUDs, 34–43 bringing into open, 36–43 choices and, 40 identifying, 35–36 list of, 37 in marketing, 34–35 in networking, 106 in politics, 34–35 prosperity perspective and, 40–43 reality check for, 38–40 Truth and, 58 Full Circle Coaching, 36 Fund-raising, 78 moves management in, 131–32 Funnel of engagement, 132–36 Gates, Bill, 13 The Genius of Opposites (Kahnweiler), 157–58 Godin, Seth, 154, 161 Golden Circle, 99–100 Good to Great (Collins), 14, 159 Google+, 20, 157, 167 Grant, Adam, 148 Gretzky, Wayne, 231 Grow Your Own Business Expo, 27 Guillebeau, Chris, 185–87 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 87 Handwritten note, for follow up, 107 Happiness authenticity of, 67–68 of introverts, 22 The Happiness of Pursuit (Guillebeau), 185 Happy hour, 44 at conference, 109 for networking, 76–94, 111 Havel, Václav, 236 Helgoe, Laurie, 22–23 Herodotus, 103 Herron, Christian Marie, 53 Herron Media, 53 Hessler, Jim, 57–58 High-arousal positive feelings, 22 Hobbies business as, 145–46 for networking, 95 on social media, 167 Home-study courses, content from, 140 Hsieh, Tony, 61 Humor, in public speaking, 184 IBM, 34 Impatience, 10 Improvisation, 232–33 Independence, 190 Info@ email account, 138 Information processing, 8–9 by introverts, 15 Insight Selling: Surprising Research on What Sales Winners Do Differently (Doerr), 149 Intention, for networking, 98 Internal motivation, 33 Internet radio, content from, 140–41 Interviews for content, 139 for networking, 95 Introvert entrepreneur authenticity of, 49–50, 67–69 authority of, 69–70 capacity zone for, 118, 234–36 challenges of, 17–23 collaboration for, 20–21, 189–214 company culture for, 61–64 core values of, 32, 57, 62 credibility of, 69–70 energy management by, 19–20 expertise of, 114, 155 external action by, 53–54 extrovert in, 66 fear of, 25–55, 87 isolation of, 20–21, 87 kindred spirits of, 51–53 networking for, 18–19, 75–114 original thoughts of, 59 public speaking by, 173–94 purpose of, 57 risk of, 66, 71–73 sales by, 115–51 as self-effacing, 14 as self-possessed, 15 self-promotion of, 19, 122–28 self-reflection of, 15–17 as self-reliant, 14–15 strengths of, 12–17 sustainability for, 21, 236–39 transparency of, 153, 164–65 trial and error by, 74 tribe for, 153–87 values of, 73–74 voice of, 17–18, 57–74 vulnerability of, 66, 70 The Introvert Manifesto: Introverts Illuminated, Extraverts Enlightened (Vogt), 45 Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength (Helgoe), 22 Introverts communication by, 8–12 defined, 3–5 depression of, 22 happiness of, 22 improvisation and, 232–33 independence of, 190 information processing by, 8–9, 15 motivation for, 33 observation by, 23 overactive brain of, 34–35 privacy and, 51, 131 public speaking by, 49 talking to, 10–11 Truth for, 18, 57 Isolation, 20–21, 87 Janeczko, Bryan, 112–14 Jeffers, Susan, 29, 98 Jobs, Steve, 65 Jordan, Michael, 13 Jung, Carl, 3, 50 Kahnweiler, Jennifer, 157–58 Katie, Byron, 40 Kawasaki, Guy, 92 Keirsey, David, 5 Kickstarter, 213 Kindred spirits, 51–53 Kiwanis, 179 Lamott, Anne, 18, 19 Leadership for business expansion, 219–20 Level 5, 14, 15 Lead-in, for networking, 90–91, 102 Lectures, for networking, 94 Lee, Felicia, 192 Letting go, 239–40 Level 5 Leadership, 14, 15 Limiting beliefs, 38–40 Lindbergh, Anne Morrow, 67 LinkedIn, 20, 82 events on, 168 for networking, 95 tribe and, 157, 161–62 Listening leadership and, 220 in networking, 89 Live a Life You Love (Biali), 141 Love choices and, 31 fear and, 30–33, 97, 121–22 networking and, 97 sales and, 144–45 Low-arousal positive feelings, 22 Marketing.


pages: 226 words: 71,540

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web by Cole Stryker

4chan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, eternal september, Firefox, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, informal economy, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, pre–internet, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, TED Talk, wage slave, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. This is an excerpt from Dawkins’s groundbreaking book, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976. Dawkins didn’t originally come up with the idea of a meme, but he was the first one to use the word, and thus to inadvertently kick-start a new branch of anthropology called memetics, a catchall term for the study of human social evolution as opposed to biological evolution (i.e., genetics). I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.

He points to the increasing role that 4chan users have in geopolitics, as they have successfully brought down the sites of massive multinational corporations. Second, Hwang claims that although 4chan exists as this “other” state outside of the rest of life online, it is an important part of the web’s cultural production. Hwang laughs at the raw visual power of the Xzibit meme, which 4chan kick-started in 2007. You may know Xzibit as a rapper and host of the MTV show Pimp My Ride. But on the Internet, he’s become so closely linked with his meme that the usual words used to caption image macros are no longer necessary; his smiling face says it all. Pimp My Ride featured Xzibit and his gearhead crew retrofitting jalopies with outlandish accoutrements like flat-screen TVs or fish tanks.

We’re getting bigger every day—and solely by the force of our ideas, malicious and hostile as they often are. If you want another name for your opponent, then call us Legion, for we are many. Knowledge is free. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us. Thus began Project Chanology, kick-started by anonymous users of 4chan and other chan-style boards where anti-Scientology discussions were held following the release of the Tom Cruise video. I got in touch with “c0s,” an Anon who claims to be the guy who created and uploaded the “Message to Scientology” video, in AnonOps, an anonymous IRC channel devoted to Anonymous’s operations.


pages: 1,136 words: 73,489

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Big Tech, bitcoin, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, commons-based peer production, context collapse, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, death of newspapers, Debian, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Ethereum, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Induced demand, informal economy, information security, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, leftpad, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, node package manager, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, pull request, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ruby on Rails, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, urban planning, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, Zimmermann PGP

Taylor, Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 260. 331 Ralf Gommers, “Re: [Pandas-dev] Tidelift,” The Pandas-dev Archives, June 11, 2019, https://mail.python.org/pipermail/pandas-dev/2019-June/000972.html. 332 “Font Awesome 5,” Kickstarter, March 13, 2018, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/232193852/font-awesome-5. 333 “Kent Overstreet Is Creating Bcachefs - a Next Generation Linux Filesystem,” Patreon, accessed March 13, 2020, https://www.patreon.com/bcachefs. 334 Na Sun, Patrick Pei-Luen Rau, and Liang Ma, “Understanding Lurkers in Online Communities: A Literature Review,” Computers in Human Behavior, no. 38 (September 2014): 110–117, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563214003008. 335 “Eran Hammer Is Creating Open Source Software,” Patreon, accessed November 29, 2017, https://www.patreon.com/eranhammer. 336 “Support Django,” Django Software Foundation, accessed March 15, 2020, https://www.djangoproject.com/fundraising/. 337 Tim Graham, “Django Fellowship Program: A Retrospective,” Django Software Foundation, January 21, 2015, https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/jan/21/django-fellowship-retrospective/. 338 Matt Holt, “The Realities of Being a FOSS Maintainer,” Caddy Forum, September 3, 2017, https://caddy.community/t/the-realities-of-being-a-foss-maintainer/2728. 339 Sindre Sorhus (@sindresorhus), “My Patreon campaign is going well . . .,” Twitter, March 7, 2019, 12:46 p.m., https://twitter.com/sindresorhus/status/1103713423605432325 340 “GitHub Sponsors,” GitHub, accessed March 13, 2020, https://github.com/sponsors.

For security-related issues, it’s actually better when the participating developers aren’t already familiar with the codebase, because they bring a fresh set of eyes. Crowdfunding campaigns can also work well because, like bounties, they fund bigger projects that require more focused time than contributions would normally allow. Font Awesome ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of Font Awesome 5, a major update to their icon set, and raised just over $1 million.332 And Linux kernel developer Kent Overstreet set up a Patreon to fund his work on bcachefs, “a next generation Linux filesystem.”333 There is a lot of motivation, both intrinsic and extrinsic, that already powers open source work; we shouldn’t disturb the parts that are currently working.

There’s the broadcasting effect, when someone climbs onstage to control the crowd and everyone turns to watch. And then there’s the small-group effect, when people strike up side conversations with their neighbors, ignoring the main stage. Social platforms must rebuild their infrastructure to accommodate these two use cases. Yancey Strickler, who cofounded Kickstarter, calls this the “dark forest theory” of the internet: “an increasing number of the population has scurried into their dark forests” to avoid the mainstream web, which has become “a relentless competition for power.”347 He points to newsletters, podcasts, and group chats as examples of dark forests, while Facebook and Twitter are examples of the mainstream, which will continue to exist alongside more private channels.


pages: 167 words: 50,652

Alternatives to Capitalism by Robin Hahnel, Erik Olin Wright

affirmative action, basic income, crowdsourcing, inventory management, iterative process, Kickstarter, loose coupling, means of production, Pareto efficiency, profit maximization, race to the bottom, tacit knowledge, transaction costs

Consider the following example: Suppose a group of people have an idea for some new product but they cannot convince the relevant council or federation to provide them the needed capital equipment and raw materials to produce it. There is just too much skepticism about the viability of the project. An alternative way of funding the project could be through a form of crowdsourcing finance along the lines of Kickstarter. The workers involved would post a description of the project online and explain their specific needs for material inputs. They appeal to people (in their role of consumers) to allocate part of their annual consumption allowances to the project. Consumers might decide, for example, to put in extra hours at work in order to acquire the extra funds needed for their contribution, or they might just decide to consume less of some discretionary part of their consumption bundle.

Or it could be used for some new manufactured product. There are a variety of motivations that might lead people to voluntarily make this allocation. They might believe in the social value of the project and therefore be willing to give the funds as an outright grant. This is currently the motivation behind a range of Kickstarter projects in the arts. Or they might be really keen on the product, and give the funds in exchange for a promise of being the first to get the product itself at an equal value to what they gave. This would, in effect, be simply a long-term pre-order of the product, although operating outside of the mechanism of the IFB.

It is not clear to me why, for these kinds of technical regulatory matters, state institutions with field offices and extension services wouldn’t do this job more effectively. 11It is worth noting that in capitalism there is a very wide range of ways that small businesses can acquire the necessary capital for projects: There are ordinary banks, of course, but in many countries there are a wide variety of specialized banks with different criteria for making loans, including some with social and environmental mandates. Community banks are different from national banks, and state banks are different from multinational banks. There are also government agencies in many countries that give far below market-rate loans for targeted purposes and even outright grants. And there are things like Kickstarter and other unconventional ways of raising capital. I am not at all saying that this generates a fair and open access to capital. It does not in capitalism. The point is that this constitutes a heterogeneous institutional environment. I think a participatory economy is also likely to function best with qualitatively distinct devices for funding projects. 12It is worth noting that the massive reduction of the work week was basically Marx’s conception of how this problem would be dealt with in a communist society: the “realm of necessity”—the amount of work that needed to be done to satisfy needs—would be dramatically reduced and the “realm of freedom” would expand. 13As in the earlier discussion of Robin’s potential willingness, on the grounds of incentives, to accept pay differentials for innovative behavior even though this violates effort-based pay, I assume more generally that he would regard some contribution-based pay differentials as legitimate if this was the result of a robust democratic decision. 14This problem of non-comparability of effort measures across workplaces is especially important because of the way aggregate effort ratings figure in all sorts of planning processes, not just individual remuneration.


pages: 309 words: 84,038

Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling by Carlton Reid

1960s counterculture, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, bike sharing, California gold rush, car-free, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, Ford Model T, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, Yom Kippur War

They didn’t get them then, and there are still none today. For Robert “Bicycle Bob” Silverman, and all of the other 1970s cycle advocates who tended cycling’s flame when planners and politicians were trying to snuff it out. THANKS TO MY KICKSTARTER PATRONS Rose Ades James Moss Jens Bemme Hannes Neupert, ExtraEnergy Chris Boardman Simon Nurse Denis Caraire Michael Prescott David Cox Eric Robertson See page 218 for all 461 Kickstarter backers. | Contents Foreword by Joe Breeze Preface Introduction 1 How Cyclists Became Invisible 2 From Victory Bikes to Rail Trails 3 Davis: The Bicycle Capital of America 4 Cycling in Britain—From Swarms to Sustrans 5 The Great American Bike Boom 6 The Rise and Fall of Vehicular Cycling 7 Where It’s Easy to Bike and Drive, Brits and Americans Drive 8 How the Dutch Really Got Their Cycleways Epilogue Acknowledgments Appendix A: “Bike Boom” Mentions, 1896–2016 Appendix B: How the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute Was Formed from a 1970s-era Cycle Advocacy Organization Appendix C: Vive la Vélorution!

History is a lesson, it is not a template. Fight. | Acknowledgments THANKS TO ALL at Island Press, including but not only Heather Boyer and Mike Fleming. For their patience, thanks are due to the loves of my life—my wife, Jude, and my children, Josh, Hanna, and Ellie Reid. Thanks also to my Kickstarter backers, listed overleaf. As much of this book is based on original research, it has involved wading through personal papers and dusty archives. Librarians in America and the UK proved to be exceptionally helpful. It was wonderful—albeit distracting—to work in such gob-stoppingly beautiful libraries such as the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and the library at the Royal Automobile Club in London.

I also looked at Ministry of Transport papers held in The National Archives in Kew, London (which is the most technologically advanced archive I have ever visited, but the concrete building leaves a lot to be desired). Portions of chapters 1 and 6 were previously published in Roads Were Not Built for Cars (Carlton Reid, Island Press, 2015). However, I have expanded the content, including adding more period sources. | Kickstarter Backers Philip Bowman Trickhand Chris Niewiarowski Stewart Duncan Chelle Destefano David Goodstein Graham George Irene McAleese Simon Woodward Chris Murphy Allen Dickie James Grant Jnik Ken Callan Edouard Guidon Mike Skiffins Mark Philpotts Andy Fox Edgar Fernandez Jaime Lee Pabiloña Jon H Ballentine Jonathan Winston Maree Carroll Michael Charland Tim Doole Ray Lea Tui The Warmans Richard Evans Steffen Lohrey John Cooper Alan Couchman Richard Ashurst Bristolpedalrevolution Shaun Connor Dr John Darling Michael Josephy Kevin Hasley Adam Bower Thomas NIcol Paul Tildesley Sara Rich Dorman Frankie Roberto John Boyd William Chong Donald Pillsbury Kyle Griggs Jim Baltaxe Bruce Lewandowski Ian Clark Martin Packer Melvin Bailey Tedder Robin Holloway James Johnston Chris Dorling Charles Frazer Harvey Chris Whiley John Donnelly Andrew Lamberton Anthony McDougle Nigel Oulton Fredrik Jönsson Alan Cragg Richard Worth Ken Neal Paul Shortland John Grocock Peter Hawkins Don Springhetti Christopher Fox Rick Rubio Darren Steele Catherine Bedford Graham Parker Jacqueline Campbell Dave Robinson Jonathan Streete Hans Dorsch Terry Coaker David Houghton Seamus Kelly Ben Wooliscroft Tina Bach Michael Beverland Graham Connor Mark Carlson Miles Rickelton Pj roon Barista Graham Robinson James Evans Frode P.


pages: 169 words: 52,744

Big Capital: Who Is London For? by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land bank, land value tax, market design, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-truth, quantitative easing, rent control, rent gap, Right to Buy, Russell Brand, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, working poor

This is not dissimilar to the principle that underpinned the success of the Garden Cities in the early part of the twentieth century, which is that they were able to take land at agricultural values and plough back the resulting profits from development into the community. Likewise, the New Towns built after the war and in the 1960s were kick-started by grants of land at agricultural value. This is broadly how the planning system operates in Germany and Holland. The wartime authors of the report concluded that ‘a means must be found for removing the conflict between private and public interest’ and that this should be done by imposing a development charge, similar to a land tax, on landowners.

Often these are in edgy locations such as Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower in East London, and the community of artists who move in briefly also brings a cachet which adds to the appealing nature of an area in the throes of change. In the past artists squatted in abandoned buildings in places such as Hoxton and Shoreditch in East London and Brixton in South London in a process that has long been credited with maintaining diversity in cities while also unwittingly kick-starting a slower process of gentrification in those areas. But in 2013 legislation was passed which made squatting in residential buildings illegal, and property guardianship can be seen as an attempt to co-opt the perceived desirable elements of squatting by artists in a blatant bid to accelerate gentrification.

Instead ‘the pendulum has swung too far off’ and rather than the social contract it should be, planning has become an ‘obscure, legalistic and specialized activity, “practised” by suits and fought over largely behind closed doors’, leading to the scandal of secret financial viability assessments engineered to provide no affordable housing. The other crucial difference is that municipal governments in Europe have greater power and financial backing, through mechanisms which create large pots of public money to kick-start European-style developments. In contrast, government in England is very highly centralized and local authorities no longer have the resources or the confidence to initiate large-scale projects. Instead, they act as enablers for the private sector, with public money used to lever in private sector development which then assumes the lead and takes ownership of places.


pages: 81 words: 24,626

The Internet of Garbage by Sarah Jeong

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Brian Krebs, Compatible Time-Sharing System, crowdsourcing, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Network effects, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior

Sarkeesian wrote: “In addition to the torrent of misogyny and hate left on my YouTube video (see below) the intimidation effort has also included repeated vandalizing of the Wikipedia page about me (with porn), organized efforts to flag my YouTube videos as ‘terrorism,’ as well as many threatening messages sent through Twitter, Facebook, Kickstarter, email and my own website. These messages and comments have included everything from the typical sandwich and kitchen ‘jokes’ to threats of violence, death, sexual assault and rape. All that plus an organized attempt to report this project to Kickstarter and get it banned or defunded.” That was in 2012. In August 2014, she was forced to flee her home after receiving a threat. In October of 2014, she canceled a lecture at Utah State University after someone sent a message to the university saying that they would commit “the deadliest school shooting in American history” if Sarkeesian was allowed to speak.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Nick Statt, “Google Dissolves AI Ethics Board Just One Week after Forming It: Not a Great Sign,” The Verge (April 4, 2019), https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/4/18296113/google-ai-ethics-board-ends-controversy-kay-coles-james-heritage-foundation. 16. April Glaser, “Kickstarter’s Year of Turmoil,” Slate (September 12, 2019), https://slate.com/technology/2019/09/kickstarter-turmoil-union-drive-historic-tech-industry.html. 17. Googlers Against Transphobia, “Googlers Against Transphobia and Hate” Medium.com (April 1, 2019), https://medium.com/@against.transphobia/googlers-against-transphobia-and-hate-b1b0a5dbf76. 18.

For decades, computing companies have tried to convince all white-collar workers that they were management, or aligned with management, and so did not need to argue with those at the top, or need unions to help press for change. As recent events in the tech industry have shown, nothing could be further from the truth. From Google to Kickstarter, tech workers have begun to see that, if they don’t have a real voice in deciding the direction of the company, they don’t have any control over the harms created by the products they make. As individuals, their voices can be easily ignored, as the Boeing example shows. As a group, however, tech workers—and citizens—have power.

As the cases of Project Dragonfly and Project Maven at Google show, worker pushback can shut down projects and save lives. As the Google Walkout showed, until more people speak up it is still more acceptable to pay a sexual harasser millions of dollars to leave than it is to pay women an equal wage or give them equal opportunities to stay. Unionization efforts at Kickstarter and other corporations provide a blueprint for the next steps we need to take back our democracy and to make it possible for people to speak in favor of what is right in a broader sense.16 And as we saw from the rejection of the transphobic and xenophobic Google ethics board due to intense pressure from employee organization and protest, workers can begin to call the shots about what actually makes good and ethical technology if they work together and fight.17 But they can only do this within a framework of a stable, elected democratic government that has, at its core, a commitment to protecting citizens and workers instead of seeing them as expendable.


pages: 89 words: 24,277

Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, cotton gin, en.wikipedia.org, game design, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Wall-E, web application

In a quest for higher crop yields and lower production costs, farms have become headless corporations pitting profits against human welfare. But local farmers are finding new markets as consumers search for food produced by people for people. While big-box stores proliferate disposable mass-market goods, websites like Etsy and Kickstarter are empowering artists, craftspeople, and DIY inventors who sell goods they’ve designed and created. And their customers love the experience. When you buy from an independent craftsman, you support creative thinking and families (not corporations), and you gain the opportunity to live with an object that has a story.

q=%22Guess+I+could+have+waited+for+today+if+all%22&in=81&type=contents&view=posts&search=true&button_search.x=54&button_search.y=-106&button_search=true 13 http://www.alistapart.com/articles/understandingprogressiveenhancement/ 14 http://google.com/websiteoptimizer Resources 15 http://amzn.com/1592535879 16 http://getmentalnotes.com/ 17 http://amzn.com/0465051367 18 http://amzn.com/0393334775 19 http://amzn.com/014303622X 20 http://amzn.com/030746086X 21 http://amzn.com/0979777747 22 http://amzn.com/0321607376 23 http://uxmag.com/design/beyond-frustration-three-levels-of-happy-design 24 http://uxmag.com/design/the-psychologists-view-of-ux-design 25 http://uxmag.com/design/organized-approach-to-emotional-response-testing 26 http://boxesandarrows.com/view/emotional-design Index 37Signals 8-10 A Able Design 88 aesthetic-usability effect 27-28 A List Apart 90 Apple 7, 27 anticipation 54-58, 87 apathy 75 Arts and Crafts movement 2, 94 B baby-face bias 18-20, 28, 32 Basecamp 8-10, 70 Betabrand 13-16, 75 Blue Sky Resumes 88-90, 93 bible 31-33 Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse, A 19 Bowman, Doug 21, 55-56 Brain Rules 12 Breathing Status LED Indicator 27 Bringhurst, Robert 20 Brizzly 19-20 C calligraphy 31 Carbonmade 40, 42-45 Clippy 60 CoffeeCup Software 85-87, 90 Cornelius, J. 86 contrast 22-25, 28, 44 Convertbot 40-41 D Damasio, Antonio 67 Darwin, Charles 17-18 design persona 35-40, 48, 91, 92 Don’t Make Me Think 77 dot-com bubble 3 Dribbble 55-56, 59 Dropbox 72-74 E Etsy 2 Elements of Content Strategy, The 75 Elements of Typographic Style, The 20 Emotional Design 27 Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal, The 17 F Facebook 3, 7, 54, 59, 74, 86-87 face-ism ratio design principle 46 fail whale 7 Fletcher, Louise 90 Flickr 3, 51, 54, 79-82, 93 Freddie Von Chippenheimer IV 37, 60-65 G Getting Real 8 GigaOm 56 Gmail 70 golden ratio 20-21, 27 Google Site Optimizer 93 GoToMeeting 76 Gould, Stephen Jay 19 Gorum, Dave 44 Groupon 62 Gruber, John 42 Gupta, Amit 51-52 Gutenberg, Johannes 31-33 gut instinct 67-68 H Hale, Kevin 11 Happy Cog 46 Hick’s Law 24, 28 hierarchy of needs 5-6, 35 Hipmunk 7 Hodgman, John 33, 36 Housing Works 40, 45-46, 75, 93 HTML 3 Human-Computer Interaction 29 I iPhone 40 iPod 20 industrial revolution 1 iTunes 7 Ping 7 Pink Panther 15-16 Putorti, Jason 69, 71 priming 59-65, 76 progressive enhancement 90-91 Pythagoras 20, 27 J Jobs, Steve 27 Jardine, Mark 41-42 K Kickstarter 2 Kissane, Erin 75 Krug, Steve 77 L Lindland, Chris 13-16 Long, Justin 33, 36 M Mac 33, 36 Mall, Dan 46 MailChimp 20, 36-40, 60-65, 91 Mashable 56 Maslow, Abraham 5-6 Medina, John 12 memory 11-13, 49, 82 messagefirst 33-35 Mestre, Ricardo 25-26 Microsoft Office 60 Mint 69-72, 93 N Norman, Donald 27, 82-83 O open system 54 Oprah Magazine 90 P Parthenon 20 party pooper 91 persona 33-40 Photojojo 49-52, 59, 65 Q Quicken 72 R rosy effect 82 S Scoutmob 62 Shakespeare 10 Silverback 77 Sims 54 Skype 76 Smith, Matthew 88-89 StickyBits 20 Squared Eye 88 Super Mario Brothers 54 surprise 49-54 T Tapbots 40-42 Tumblr 23-24 Trammell, Mark 55 Twitter 3, 7, 20-21, 54, 55-59, 74, 86-87 V variable rewards 62, 87 velvet rope 57, 87 Volkswagen Beetle 32 W WALL•E 41-42 Warfel, Todd Zaki 33 Weightbot 40-41 Wilson, Rainn 4 Wufoo 9-11, 13, 52-54, 93 Y YouTube 37, 60 About A Book Apart Web design is about multi-disciplinary mastery and laser focus, and that’s the thinking behind our brief books for people who make websites.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

And, in many cases, the mavericks have succeeded by forcibly expressing their opposition to globalization on social media, while being economical with the truth. Money, meanwhile, has become a means of conducting economic warfare, in a twenty-first-century version of coin clipping aimed at the foreign investor. For all the talk of central bankers kick-starting economic growth, monetary stimulus has increasingly ended up creating only winners and losers both within and across borders – a process that has served to create an even bigger gulf between policymakers and the citizens they are supposed to serve. TECHNOCRATIC SOLUTIONS, OBLIGATIONS AND MORALITY Part Four argues that many of the ‘solutions’ to the problems associated with globalization are simply too technocratic.

The numbers involved were staggering: the US provided $13 billion in aid, worth almost 5 per cent of US national income in 1948 and around $130 billion in 2015 dollars. At America’s insistence, the money was to be allocated by the Europeans themselves through the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC). Four GATT rounds in just nine years – all aimed at reducing trade tariffs – also helped to kick-start economic activity: Geneva in 1947 (pre-dating Marshall), Annecy in 1949, Torquay in 1950 and Geneva (again) in 1956. There were, however, several strings attached. To keep Soviet communism at bay, European nations were encouraged to embrace free-market principles. That meant getting rid of unnecessary regulations, abolishing price controls, supporting free trade and, bit by bit, rebuilding Europe on principles consistent with Washington’s strategic ambitions.

Given that around 90 per cent of the total value of financial assets in the US is owned by the top 10 per cent of households, this was – particularly for the very well-off – a very pleasant windfall gain. Yet despite this financial uplift for the wealthy, broader economic gains – those that might have benefited society more widely – proved few and far between. Quantitative easing may have been designed to kick-start economic growth, but the pace of recovery in the US – and elsewhere – was unusually weak. In particular, despite strong gains in equity markets, companies mostly remained unwilling to invest. In many cases, they didn’t need to. Subdued labour incomes – thanks to a mixture of weak demand, technological change and competition from cheaper labour elsewhere in the world – meant that gains in sales revenues alone led to higher corporate profits; higher profits, in turn, fed through to further stock market gains, even in the absence of a recovery in investment.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

You will hear very little from academics here. You will hear a lot from people who are out there pursuing careers in the fields they speak about. Since they are not professional teachers but from the real world, be tolerant of their quirks, etc. We have a green room and a sound room. Feel free to use them to create commercials, Kickstarter or Indiegogo videos, or viral videos. I recommend each of you create a video and a theme song. At times, there will be people videotaping. You will get used to having cameras around. Get comfortable with them. They will try to stay out of your way, but still capture the content they need. We hope you will always think of the reputation of the school while you are here.

It is simple to get incorporated on LegalZoom or Clerky, get legal advice on LawTrades, and apply to Draper University or an accelerator like Boost.vc, Y Combinator or TechStars. It is simple to list your company on AngelList or Crowdfunder and attract people to invest angel money with you. It is easy to list products on ProductHunt, Kickstarter or Indiegogo to see if there are customers interested in what you are doing. Legal terms are getting standardized and easy to research, terms like “SAFE” (Standard Agreement of Future Equity--innovated by Y Combinator) notes, “KISS” (innovated by 500 Startups) and our favorite with Draper Associates, “Series Seed” (with our addition of “TATS [Tradeable Automated Term Sheet],” which you can find at www.lawtrades.com).

He was going to build a smart watch company, which he eventually called Pebble. It was an inauspicious beginning. Almost immediately after I invested in Pebble, Eric tried to build up his inventory and he ran out of cash. But then, like a Hail Mary pass in the last seconds of a football game, he tried something outrageous. He put a video together for a Kickstarter campaign (one of the first), and within three weeks, he had $10 million in pre-orders. He got the cash up front. In those three weeks, he went from near bankruptcy to a darling of the industry and he had cash with which he could build the inventory and ship the watches. The company sold over two million watches, reaching over $100 million in sales.


pages: 318 words: 91,957

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

Layoffs were unheard of, and in 1985, IBM even retooled its own marketing efforts to differentiate itself from GE, unveiling a new ad campaign with the tagline, “Jobs may come and go. But people shouldn’t.” It was an explicit rebuke of Welchism, a rejoinder to CEOs who fetishized downsizing. By the early 1990s, however, market pressures were too powerful for even IBM to resist. After Big Blue reported a sharp quarterly loss, the company was eager to kick-start its languishing stock price and went looking for a new CEO who could work the Welchian magic. At one point, the IBM board even tried to entice Welch to consider the job. He declined to entertain the offer. But the board was able to attract Lou Gerstner, a former American Express executive who for the previous few years had served as chief executive of RJR Nabisco, following its leveraged buyout by the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.

Included in their bylaws are explicit commitments to have a positive influence on society, and to take care of workers, the environment, and communities. Maryland became the first state to allow public benefit corporations in 2010, and a decade later almost every state has passed laws that enable companies to choose this path. Already, some well-known companies, including Kickstarter and Patagonia, have done so. By writing a more expansive set of priorities into their governing documents, executives are at once codifying their values and rebuking the notion that they are obliged to maximize its short-term profits. As Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard said when his company made the transition to public benefit corporation, “Benefit Corporation legislation creates the legal framework to enable mission-driven companies like Patagonia to stay mission-driven through succession, capital raises, and even changes in ownership, by institutionalizing the values, culture, processes, and high standards put in place by founding entrepreneurs.”

Yet more than anyone else, it was Welch himself who created the schism between the Golden Age of Capitalism and the unequal, unsustainable era of shareholder primacy in which we now live. He was the first CEO to take a healthy company and treat it like a turnaround job, preemptively laying off tens of thousands of workers and kick-starting the era of mass downsizing, outsourcing, and offshoring. He was the first to use dealmaking to expand the business into any industry possible, setting in motion decades of consolidation that concentrated industries and made the economy less dynamic. He was the first who brought to his job a singular focus on quarterly earnings, and employed financialization, earnings smoothing, buybacks, and everything else in his power to see that GE’s stock price continued to rise.


pages: 525 words: 116,295

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

People have more insight and visibility into the suffering of others, and they have more opportunities to do something about it. Some scoff at the rise of “slacktivism”—slacker activism, or engaging in social activism with little or no effort—but transnational, forward-thinking organizations like Kiva, Kickstarter and Samasource represent a vision of our connected future. Kiva and Kickstarter are both crowd-funding platforms (Kiva focuses on micro-finance, while Kickstarter focuses mostly on creative pursuits), and Samasource outsources “micro-work” from corporations to people in developing countries over simple online platforms. There are other, less quantifiable ways to contribute to a distant cause than donating money, like creating supportive content or increasing public awareness, both increasingly integral parts of the process.

Yet less than a month after the public revelations about these cyber weapons, security experts at Kaspersky Lab, a large Russian computer-security company with international credibility, concluded that the two teams that developed Stuxnet and Flame did, at an early stage, collaborate. They identified a particular module, known as Resource 207, in an early version of the Stuxnet worm that clearly shares code with Flame. “It looks like the Flame platform was a kick-starter of sorts to get the Stuxnet project going,” a senior Kaspersky researcher explained. “The operations went separate ways, maybe because Stuxnet code was mature enough to be deployed in the wild. Now we are 100 percent sure that the Stuxnet and Flame groups worked together.” Though Stuxnet, Flame and other cyber weapons linked to the United States and Israel are the most advanced known examples of state-led cyber attacks, other methods of cyber warfare have already been used by governments around the world.

Hormuud https encryption protocols Huawei human rights, 1.1, 3.1 humiliation Hussein, Saddam, itr.1, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 Hutus Identity Cards Act identity theft identity-theft protection, 2.1, 2.2 IEDs (improvised explosive devices), 5.1, 6.1 IEEE Spectrum, 107n income inequality, 1.1, 4.1 India, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1 individuals, transfer of power to Indonesia infiltration information blackouts of exchange of free movement of see also specific information technologies Information and Communications Technologies Authority Information Awareness Office information-technology (IT) security experts infrastructure, 2.1, 7.1 Innocence of Muslims (video), 4.1, 6.1 innovation Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, n insurance, for online reputation integrated clothing machine intellectual property, 2.1, 3.1 intelligence intelligent pills internally displaced persons (IDP), 7.1, 7.2 International Criminal Court, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2 internationalized domain names (IDN) International Telecommunications Union Internet, 2.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 Balkanization of as becoming cheaper and changing understanding of life impact of as network of networks Internet asylum seekers Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) internet protocol (IP) activity logs internet protocol (IP) address, 3.1, 3.2, 6.1 Internet service provider (ISP), 3.1, 3.2, 6.1, 7.1 Iran, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 7.1 cyber warfare on “halal Internet” in Iraq, itr.1, 3.1, 4.1, 6.1, 6.2 reconstruction of, 7.1, 7.2 Ireland iRobot Islam Israel, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 iTunes Japan, 3.1, 6.1n, 246 earthquake in Jasmine Revolution JavaOne Conference Jebali, Hamadi Jibril, Mahmoud Jim’ale, Ali Ahmed Nur Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World (Rosenberg), 4.1 Joint Tactical Networking Center Joint Tactical Radio System Julius Caesar justice system Kabul Kagame, Paul, 7.1, 7.2 Kansas State University Karzai, Hamid Kashgari, Hamza Kaspersky Lab Kenya, 3.1, 7.1, 7.2 Khan Academy Khartoum Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Khomeini, Ayatollah Kickstarter kidnapping, 2.1, 5.1 virtual Kinect Kissinger, Henry, 4.1, 4.2 Kiva, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 Klein, Naomi, n Kony 2012, 7.1 Koran Koryolink “kosher Internet,” 187 Kosovo Kurds, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1 Kurzweil, Ray Kyrgyzstan Laârayedh, Ali Lagos language translation, 1.1, 4.1, 4.2 laptops Latin America, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1 law enforcement Law of Accelerating Returns Lebanon, 5.1, 7.1, 7.2 Lee Hsien Loong legal options, coping strategies for privacy and security concerns legal prosecution Lenin, Vladimir Levitt, Steven D.


pages: 540 words: 119,731

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain

Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Formerly the powerful lieutenant to Samsung’s ruling Lee family and head of the Future Strategy Office, Samsung’s highest body that houses many of the elite executives, known as “the Tower.” Now serving a five-year prison sentence for bribery and embezzlement. Shin Jong-kyun (J.K. Shin). CEO of Samsung’s mobile unit from March 2013 to December 2015. He oversaw the kick-starting of the Galaxy smartphone line and helped to initiate the smartphone wars against Apple. Koh Dong-jin (D.J. Koh). Successor to J.K. Shin and CEO of Samsung’s mobile unit from December 2015 to the present. He oversaw the recall and cancellation of the Galaxy Note 7 after the product began catching fire.

State Department was watching Korea Semiconductor’s precarious financial situation closely, worried about the fallout of a default, since projects like this had loans from the U.S. government. They were believed to be in the national interests of both the United States and South Korea, a means to kick-start the sluggish Korean economy. With the OPEC oil embargo under way, it was clear that the United States and Korea needed to build new value-added industries that depended on highly skilled workers and not on natural resources like petroleum. Semiconductors were a good bet. They were an essential technology behind the Apollo space shuttles sent to the moon and in the laser-guided missiles deployed in the Vietnam War.

Our guide opened the doors to the room where what would become known as Samsung’s revolution took place: the main conference room. The hotel was under renovation when I visited, so the site wasn’t completely historically accurate. But I stood in the conference room in awe. This was the site of the speech that kick-started a radical managerial transformation within Samsung. It was a moment that would help redefine the world of tech. On the morning of June 7, 1993, the assembled Samsung executives were seated around the table with notebooks, wearing identical white shirts and blue or black suits. At the front of the room stood a speaker’s table with a bed of pink flowers—a South Korean tradition.


pages: 236 words: 62,158

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

Nintendo launched the Wii U, which sold 14 million units, relatively few in comparison to the handheld 3DS, which sold 53 million units.82 The Switch, a hybrid of mobile and home consoles, was launched later, selling 18 million in one year alone.83 While these console battles raged, PC gaming entered a new phase. The independently developed (indie) game Minecraft sold an astonishing 144 million copies (across multiple platforms, with a high of 74 million monthly players), and the developer was purchased by Microsoft for $2.5 billion.84 The crowdfunding platform Kickstarter provided a new way for developers to raise money for games, shifting the business model of many titles. In addition to games, hardware like the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift were also funded this way. A growing number of games—including Gone Home, The Last of Us, and Papers, Please— began dealing with ethics and more mature themes.

The first segment is development, without which there are no games to be published or sold. Games are made by studios, which can either be independent or owned by a publisher. The link between publisher and studio has become more complex, particularly with the emergence of alternative sources for raising capital like Kickstarter. There was, broadly speaking, around £639.1 million in GVA from development in 2013, which equates to an average of around £68,000 per worker. While this is a rough average, it does give a sense of the scope for extracting surplus value from these workers. If the average salary is lower than the amount workers are contributing, the company is clearly making a lot of money.

., 19 Douglas, Dante, 94 Draper, Hal, 132 Duke Nukem, 2, 29 Dune II, 28 Dungeon Fighter Online, 38 Dungeon Keeper, 2 Dungeons & Dragons, 2, 23, 25, 125 Dye, Dale, 116 Dyer-Witheford, Nick, 15–16, 19, 21, 29, 37, 46, 86, 106, 160 Dyson, Jon-Paul, 127 E Eagleton, Terry, 109, 111 EA Sports, 39 Edinburgh, 40 EDSAC, 19 Ehrhardt, Michelle, 96 The Elder Scrolls, 125 Electronic Arts, 46–47, 50–51, 82–84, 93 Engels, Friedrich, 67, 108–10, 132 England, 67, 138 Epic Games, 33 Esposito, Nicolas, 13 E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, 26 Eugen Systems, 94 EuroMayDay, 142 Europe, 38–39, 116 EVE Online, 149 EverQuest, 30 Every day the same dream, 142–43 F Facebook, 31, 96 Fallout, 2, 24, 126 Famicom, 27 Farmville, 31 Feenberg, Andrew, 114 Ferris, Rupert, 4–5 FIFA 17, 39 Financial Times, 144–45 First World War, 117–18 Fisher, Sam, 120–21 Fleming, Ian, 115 Football Manager, 42 Forbes, 147 Fordism, 23 Fortnite, 33, 38 Foxconn, 141 France, 57, 68, 94–95, 99 Freeman, Gordon, 121 French Revolution, 4 Frye, Jacob and Evie, 4–6, 63 Full Spectrum Warrior, 54 F-Zero, 28 G Gagné, Jean-François, 80 GAME, 48, 50 Game Boy, 27–28, 29, 152 Game Boy Advance, 30 Game Boy Color, 28 GameCube, 30 Game Developers Conference, 95, 96, 98, 99 Game Dev Story, 61–64, 75 Game of Life, 22 Gamergate, 154–55, 161–62 Games London, 42 Games of Empire, 15 Game Workers Unite, 96–100, 102, 160, 163 GEORGINA, 24 Germany, 39, 98, 110, 142 Global North, 42, 44, 71, 140, 148 Global South, 37 God of War: Ghost of Sparta, 82 GoldenEye 007, 115–16, 120, 149 Gone Home, 32 Good, Owen, 117, 119 Google, 47, 147 Google Play, 147 Graeber, David, 148 Grand Theft Auto, 71 Grand Theft Auto V, 39–40, 43–44 Greenbaum, Joan, 78 Green, Joshua, 155 Guild Wars 2, 155 Gulf War, 118–119 H Habert, Félix, 95 Half-Life, 31, 70, 121, 159 Half-Life 2, 52 Hall, Stuart, 1, 161 Halo, 120 Halo: Combat Evolved, 30 Halt and Catch Fire, 23 Hamurabi, 23 Harvey, David, 67 Hernandez, Patricia, 137 Hewlett Packard, 32 Hexapawn, 23 Higinbotham, William, 20, 22 Hirsch, Marianne, 118 Hitchens, Michael, 115 Hitler, Adolph, 115 Hollis, Martin, 58 Hollywood, 116, 135 Home Pong, 22–23 Huizinga, Johan, 14–16, 148 Huntemann, Nina, 113 Hutspiel, 19 I IBM, 19, 29 IBM 701, 19–20 IBM 704, 20 IBM 1620, 20 Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, 102 Industrial Revolution, 4 International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, 96 International Center for the History of Electronic Games, 127 International Game Developers Association, 74, 84, 87–88, 95–97 Internet Gaming Entertainment, 154–55 IRA, 57 Iran-Contra scandal, 119 Iraq, 118 Italy, 69 iTunes, 140 J Japan, 24–27, 30, 39, 114 John Madden Football, 27 Johnson, Boris, 40–42 Johnson, Mark R., 147 Jørgensen, Kristine, 122 Joseph, Daniel, 26, 52–53, 123–24 Jung, Carl, 135 K Kasparov, Garry, 29 Kassar, Ray, 152 Kemeny, John, 21–22 Kerr, Aphra, 43 Kickstarter, 32, 45 Kirkpatrick, Graeme, 78 Kotaku, 64–65 Kraft, Philip, 78 Kunkel, Bill, 12 L Labour Party, 145 Lamia, Mark, 119 The Landlord’s Game, 138 The Last of Us, 32 League of Legends, 32, 38, 70, 146, 150–51, 154, 156–57 Leblanc, David, 142 Lebowitz, Michael, 68 Lees, Matt, 155 The Legend of Zelda, 27, 28 Le, Minh, 70 Lemmings, 1 Lind, Maria, 144 London, 4–6, 41, 63, 105, 128, 146 Lumino City, 42 Lunar Lander, 24 M MacLean, Jen, 95–97 Magie, Elizabeth, 138 Magnavox, 22 Mandel, Ernest, 106–7 Manhattan Project, 19, 22 Marine Doom, 54 Mario, 2, 25, 27 Marxism, 3, 8, 12, 67, 159–62 crisis of overproduction and, 26 Eagleton on, 111 labor and, 63 Mandel on, 106–7 on mass culture, 107–8 Ollman and, 137 revolution and, 108 socialism from below and, 132–33 Marx, Karl, 17, 36, 64, 108–10, 139 in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, 3–8, 63, 66–67, 163 Capital, 8, 53, 67–69, 74 on commodities, 47 materialism of, 129, 133 on ruling ideas, 132 on surplus, 85 MayDay NetParade, 142 May, Theresa, 145 Maze War, 23 McGonigal, Jane, 148 McLuhan, Marshall, 17–18 Medal of Honor, 116 Medal of Honor: Warfighter, 56 Mega Drive / Genesis, 28 Meier, Sid, 129–31, 147 Metal Gear Solid, 2 Microsoft, 30–32, 39, 46 Middle East, 122 Midvale Steel Company, 76 Miles, Desmond, 3–4 Miller, Monica K., 153 Minecraft, 32, 47 MIT, 20–21 Modular One, 24 Molleindustria, 13, 140, 141, 142 Monopoly, 137–38 Monument Valley, 40 Mortal Kombat, 28 Mouse in the Maze, 20 MS-DOS, 1, 105, 106 Muncy, Julie, 117 N Namco, 25 NASA, 42 National Health Service, 42, 145 NATO, 19 Navy SEALs, 56 Nazis, 115 Nearing, Scott, 138 NetEase, 47 New Left, 21 New York, 18, 137, 139 Nexon/Tencent, 38 Ngai, Pun, 73 Niantic, 147 Nicaragua, 119 Nieborg, David, 48, 51 Night in the Wood, 96 Nim, 18, 23 Nimatron, 18 Nintendo, 25–28, 30, 32, 47, 101, 147, 152 Nintendo 64, 28, 32, 115–16 Nintendo Classic Mini Entertainment System, 27 Nintendo Classic Mini Super Nintendo Entertainment System, 28 Nintendo DS, 30 Nintendo Entertainment System, 27 Nintendo Game Boy, 2 North America, 38–39 North, Oliver, 119 Notes from Below, 69, 86, 92, 97, 160 O Oculus Rift, 32 Odyssey, 22 Ollman, Bertell, 137–40 Oregon Trail, The, 22 Origin (EA), 51 Osborne, George, 42 Overwatch, 39 Owen, Wilfred, 117 P Pac-Man, 25 Pajitnov, Alexey, 28 Pakistan, 140 Palestine, 122 Papers, Please, 32, 143 Parkin, Simon, 56 Patterson, Jimmy, 116 Payne, Matthew, 119–20 Pedercini, Paolo, 140, 142 Perfect World Games, 53 de Peuter, Greig, 15–16, 19, 21, 29, 46, 86, 106, 160 Philippines, 41 Phone Story, 140–41 Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, 38–39 PlayStation, 2, 28, 30, 31, 50, 116, 152 PlayStation 2, 30 PlayStation 3, 30 PlayStation 4, 31, 50 PlayStation Portable, 30 Pokémon GO, 147 Pong, 20, 22 Populous, 31, 127 Prado, Jason, 92 Price, Jessica, 155 Probst, Larry, 83 PS4 Pro, 31 Punch the Trump, 145 Q Quake 2, 70 Quinn, Zoë, 154 R Raytheon, 20–21 Ready at Dawn, 82 Riot Games / Tencent, 38 Roarem Castle, 138 Rockefeller, Nelson, 139 Rockstar, 39, 71 Rockstar North, 40 Rocksteady Studios, 40 Royal Ulster Constabulary, 57 Russell, Steve, 21, 22 Russia, 115, 118–19, 132 Ryse, 86 S SAG-AFTRA, 91, 93, 94, 99 Salen, Katie, 15 Samuel, Arthur, 20 San Francisco, 95 Sarkeesian, Anita, 154 Saving Private Ryan, 116 Scientific American, 22 Screen Actors Guild, 91 Sears Roebuck, 22 Seattle, 91 Second World War, 27, 116–18 Sega, 27, 28, 30 Sega Genesis, 31 Senate, 29 Shannon, Claude, 18–19, 29 Shaw, Carol, 151–52 A Short History of the Gaze, 142 Short, Tanya, 85–86 Silicon Valley, 23, 99 SimCity, 2, 31, 128–29 SimCopter, 2 Sims, The, 31, 127–28 Smilegate/Tencent, 38 Solitaire, 28 Sonic, 2, 27 Sonic the Hedgehog, 28, 97 Sony, 27, 28, 30–32, 39, 46, 82, 152 Sony Online Entertainment, 30 South Armagh Brigade, 57 South Korea, 27 Soviet Union, 19–21, 28 Space Invaders, 24–25 Spacewar!


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Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change by Ronald Cohen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, benefit corporation, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, diversification, driverless car, Elon Musk, family office, financial independence, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, minimum viable product, moral hazard, performance metric, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, zero-sum game

It provides legal protection for acting in accordance with their moral purpose. In the United States, 34 states have already introduced benefit corporation legislation, and six more are in the process of doing so.104 By the middle of 2019, more than 5,400 benefit corporations were active in America. Patagonia and Kickstarter are examples of companies that are both certified by B Lab and incorporated as benefit corporations. A similar effort has taken place in the UK, with the introduction of Community Interest Companies (CIC) in 2005. The initiative is directed at small businesses and allows them to use their profits and assets for public good.

In the first ten years after its launch, over 14,000 companies registered as CICs.105 This trend of passing legislation to enhance the status of social enterprises is spreading to other countries, including France (which we will discuss in Chapter 6), Luxembourg and Italy. Impact Entrepreneurial Networks For any new business starting up, mentorship and seed investment are crucial. Recent decades have given rise to numerous kick-starter organizations that foster impact entrepreneurship in the early stages, as their groundbreaking innovations take shape. The non-profit Ashoka is a good example. Founded by Bill Drayton in 1980 with the aim of mitigating income inequality through social entrepreneurship, it identifies entrepreneurs who have large-scale solutions to social challenges, supporting them as they strive to achieve their vision.

., 176–7 tech entrepreneurship 5, 17, 55, 61, 138 environmental challenges 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12–13, 16, 17, 18, 27, 32, 181–2, 183, 191, 192, 193, 194, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205 asset management and 83, 84 B Lab and 56–7 business and 88, 89, 90, 93, 97, 101, 102, 107, 108, 109–13, 114, 116 climate change 16–17, 28, 45, 66, 73, 74–5, 76, 77, 82, 95, 104, 105, 106, 107, 139, 177, 191 government and 154, 156, 159, 162, 163, 164, 166, 171, 172, 174, 176, 177–8, 179 green bonds 63, 173, 191, 199 impact philanthropy and 121, 131, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 153 measuring impact on 28 pension funds and 72, 78 SDGs and see United Nations: Sustainable Development Goals SIBs and 68 Environmental Sustainable Governance (ESG) 63, 64, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78–9, 80, 81, 82, 83, 115, 145, 159, 187, 190, 198–9, 200, 203, 205 Esmée Fairbairn Foundation 23 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development 163 European Union 1, 6, 159–60, 171, 173, 176 Everplans 47 externalities 28 Exxon Mobil 111 Faber, Emmanuel 86–7, 94, 95, 96, 97 Facebook 14, 48, 83 family offices 71, 81, 146 Fawcett, Mark 74–5 FC United of Manchester 172–3 Ferrari, Sara 81 fiduciary duty 75, 145, 199 financial crisis (2008) 158–9, 185–6 financial markets, size of 71 Fink, Larry 33, 62, 82 Fink, Lord (Stanley) 19 Finland 124, 163 Fintech 42–5, 199 Flint, Michigan water crisis 54 FMO (Dutch development finance institution) 163 Fondece 176 Ford 111–13, 136, 140, 142–4, 153 Foundation 140, 142–4, 153 France 1, 6, 22, 58, 63, 75–6, 86, 88, 95, 124, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162–3, 173–4, 175–6, 177, 184, 187, 204–5 Francis, Pope 6 Freedom Bakery, Glasgow 172 Friedman, Milton 185 FTSE Blossom Japan Index 78 Fusion Housing SIB, The 126–7 Gates, Bill 55, 149–50 Gaudio, Paul 103 G8 Social Impact Investment Taskforce (G8T) v, 6, 7, 148, 160, 235 gender bond 191 generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) 110, 115, 117 generally accepted impact principles (GAIP) 110, 114 General Mills 113 General Motors 112 Generation Investment Management 49–50, 82–3 Georgieva, Kristalina 68 Ghislane 37 Giddens, Michele 18 Gilbert, Jay Coen 108 Glencore 76 Global Family Office Report (2017) 81 Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) 108 Global Impact Investing Rating System (GIIRS) 108 globalization 13, 16 Global Reporting Initiative (GRI): Sustainability Reporting Standards 108 Global Steering Group for Impact Investment (GSG) v, 7, 27, 29, 109, 136, 148, 158, 171, 206 Global Value Exchange 31, 162 Goldberg, Randy 54 Goldman Sachs 80, 127 Goldstein, John 80 Google 14, 49 Gore, Al 28, 49, 83 government 3–4, 30–1, 70, 154–80, 189–90 how impact investment can help governments do their job 155–8 local government 26, 125–6 measuring and valuing impact of 30–1 nine things for governments to do 158–77 Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), Japan 78 Grameen Danone Foods Social Business Enterprise 94–5 Great Depression vii, 185 green bond 63, 173, 191, 199 G7 166 gut microbiome, human 45 Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity 142 GV (formerly Google Ventures) 49 Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley 51 Harrison, Peter 64 Harvard Business School 2, 25, 26, 29, 92–3, 109 Hawkes, Richard 191 Hayes, Lisa 40 Heath, David 54 hedge funds 13 Heron Foundation 139, 145 Hewlett Foundation 137, 153 high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) 70, 71, 81, 145, 200 high-sustainability investments 74 Hines, Luke 39–40 Hohn, Sir Christopher 66 homelessness 30, 31, 54, 124, 125, 126, 127, 166, 170 Horn, Bernard 20 Houlahan, Bart 108 HSBC 75, 169 Hulme, Philip 19 Husain, Safeena 132 Hutchison, David 20 IBM 47, 189 IKEA 93, 103, 104–6, 107 impact capitalism 4, 180, 181–94, 200 impact economies 68, 85, 155, 157, 159, 161, 178, 180, 184, 186, 192, 200 impact investment birth/origins of 17–28 business, embedding in 86–117 defined 11–13 entrepreneurs, rising generation of 34–61 future of 9–10, 32–3, 186–94 government, role of see government impact capitalism, move from selfish capitalism to 181–94 ‘impact investing’ term coined 11 market growth 64 measuring/valuing 10, 13, 14, 28–31, 64, 67–8, 69, 107–17, 119, 120–1, 159, 183, 186, 190–1, 201 philanthropy and 9, 70, 118–53, 187–8 risk and see risk specialist impact investing firms 82–3 wholesalers 168–72, 184, 201 ‘Impact Investment: The Invisible Heart of Markets’ report (2014) 6 Impact Management Project (IMP) v, 29, 109 impact philanthropy 9, 70, 118–53, 187–8 Impact Revolution v, 1, 5, 8, 9, 10, 14, 28, 32, 33, 85, 152, 180, 182, 186, 188, 189, 235 impact unicorn 35, 188–9 impact ventures/impact enterprises 34–61, 63, 66 impact washing 30, 64 Impact-Weighted Accounts Initiative (IWAI) v, 29–30, 109–17, 201 impact-weighted financial accounts v, 29–30, 67, 107–17, 159, 183, 186, 190–1, 201 Impresa Sociale 177 Imprint Capital 80 incubator (collaborative program designed to help new start-ups grow their business) 175, 176, 202 India 7, 27, 43, 47, 53, 56, 80, 84, 94, 124, 131–4, 153 Indigo Agriculture 45–6 inequality vii, 1, 3, 14, 15–16, 58, 88, 116, 140, 154, 155, 177, 179, 181, 182, 186, 192–3, 194, 200 Ingka Group 104 inheritance, generational 65, 81 Instiglio 132 institutional investors 63, 76, 81, 85, 95, 125, 174, 202 insurance companies 69, 71, 73, 157, 170, 202 Intarcia Therapeutics 150–1 Intel 40 intermediary 22, 202 International Committee of the Red Cross Program for Humanitarian Impact Investment (PHII) 133 International Finance Corporation (IFC) 64, 68–9 ‘Operating Principles for Impact Management’ 68–9 ‘The Promise of Impact’ report 69 Investing with Impact Platform 81–2 Invest Palestine 163 ‘invisible hand’ of markets 10, 97, 184, 185 invisible heart of markets 6, 10, 185 iPhone 77 Ireland 171 Israel 7, 39, 40, 50, 52, 53, 83, 124, 152, 158, 163, 177 Italy 6, 11, 58, 133, 158, 159, 171, 173, 177 Jana Partners 77 Japan 6, 63, 78–9, 124, 144, 158, 159, 170, 171 Japan National Advisory Board 171 Jewish Vocational Services (JVS) 128–9 Jobs, Steve 55 Joby Aviation 149 Johnson, Jeremy 48 Jonathan Rose 143 JP Morgan 87, 169 J.W. McConnell Family Foundation 144 Karboul, Dr Amel 137 Kassoy, Andrew 108 KETOS 53–4 Keynes, John Maynard 114, 185 Kickstarter 57 Kind 90 Kirklees Council 127 KKR 81 Kleissner, Charly 145–6 Kleissner, Lisa 145–6 KL Felicitas Foundation 145–6 Klop, Piet 73 KLP (pension fund) 74 Knorr 91 Kogiso, Mari 144 Komolafe, Tolulope 47, 49–50 Kopp, Wendy 59–60 Korea Inclusive Finance Agency 176 Korea Small and Medium Business Corporation (SBC) 176 Korea Social Enterprise Promotion Agency (KoSEA) 176 Kresge Foundation 127, 144, 153 Kubzansky, Mike 148 Kuper, Andy 83 Labour Party 19, 160, 179 laissez-faire economics 185 Large Outcome Funds 138 LeapFrog Investments 83 Learn Capital 49 leather waste 54–5 LED lightbulbs 106 Lego 90 Le Houérou, Philippe 69 Liberian Educational Advancement Program (LEAP), The 137 Liedtke, Eric 103 Life Chances Fund (LCF) 26, 165 life insurance 71 Lipton 91 Livelihoods Fund for Family Farming 95 Livox 42 Lloyds Bank 169 local government 26, 125–6 London Stock Exchange 19 Lööf, Torbjörn 104 Loop 102–3 MacArthur Foundation 151, 153 Machado, Antonio 180 Macron, Emmanuel 88 Maersk 76 malaria 37 Maltzahn, Geoffrey von 45–6 Mars 90, 95 MaRS Center for Impact Investing 171 Martin, Roger 138 Massachusetts Pathways to Economic Advancement SIB 127–8 Maude, Francis 160, 169 Maurer, Peter 133 Maycomb Capital 127 MAZE Mustard Seed Social Entrepreneurship Fund 144 Mazzucato, Mariana: The Entrepreneurial State 158 McGrath, Sir Harvey 170 McKinsey 65, 71 Mercedes 112 Merck & Co 150 Merrill Lynch 81 MESIS 159 microbiology 45 microfinance 43–4, 80, 94, 145, 163 migration 1, 2, 16, 98–9, 127–8, 144, 163 millennials 65, 81, 92, 188 Miller, Clara 139, 145 Minett, Helen 127 Ministry of Justice 21, 26–7 mission-related investment (MRI) 142–3, 202 Mizuno, Hiro 78 MN (pension fund) 73 Mobileye 40 Morgan Stanley 81–2 MSCI Japan Empowering Women Index (WIN) 78–9 MSCI Japan ESG Select Leaders Index 78–9 Musk, Elon 55–6 mutual funds 95 MyEye 2 40 Nadosy, Peter 142 Nassara, Ibrahim 52–3 Nathan Cummings Foundation 145 National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) 74–5 National Health Service (NHS) 126 NaturALL Bottle Alliance 91 Nazid Impact Food 50, 53 neoliberalism 152, 185 Nestlé 90, 91 Neudorfer, Yaron 163 Newborough, Philip 18 Nike 90 Ninomiya Sontoku 78 non-financial information statement (NFIS) 159 Non-Profit Finance Fund 120 non-profit sector 25 NovESS 159, 175–6 Novogratz, Jacqueline 84 O’Donohoe, Nick 169, 170 Office for Civil Society 160 Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, US 141 Omidyar Network 48, 49, 136, 146–8, 151, 153 Omidyar, Pamela 146 Omidyar, Pierre 146–8 100 per cent Impact Network 146 One Service 123–4 OPIC (US DFI) 167 OrCam 39–41, 42 organic food 51, 96–7 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 3, 70, 178 Origin Materials 91 Osberg, Sally 138 outcome-based contract 9, 22, 31, 126–7, 134, 137, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 180, 188, 189, 202–5 see also individual contract type outcome payers 22, 27, 123, 129, 133, 152, 163–4, 204–5 Outcome Fund 26–7, 130, 134–8, 148, 153, 156–7, 165–6, 167, 184, 187, 188, 203 Pacte Law, France 177 Page, Larry 55 Palandjian, Tracy 25 Palestine 163–4 Palestine Investment Fund 163–4 Palestine Telecommunications Company 163 Palestinian Authority 163 Palestinian Ministry of Finance 163 Palihapitiya, Chamath 83–4 Pardo, Ivan 89–90 Parley for the Oceans 102, 103 Partners Group 81 Passeport Avenir 163 Patagonia 36, 57 pay-for-outcomes model 128–9, 134, 152, 156–7, 167, 180, 192, 203 PayPal 44–5 Pension Danmark 74 pension funds/savings 62, 65, 70, 71, 72–9, 157–8, 170, 172, 173–5, 187, 202 PepsiCo 110–11 Pereira, Carlos Edmar 41–2 PET bottles 106 Peterborough SIB 8, 20–2, 23–4, 25, 26–7, 30, 123–4 PFS (Pay for Success) (SIB in US) 22, 204 Pfund, Nancy 83 PGGM (pension fund) 73 philanthropy, impact 9, 70, 118–53, 187–8 DIBs (Development Impact Bonds) and 130–5 endowment and 138–46, 173 future of impact investment and 152–3 impact measurement and 118–21 measuring impact in 120–1 new crop of foundations 146–52 Outcome Funds and 134–8, 203 SIBs (Social Impact Bonds) and 121–30, 205 Phillips, Andi 127 Pioneers French Impact 175–6 PlantBottle 91 plastic 90, 91, 92, 97, 101–3, 104 PME (Dutch pension fund) 73–4 pollution 5, 28, 66, 138, 154, 155 Polman, Paul 88, 90 Porter, Professor Michael 26, 92–3 portfolio diversification 13, 67 Portland Trust, The 163, 235 Portugal 7, 31, 144, 153, 158, 160–2, 171, 173 Portugal Inovação Social (PIS) 171 poverty 16, 69–70, 84, 95, 140, 156, 167–8, 171, 182, 205 PPL Therapeutics 15 Principles of Responsible Investment (PRIs) 32, 203 Prior, Cliff 170 Pripp-Kovac, Lena 105 prisoner reoffending rates/recidivism 8, 20–2, 23–4, 25, 30, 80, 123–4, 161, 166 private equity 1, 3, 13, 53, 67, 71, 80, 171, 191, 235 PROESUS 176 profit-with-purpose model 35–6, 148 program-related investments (PRIs) 142–3, 148, 203–4 Prudential Financial 127 public-private partnerships 137, 204 QuantumScape 149 Rajasthan, India 131–2 Ratan Tata 153 Rausing, Sigrid 19 Reclaim Fund 169 recycling 90, 91, 97, 101–3, 104, 105, 106, 113 Red Cross 133 Refugees United 147 regulation boosting supply of impact capital through changes in 172–5, 187 risk of future 65–6, 92, 159–60 repurposing items 54 Responsible Investment (RI) 63 retail investors 204 Revolution Foods 50, 51–2, 57 Revolution Growth fund 52 Riboud, Franck 94 Richmond, Kristin Groos 51, 52 Rikers Island, New York City 80 Rinaudo, Keller 37–9 Rise Fund 79 risk defined 13 lower level of in impact investing 65–6, 92 measuring 7, 13, 67–8 risk and return, model of 6, 13, 67, 84, 93, 114 risk-return-impact, triple helix of 6, 9, 12–14, 27, 31, 33, 35, 60, 65, 66, 68, 72, 79, 84, 85, 93, 109, 115, 154, 155, 157, 178, 180, 183, 186, 190, 192 robotics 37–8 Rockefeller Foundation 11, 23, 151, 153 Root Capital 84 Rothschild, Lord (Jacob) 153 Rottenberg, Linda 59 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: The Social Contract 184 Royal Bank of Scotland 169 Royal Dutch Shell 76, 111 Rubin, Jerry 128, 129 Ryan, Paul 179 Saildrone 149 Sankaran, Meena 53–4 Sasakawa Peace Foundation (SPF) 144 Sass, Christina 47–8, 49 SBB (Social Benefit Bond) 22, 204 school meals 50–3 Schroders 64, 80 Second Bounce of the Ball, The (Cohen) 7 Securities Exchange Commission, US 117 Serafeim, George 29, 109, 114 shareholder activism 66 Shashua, Professor Amnon 40 Siroya, Shivani 42–5 Skoll Foundation 148–9 Skoll World Forum (2019), Oxford 152 Small Business Administration, US 171 smart water grid management 54 Smiley, Scotty 39–40 Smith, Adam: The Theory of Moral Sentiment 10, 185 The Wealth of Nations 10, 184–5 Social Capital 83–4 social entrepreneurship 58, 82, 144, 175–7 Social Finance v, 19–20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 235 Social Finance Israel 163 Social Finance US 26, 127, 148 Social Impact Accelerator (SIA), EU 176–7 Social Impact Bond (SIB) 6, 8, 20–8, 67, 78, 80, 179, 198, 204–5 global spread of 25–8, 124–30 government and 122–4, 125, 126, 127, 130, 133, 157, 162–4, 165, 173 origins of 8, 20–5, 123–4 outlined 22–5 philanthropy and 121–30, 133–4, 135, 137, 138, 153, 187–8 Social Impact Contract 22, 162–3, 204 Social Impact Measurement Initiative (SIMI) 159 Social Impact Partnerships to Pay for Results Act (SIPPRA) (2018), US 165–6 social investment 7, 11–12, 141, 143, 160, 172–3, 179 social investment bank v, 19, 72, 76, 160, 169–70, 171–2, 175, 201 Social Investment Task Force (SITF) v, 6, 18, 19, 169, 235 Social Investment Tax Relief (SITR) 172–3 social pension funds 76 social prescribing 126 social service providers 22, 125, 130 Social Value Act (2012) 164 Social Value UK 162 solidarity funds, 90/10 75–6, 173–4, 187, 204, 205 Solomon, Sir Harry 163 South Korea 158, 160–1, 171, 176 sovereign wealth funds 70 Spark Capital 49 Starr, Megan 81 State of the Non-Profit Sector Survey 119–20 Straw, Jack 20–1 Subramanian, Savita 115 subscription services 105 Summers, Larry 6, 26 Sure 90 Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), The 108 Swensen, David 65–6 Tala 43–5 Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) 107 Tata Trusts 153 taxation 31, 36, 65, 66, 92, 141, 143, 154, 157, 158, 168, 172–5, 177, 185 Teach For America 58–9 Tech revolution 5, 7, 9, 13, 14–17, 35, 61, 138, 156, 178, 182, 189 Tesla 55–6, 83, 149 thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) 102–3 Thompson, Mark 75 Tobey, Kirsten Saenz 51, 52 TOMS shoes 36, 54 Toniic 146 TPG 79, 80–1 trans fat 113 Treasury Department, US 6, 25–6, 141, 166 Treasury, UK 6 Triodos Investment Management 83 Troubled Families program 164 UBS 44, 79–80, 81 Optimus Fund/Optimus Foundation 80, 132, 137 UK government 6, 19, 26, 27, 30–1, 136, 158, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 169, 170, 172, 175, 179 Ulukaya, Hamdi 99–101 unclaimed assets v, 19, 157, 168–72, 198, 201, 205 unemployment vii, 2, 30, 52, 100, 123, 124, 156, 164, 170 unicorn 35, 188–9 Unilever 89, 90–1 Unit Cost Database 1, 161 United Nations 32 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 69–72, 73, 74, 78, 79, 85, 97, 104, 108, 131, 166, 174, 190–2, 205 United States 113 benefit corporation and 57 government 157, 158, 165–6, 167, 171, 177, 178, 179 pension funds in 76 PFS (pay for success) in 22, 80, 124, 204 philanthropy in 118, 119–20, 127, 129, 140–1, 143, 148, 149, 152 Social Finance US 26, 127, 148 US Agency for International Development (USAID) 167, 168 US Trust 65 venture capital 1, 2, 5, 7, 13, 14–16, 18, 20, 32, 35, 39, 49, 67, 71, 83, 138, 148, 157–8, 172, 175, 176, 178, 191, 205, 235 Village Enterprise DIB 167–8 Vir Biotechnology 150 Walker, Darren 140, 141, 142, 143 Wall Street Crash (1929) 116–17, 158–9 Warby Parker 36, 57 water usage 53, 54, 69, 73, 84, 90–1, 100, 106, 110–11, 112, 116, 205 Wesling, Kresse 55 WhiteWave 96–7 wholesalers, impact capital 168–72, 184, 201 World Bank 64, 68–9, 78, 163 World Benchmarking Alliance 108 World Economic Forum: International Business Council 108 Yad Hanadiv 153 Yale University 65–6 Yates, Shannon 44 Young, Todd 179 Yunus, Muhammad 94 Zipline 37–9, 42 Zuckerberg, Mark 48–9, 55, 151 THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING Find us online and join the conversation Follow us on Twitter twitter.com/penguinukbooks Like us on Facebook facebook.com/penguinbooks Share the love on Instagram instagram.com/penguinukbooks Watch our authors on YouTube youtube.com/penguinbooks Pin Penguin books to your Pinterest pinterest.com/penguinukbooks Listen to audiobook clips at soundcloud.com/penguin-books Find out more about the author and discover your next read at penguin.co.uk This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.


pages: 685 words: 203,949

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

Proceedings of the 24th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 1793–1800. Wikipedia is an example of crowdsourcing Ayers, P., Matthews, C., & Yates, B. (2008). How Wikipedia works: And how you can be a part of it. San Francisco, CA: No Starch Press, p. 514. More than 4.5 million people Kickstarter, Inc. (2014). Seven things to know about Kickstarter. Retrieved from http://www.kickstarter.com the group average comes Surowiecki, J. (2005). The wisdom of crowds. New York, NY: Penguin. and, Treynor, J. L. (1987). Market efficiency and the bean jar experiment. Financial Analysts Journal, 43(3), 50–53. the cancer is now in remission Iaconesi, S. (2012).

Wikipedia is an example of crowdsourcing: Anyone with information is encouraged to contribute, and through this, it has become the largest reference work in the world. What Wikipedia did for encyclopedias, Kickstarter did for venture capital: More than 4.5 million people have contributed over $750 million to fund roughly 50,000 creative projects by filmmakers, musicians, painters, designers, and other artists. Kiva applied the concept to banking, using crowdsourcing to kick-start economic independence by sponsoring microloans that help start small businesses in developing countries. In its first nine years, Kiva has given out loans totaling $500 million to one million people in seventy different countries, with crowdsourced contributions from nearly one million lenders.

So the observed effect may not be due to Internet dating per se, but to the fact that Internet daters tend to be more educated and employed, as a group, than conventional daters. As you might expect, couples who initially met via e-mail tend to be older than couples who met their spouse through social networks and virtual worlds. (Young people just don’t use e-mail very much anymore.) And like DARPA, Wikipedia, and Kickstarter, online dating sites that use crowdsourcing have cropped up. ChainDate, ReportYourEx, and the Lulu app are just three examples of a kind of Zagat-like rating system for dating partners. Once we are in a relationship, romantic or platonic, how well do we know the people we care about, and how good are we at knowing their thoughts?


pages: 328 words: 96,141

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

A former girlfriend told reporters in the nineties that his business success was driven by his desire to go to the stars himself; according to Stone, Bezos’s high school valedictory address had proposed the idea of “saving humanity by creating permanent human colonies in orbiting space stations while turning the planet into an enormous nature preserve.” You get the idea. The vision that captivated Bezos still drives him now. It is a different strain of space economic utopianism than the one that drives those who propose colonizing Mars, and it holds itself out as the more pragmatic approach. In this narrative, kick-started by Gerard O’Neill’s 1976 book The High Frontier, the fragility of the human species on earth is intimately connected to industrialization—the way the massive use of fossil fuels to drive the economy has altered the ecosystem. Instead of taking humans away from the planet and into space, why shouldn’t the space industry develop the ability to put heavy industry up there in the cosmos?

Nearly all of them involved three key steps: extending the space shuttle for two more flights to complete construction of the space station, canceling or postponing the Ares rocket, and expanding NASA’s commercial partnerships to include flying astronauts as well as cargo to the space station. Though neither SpaceX nor Orbital had launched a rocket yet, the promise of a cost-effective alternative led policy makers to kick-start what would become the Commercial Crew program. “It seemed after Augustine that everyone would accept the cancellation of Orion and Commercial Crew was ready for prime time,” Garver told me. “When I got there and started on transition, it was clear that COTS was going to become the program of record.

“They have that crappy printed picture where all the crew had signed it properly framed and hanging up in their hallway,” he told me. 11 Capture the Flag Going through test pilot school, there isn’t a student who doesn’t think the dream job would be to be a flight-test engineer on a brand-new spaceship and then get a chance to go fly on it. —Astronaut Robert Behnken Blue Origin’s first real step out into the public eye came in 2010, thanks to the Obama administration’s enthusiasm for commercial space exploration. To kick-start the next stage of its commercial partnerships, this time focused on flying astronauts to the space station, NASA put up a small pot of money for a program called Commercial Crew Development, or CCDEV. (NASA loves acronyms.) The first $50 million was part of the nearly $100 billion stimulus legislation the new president devised to goose the flagging economy, and NASA put a share of that money into the commercial program.


pages: 335 words: 96,002

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World by Craig Kielburger, Holly Branson, Marc Kielburger, Sir Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, blood diamond, Boeing 747, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, Colonization of Mars, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, energy transition, family office, food desert, future of work, global village, impact investing, inventory management, James Dyson, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, market design, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, pre–internet, retail therapy, Salesforce, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Virgin Galactic, working poor, Y Combinator

You Aren't the First and You Won't Be the Last Know Your Dragon Keep It High Level Know the Details Be Yourself Chapter 19: Change Without Cash Become a Professional at Pro Bono: A Snapshot of WE's In-Kind Offers Want to Give Back? Head to the Mall Don't Show Me the Money Good Housekeeping: Our Deal with a Seal Chapter 20: Your WEconomy Assignment: Build A 100-Year Purpose Plan But Then Again Pretty Much Anything is Possible When Two Visionaries Unite … Tips to Kick-Start Your Weconomy 100-Year Purpose Plan: Conclusion: The Weconomy Needs You Epilogue Appendix Acknowledgments End User License Agreement Praise for WEconomy “As global citizens, it is important that we all decide how we can help build a better future for everyone who inhabits this planet.

I like to call it the Super Bowl of Social Change. Like the world's biggest football game, WE Day is a stadium-sized event. It was held in 15 cities in 2017, with smaller, community-run events in even more locations. It brings together world-renowned speakers and performers with thousands of young volunteers to honor their contributions and kick-start another year of change. The “price” of their ticket is paid in food drives, charity dance-a-thons, and bake sales. Every young person at every WE Day in cities around the world earns entry by supporting one local and one global cause. Annually, this adds up to helping more than 2,500 causes and charities.

Everything your parents taught you about not getting into cars with strangers has become obsolete. You can hail a ride through an app instead of a using a taxi service. You can bypass traditional organizational structures and rely on the kindness of strangers to buy almost anything (Craigslist, Etsy); fund your next venture (Kickstarter); board your pet (Rover); borrow power tools (Zilok); or support charity projects (Change .org, Crowdfunder UK). All of these structures have been broken down by building a community with shared values or a binding purpose. We trust in a group of peers with shared interests as much as—or more than—we trust in big companies.


pages: 340 words: 101,675

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

Thanks to my family, especially to my parents, Metis and Bernard Hon, and my partner, Margaret Maitland, for their support and encouragement. Thanks to my friends, Naomi Alderman, Andrea Phillips, and Alexandre Mathy, for their advice and humor. And thank you to all of those who backed the first edition of this book on Kickstarter. Without you, this book wouldn’t exist. INTRODUCTION Why write a history of the twenty-first century? Now that we’ve reached the end of the century, it may seem foolhardy for a mere human to attempt to analyze the data at our disposal. After all, we’re awash with information from every corner of the world, covering every second of the century.

Robotics historian Stan Malhotra relates the students’ path to success: The students drew up the first plans for the Speeky more as a thought experiment than a business venture, and when they sent them to a factory in Guangdong, they weren’t expecting to make anything other than mementos. But like many breakthroughs, it was a chance encounter between one of the team, Alice Stephenson, and a group of amateur performers from Boston University that gave them the idea to create online tools that would allow actors to easily ‘puppet’ the Speeky. One Kickstarter project later, and they had more than $20 million in pre-orders. It wasn’t the first internet-connected toy to be sold, but it was the first that combined cheap but well-designed robotics components with a puppet interface. Crucially, that interface was simple to use for anyone who’d ever played an action or role-playing video game—in other words, several hundred million people across the globe.

Some viewed this as a long-expected reversion to the historical norm, where writers would have a “day job” that would support their writing on evenings and weekends. The only problem was that day jobs were evaporating as well. A partial solution lay in traditional crowdfunding websites such as Kickstarter, through which creators would announce their books, films, toys, utilities, and products, and ask for advance orders. If they raised enough money, the project would go ahead—and if they didn’t, the money would be refunded, establishing a critically important signal of demand that was missing in more centrally controlled art schemes.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

It wasn’t Levon’s decision. In fact, for many years after The Band stopped recording, Levon made a good living off of the record royalties of The Band’s catalog. But no more. So what is your solution—charity. You want to give every great artist a virtual begging bowl with Kickstarter. But Levon never wanted the charity of the Reddit community or the Kickstarter community. He just wanted to earn an honest living off the great work of a lifetime. You are so clueless as to offer to get The Band back together for a charity concert, unaware that three of the five members are dead. Take your charity and shove it. Just let us get paid for our work and stop deciding that you can unilaterally make it free.

Like I said on stage, I wanted to offer a solution to help make right what the music industry did to members of The Band… I’m hopeful that innovations like the ones I discussed tonight and the others that are being worked on by entrepreneurs right now will continue to do right by artists and cut out those who’d mistreat them… Like I said on stage, it would be an honor to gather members of The Band together to produce one more album with unreleased content or something to honor Levon Helm—really any kind of creative project they’d like to produce—(this time funded on kickstarter) and we’ll gladly launch it on the IAMA section of reddit. I replied in an open letter to him. Dear Alexis, Last week at our debate, I talked about the essential unfairness that my friend and colleague Levon Helm had to continue to tour at the age of 70 with throat cancer in order to pay his medical bills.


pages: 247 words: 68,918

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

During the financial crisis and global recession, an enormous market meltdown that provided globalization with its first true stress test, political officials in both the developed and the developing worlds seized responsibility for decisions that are usually left to market forces—and on a scale not seen in decades. Governments around the world responded to the implosion of major financial institutions and key economic sectors with massive doses of state spending meant to kick-start growth and, in some cases, to bail out companies considered “too big to fail.” States grabbed control of firms once considered industry flagships. They did all this because they believed it was necessary—and because no one else could do it. During the financial crisis and its aftermath, this dynamic generated a massive shift in financial decision-making power from New York to Washington.

This was a massive failure of government oversight and regulation in which hunger for short-term profit and a post-Cold War capitalist triumphalism allowed too many people to believe that markets can regulate themselves.c Since 2008, the global recession has pushed dozens of governments back toward the left side of the spectrum. Policy makers and legislators in Europe and America have embarked on the largest state economic intervention since the 1930s. Less than one month after taking office, President Barack Obama signed into law a $787 billion stimulus plan, a package of government spending and tax cuts meant to kick-start U.S. growth and create millions of jobs. Intervention on this scale is meant to prevent a huge market failure—to move left along the spectrum so that the economy can recover its balance following a thirty-year-long lurch to the right. But America’s massive government intervention in markets was not simply a victory of Democrats over Republicans.

In less developed rural areas, small farmers and business owners struggle to access credit from state-owned banks, sharply limiting their ability to produce growth in areas of the country that badly need it. In other words, state capitalism is burdened with its own brand of shortsighted, short-term thinking, especially when powerful players within the system have their own set of incentives for earning short-term rewards. The injection of hundreds of billions of dollars can kick-start any developing economy, but the problems that threaten future growth continue to metastasize. In addition, as we’ve seen, the ties that bind political and business elites in state-capitalist countries shape the environment in which some of their largest companies operate. In China, the leadership reserves the right to select the heads of all major banks and large industrial enterprises.


pages: 227 words: 71,675

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything by Becky Bond, Zack Exley

battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, declining real wages, digital rights, Donald Trump, family office, fixed income, full employment, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, income inequality, Kickstarter, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, randomized controlled trial, Skype, telemarketer, union organizing

The good news is there are more than enough amazing volunteer leaders among the people, and three or four talented and committed volunteers working part time can often do the work of a full-time paid staffer. When you’ve got at least a handful of people committed to a cause signed up on a list, you’ve got what you need to kick-start a vibrant organization. Most hard work gets done by teams. In the world of organizing, the 2008 Obama primary popularized the strategy of forming “neighborhood teams.” A detail often forgotten about the historic 2008 race was that Obama was far behind in the polls in South Carolina, including with African American voters, for most of the race.

But if you’re a grassroots activist, or a revolutionary leader in a local community, I imagine you could be looking at all of these fundraising lessons from presidential campaigns and organizations with national profiles and thinking, “What does any of this have to do with me?” It’s true that it took a lot of national campaigns over time to prime the small-dollar pump. But now all kinds of local projects are kick-started with small donations. Winning support from your community to lead a campaign or make change has never been easier. But to raise funds this way, you need to have a base that wants to support you. If you don’t have that base, you face two options: seek large donations from rich people and foundations, or build a base so you can seek small-dollar donations.

You’d be clicking as fast as you could, but you’d see the scroll bar shrinking down and down,” which meant an unseen mountain of unclicked numbers were piling up below the screen—voters that could be reached if only you had more clickers! No problem. Everyone knew what to do next: form a new volunteer team. This pattern had been established in the DNA of our department. Sam took the lead in kick-starting the dialer monitor team (they decided “clickers” sounded too unglamorous). But Sam was way too busy with a million other things, including supporting the burgeoning state field and communications teams in states all over the country. So Sam gave the job of forming the team to Kyle, who had officially joined our staff as a paid intern just days earlier.


pages: 406 words: 105,602

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

And yet, in the acknowledgments to that book, I thanked eighty-nine people (I counted). This book, by contrast, has felt like a true community effort. No doubt that’s in part because it got its start from the community that developed around my Kickstarter MVP book, The Leader’s Guide. I owe a huge debt to the nearly 9,677 people who backed the Kickstarter campaign, making possible the research that eventually led to The Leader’s Guide, as well as everyone who joined and participates in the Leader’s Guide community on Mightybell that has become a dynamic, active place for discussions about the principles in the book.

What is really known about what customers want in that solution? By writing down what they think will happen ahead of time, team members are reminded that they won’t always be right—which is fine. The goal is to learn. KEEP IT SIMPLE Here’s what an entrepreneur named Pedro Miguel, a member of the online community connected to my Kickstarter book, The Leader’s Guide,3 has to say about the process of asking questions as the first step in creating a new product or process: Validating ideas by talking to people is hard but crucial to understand if people really have the problem you are trying to solve. One way that works for me is to build a simple three-question survey that validates key assumptions: Do people really have the problem you think they do?

There is a whole separate discipline to this called “customer development,” a term originally coined by Steve Blank. See startuplessonslearned.com/​2008/​11/​what-is-customer-development.html. 3. Part of the research that went into this book came from a project called The Leader’s Guide. In 2015, I launched a Kickstarter campaign to publish a limited-run, 250-page book aimed at helping entrepreneurs, executives, and project leaders put lean principles into practice. The campaign was backed by 9,677 people choosing from 30 different reward levels and raising $588,903. The content of the book was derived from materials I’d used in the years prior; the goal was to provide a concrete road map for leaders who want to transform their management practice in an entrepreneurial direction.


pages: 361 words: 107,461

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

And I realized my innovation alarm was going off, because I’d ask these really, really simple questions, and no one could give me a clear answer.” Like Jen and Steph, Tim decided he was going to be the one to solve this creative problem and answer the questions the shoe manufacturers couldn’t. Five years later, he launched the idea on Kickstarter. Two years after that, barely a month after Away delivered its first 2,000 suitcases, Tim, now with a partner named Joey Zwillinger, turned that idea into a company called Allbirds. And two years after that, it was worth $1.4 billion. Apparel. Ice cream. Footwear. Luggage. They’re all different, but they’re all the same.

In this way, each person in your inner circle is both a potential resource in and of themselves and also a launching pad to someone in the circle one step removed. In theory, you can move like this out through the concentric circles almost infinitely. In fact, that’s kind of how crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe tend to work. They’re word-of-mouth mechanisms designed to help innovators and creators just like you get started, by reaching the fifth, sixth, or seventh circle of people whom you could never reasonably expect to know or meet, but whose capital you can use to actually produce the thing you are trying to sell.

Ask­ing people for money is always a difficult, and sometimes uncomfortable, thing to do. Having to do it a hundred times at $20 to $50 a pop isn’t just tedious, it’s impractical. When are you going to find the time to run the actual business? Crowdfunding consolidates all those small asks into a single conversation broadcast through the loudspeaker we call the internet. In fact, Kickstarter is how Tim Brown first launched Allbirds and how several other companies, such as Oculus, Brooklinen, and the card game Exploding Kittens, initially raised their money. The lesson here is that despite the sometimes daunting advantages that privilege can confer, this process for raising early money really is available to anyone.


pages: 603 words: 182,826

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

The incomes of old-established families dependent on fixed rentals were progressively reduced, and at the same time the despised merchant class began to benefit from a rapidly increasing trade as European vessels found new routes to the east. Silver originally mined in Bolivia and shipped to Cadiz was exchanged by Portuguese and later Dutch shippers for Chinese silk and porcelain. In modern Indonesia and along the coasts of the China Sea, the massive purchases of spices by the newcomers kick-started a general trade within the Far East that enriched the merchants of Canton and Shanghai still further. In the last century of the Ming dynasty, up to 1644, almost seventy-five hundred tons of silver flowed into China, not only from Europe but from the rising trade economy of Japan. The surge of precious metal completed the destruction of the old order, with inflation tripling once more in the second half of the sixteenth century.

Thus the effects of the Meiji land reforms were to tame the samurai landlords but to leave the pattern of land holding virtually unchanged. In the absence of any movement by Japan’s landed interests to assert claims to political power, the Meiji government deliberately taxed agriculture heavily in order to finance industrial development. Up to 80 percent of the revenues that kick-started Japanese industrial growth in the 1890s came from land taxes and were channeled either into military expenditure for Japan’s successful wars with China and Russia, or into railroad construction and shipbuilding. Yet for all their political impotence, the values of Japan’s landowners, inherited from the samurai, became the standard for Japan’s new industrialists, even though by the 1920s their manufactured products were three times as valuable as those grown on the land.

The exodus of more than one million people, some 10 percent of the population, served as a popular vote on the policy. The economic goal of INRA was more practical, to generate enough profit from sugar, coffee, and tobacco to invest in the development of the island’s mouthwatering deposits of nickel—as much as one fifth of the world’s reserves. Guevara intended mining profits to kick-start the process of industrialization allowing Cuba to become a modern, but socially owned, economy. The United States economic blockade played a large part in INRA’s failure to achieve this goal too. But falling sugar yields and Castro’s repeated attacks on corruption, inequality, and materialism within the ranks of his own dictatorial administration, notably in the “rectification campaign” he launched at the end of the Cold War, made it clear that Guevara’s system simply did not work.


pages: 519 words: 142,646

Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

active measures, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate governance, David Brooks, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, forensic accounting, future of work, Future Shock, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, HyperCard, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, machine readable, machine translation, mail merge, Marshall McLuhan, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social web, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, text mining, thinkpad, Turing complete, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, Year of Magical Thinking

The scratch-built writing software admits no customization whatsoever: no preferences, no notifications, no toolbars, and certainly no anthropomorphic paperclips. It supports backspace and deletion, but there is no copy and paste option—“just like … before 1979 (and the debut of WordStar),” the KickStarter page explains.35 While there is no Web access as such, built-in Wi-Fi allows it to continually sync to a cloud-based storage system. The battery is supposed to be good for four weeks of steady use. There is a carrying handle. Within thirty days KickStarter backers had funded the project at roughly 125 percent of what the developers were seeking. The concept is not strictly new. The TRS-80 Model 100, a small notebook-style computer first introduced by Radio Shack in 1983, remained popular, especially with journalists, for years after the end of its natural market cycle because of its light weight and long battery life.

See John Brownlee, “Microsoft Research Invents a Stylus That Can Read Your Mind,” Design, Fast Company, October 10, 2014, http://www.fastcodesign.com/3036931/microsoft-research-invents-a-stylus-that-can-read-your-mind?partner=rss. 34. See “Hemingwrite—A Distraction Free Smart Typewriter,” Kickstarter.com, accessed August 19, 2015, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adamleeb/hemingwrite-a-distraction-free-digital-typewriter. 35. Ibid. 36. For example, Peter Swirski, From Literature to Biterature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013). 37. For this last, see Shelley Poldony, “If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?

If the Hanx Writer is a celebrity vanity project, the Hemingwrite has greater ambitions. The Hemingwrite is being marketed as a “distraction-free” writing device, essentially a dedicated word processor with a number of carefully chosen limitations and constraints. It debuted in December 2014 in a well-promoted KickStarter campaign, meaning that its developers went public in search of backers to bankroll the manufacturing run. “We engineered the Hemingwrite to do one thing, and do it sublimely well,” the video introducing the fundraising campaign relates.34 At a glance, it looks like a small, portable typewriter.


pages: 243 words: 74,452

Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck by Jon Acuff

Albert Einstein, fear of failure, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Ruby on Rails, Skype, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh

Contents Praise for Jon Acuff Title Page Copyright Dedication 1 The Career Savings Account 2 Do This First INVESTMENT 1 RELATIONSHIPS 3 You Don’t Know Who You Know 4 Give Your Foes What They Need Most 5 Casual Counts 6 Great Careers Take Great Advocates 7 Don’t Burn Many Bridges 8 Community Shines Brightest in the Darkness of a Career Bump INVESTMENT 2 SKILLS 9 You Have More Skills Than You Think 10 Master the Invisible Skills 11 Never Become a Dinosaur 12 Win the Way You Won Before 13 Kick-Start Your New Skills with Something Fun 14 Skills Get Sharp Slowly and Dull Quickly 15 Grab the Right Kind of Hammer for Your Career Ceiling INVESTMENT 3 CHARACTER 16 Plant an Orchard 17 Generosity Is a Game Changer 18 Empathy, No Longer Just for People Who Like to Cry with Friends 19 Be Present 20 Never Jump Without Character INVESTMENT 4 HUSTLE 21 Grit Is a Choice, Not a Feeling 22 Hustle Has Seasons: Use Awareness to Recognize Them 23 Career Yoga 24 Always Use This to Multiply the Moment 25 Three Final Words You’ll Tell Me Someday Soon Acknowledgments Tell Me About Your Do Over!

Casual friendship. Shauna Callaghan, who I met once, built my blog after my last Career Do Over. Casual friendship. Andy Traub, who I’d known mainly via the Internet, helped me get back up on my feet after my last Do Over. Casual friendship. Shawn Hanks, who I hadn’t seen in a year, helped me kick-start my speaking career after my last Do Over. Casual friendship. My tender heart tried to remember that moment of lifelong friends rallying around me during my career transition, but the truth is that many of the relationships that did the heaviest lifting were casual at first. Which doesn’t mean superficial.

Remember If you want to win in the future, sometimes you have to look to the past. Interview a former win. Why did it work? What about that situation made it more successful than others? Never reinvent the wheel. What can you do today to help re-create some of the circumstances that helped you win yesterday? 13 Kick-Start Your New Skills with Something Fun So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. —WENDELL BERRY We need new skills because they lead to new jobs, new dreams and new opportunities. We’ve won before and we’re ready to win again. Now, what’s one new skill we want to learn?


pages: 255 words: 76,834

Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda

1960s counterculture, anti-pattern, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bash_history, Bill Atkinson, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, HyperCard, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lock screen, premature optimization, profit motive, proprietary trading, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Fadell, work culture , zero-sum game

Apple certainly had its core enthusiasts at that time, and they were passionate about its products, but to everyone else, the Mac was a computer they might have used in college but forgot about when they became adults and got jobs. Four months after I started at Apple, things started to change. The release of the iPod was as much a surprise to me as it was to everyone else, and this portable music player kick-started Apple’s shift from computers to personal technology. The iPod also provided the money and the confidence that would lead to the development of the wildly successful devices that followed. This culminated with the iPhone, the product that transformed Apple from a technology bit player into one of the world’s most profitable enterprises.

In the large projects Brooks was speaking about, where teams of hundreds or thousands are working against schedules and initiatives with mutual dependencies, the size of the effort bounds the speed of the work, and the overhead of communication and coordination swamps the impact of individuals, even the geniuses. However, in the early phase of software development, it’s possible to shake free of these restrictions, especially when teams are small and the hunt for ideas is still on. This was the scenario when Richard joined us at Apple. We were still looking for an organizing concept to kick-start our web browser effort, and Richard showed us how. Not only that, he proved that a 10x productivity gap is a conservative upper limit on the possible in early stage software. Indeed, Richard did more to move our project ahead in two person-days of work than Don and I had done in the preceding twelve person-weeks.

Of course, a program that produced nothing but a Black Slab was far from a fully functioning web browser. We were still a long way from delivering a finished app, but our technical dawn had broken, the lights were now on, so at least we could see where we were going. 4 One Simple Rule We’d begun as three programmers trying to kick-start a project. Within a few months, we’d hired a few more people, and we were nine, a small web browser software team starting to hit its stride. By that time, word had come down the management chain. Steve Jobs himself had decided how he would judge our browser as a product. The focus would be on one thing: speed.


pages: 280 words: 79,029

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application

Results released in August 2014 showed an 8.4 percent reduction in reconvictions since the start of the program compared with the national baseline. If the scheme keeps performing like that and achieves a reduction in reconvictions of 7.5 percent or more compared with the control group, the original investors will receive a payout in 2016. Whatever its eventual results, the real impact of the Peterborough SIB will have been to kick-start a new market. Britain is home to the greatest number of SIBs, helped along by the enthusiasm of David Cameron, the Conservative British prime minister, for an idea he calls the “Big Society.” Almost no one knows what this phrase means, but if it has any substance at all, it is in the area of social investment.

“These plans would help all students get the financing they need—including students from disadvantaged backgrounds—but without the anxiety that comes with traditional loans,” said Petri in a statement at the time. *** AT THE SAME TIME that policy makers are becoming more intrigued by the idea of income-share agreements, the technological landscape is shifting. The example of firms like Kickstarter, Crowdcube, Lending Club (discussed in the next chapter), and others is habituating people to the idea of funding strangers over an online platform. And the availability of data online means that firms like Upstart can analyze the likely earnings power of youngsters in more sophisticated ways than ever before.

Flowers, 69, 81 Japan, banking crisis in, 75 Japan, financial innovation in, 27, 29, 39–40 Jha, Saumitra, 27 Jiménez-Martín, Sergi, 73 Job creation, young small firms and, 147–148 Joint-stock firms, 23 JPMorgan, 77, 169 Jump-to-default risk, 238 Käärmann, Kristo, 190 Kabbage, 218 Kahneman, Daniel, 47, 137 Kanjorski, Paul, 145 Kauffman Foundation, 158 Kennedy, John F., 32 Keys, Benjamin, 48 Kharroubi, Enisse, 79 Kickstarter, 172 King, Stephen, 99 Klein, David, 182 Krugman, Paul, xv Lahoud, Sal, 166 Lang, Luke, 153, 161–162 Laplanche, Renaud, 179, 184, 188, 190, 193–194, 196–197 Latency, 53 Law of large numbers, 17 Layering, 57 Left-digit bias, 46 Lehman Brothers, x, 44, 65 Lending direct, 84 marketplace, 184 payday, 200 relationship-based, 11, 151, 206–208 secured, xiv, 76 unsecured, 206 See also Loans; Peer-to-peer lending Lending Club, 172, 179–180, 182–184, 187, 189, 194–195, 197 Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci), 19 Lerner, Josh, 59 Lethal pandemic, risk-modeling for demographic profile, 230 exceedance-probability curve, 231–232, 232 figure 3 historical data, 228–229 infectiousness and virulence, 229–230 location of outbreak, 230–231 Leverage, 51, 70–71, 80, 186, 188 Leverage ratio, 76–77 Lewis, Michael, 57 Liber Abaci or Book of Calculation (Fibonacci), 19 LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate), 41 Liebman, Jeffrey, 98 Life expectancy government reaction to, 128–129 projections of, 124–127, 126 figure 2 ratio of young to older people, 127–128 Life-insurance policies, 142 Life-settlements industry, 142–143 Life table, 20 Limited liability, 212 Liquidity, 12–14, 39, 185–186 List, John, 109 The Little Book of Behavioral Investing (Montier), 156 Lo, Andrew, 113–115, 117–123 Loans low-documentation, 48–49 secured, 76 small business, 181, 216 student, 164, 166–167, 169–171, 182 syndicated, 41 Victory Loans, 28 See also Lending; Peer-to-Peer lending Logistic regression, 201 London, early fire insurance in, 16–17 London, Great Fire of, 16 London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), 41 Long-Term Capital Management, 123 Longevity, betting on, 143–144 Loss aversion, 136 Lotteries, 212, 213 Low-documentation loans, 48–49 Lumni, 165, 168, 175 Lustgarten, Anders, 111 Lynn, Jeff, 160–161 Mack, John, 180 Mahwah, New Jersey, 52, 53 Marginal borrowers assessment of, 216–217 behavioral finance and, 208–214 industrialization of credit, 206 microfinance and, 203 savings schemes, 209–214 small businesses, 215–219 unsecured lending to, 206 Wonga, 203, 205, 208 Marginal borrowers (continued) ZestFinance, 199, 202, 205–206 Maritime piracy, solutions to, 151–152 Maritime trade, role of in history of finance, 3, 7–8, 14, 17, 23 Market makers, 15–16, 55 MarketInvoice, 195, 207, 217–218 Marketplace lending, 184 Markowitz, Harry, 118 Massachusetts, use of inflation-protected bonds in, 26 Massachusetts, use of social-impact bonds in, 98 Matching engine, 52 Maturity transformation, 12–13, 187–188, 193 McKinsey & Company, ix, 42 Mercator Advisory Group, 203 Merrill, Charles, 28 Merrill, Douglas, 199, 201 Merrill Lynch, 28 Merton, Robert, 31, 113–114, 123–124, 129–132, 142, 145 Mian, Atif, 204 Michigan, University of, financial survey by, 134–135 Microfinance, 203 Micropayment model, 217 Microwave technology, 53 The Million Adventure, 213–214 Minsky, Hyman, 42 Minsky moment, 42 Mississippi scheme, 36 Mitchell, Justin, 166–167 Momentum Ignition, 57 Monaco, modeling risk of earthquake in, 227 Money, history of, 4–5 Money illusion, 73–74 Money laundering, 192 Money-market funds, 43, 44 Monkeys, Yale University study of loss aversion with, 136 Montier, James, 156–157 Moody, John, 24 Moody’s, 24, 235 Moore’s law, 114 Morgan Stanley, 188 Mortgage-backed securities, 49, 233 Mortgage credit by ZIP code, study of, 204 Mortgage debt, role of in 2007–2008 crisis, 69–70 Mortgage products, unsound, 36–37 Mortgage securitization, 47 Multisystemic therapy, 96 Munnell, Alicia, 129 Naked credit-default swaps, 143 Nature Biotechnology, on drug-development megafunds, 118 “Neglected Risks, Financial Innovation and Financial Fragility” (Gennaioli, Shleifer, and Vishny), 42 Network effects, 181 New York, skyscraper craze in, 74–75 New York City, prisoner-rehabilitation program in, 108 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 31, 52, 53, 61, 64 New York Times, Merrill Lynch ad in, 28 Noncorrelated assets, 122 Nonprofits, growth of in United States, 105–106 Northern Rock, x NYMEX, 60 NYSE Euronext, 52 NYSE (New York Stock Exchange), 31, 52, 53, 61, 64 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), 128, 147 Oldfield, Sean, 67–68, 80–84 OnDeck, 216–218 One Service, 94–95, 105, 112 Operating expense ratio, 188–189 Options, 15, 124 Order-to-trade ratios, 63 Oregon, interest in income-share agreements, 172, 176 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 128, 147 Overtrading, 24 Packard, Norman, 60 Pandit, Vikram, 184 Park, Sun Young, 233 Partnership mortgage, 81 Pasion, 11 Pave, 166–168, 173, 175, 182 Payday lending Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, survey on, 200 information on applicants, acquisition of, 202 underwriting of, 201 PayPal, 219 Peak child, 127 Peak risk, 228 Peer-to-peer lending advantages of, 187–189 auction system, 195 big investors in, 183 borrowers, assessment of, 197 in Britain, 181 commercial mortgages, 181 CommonBond, 182, 184, 197 consumer credit, 181 diversification, 196 explained, 180 Funding Circle, 181–182, 189, 197 investors in, 195 Lending Club, 179–180, 182–184, 187, 189, 194–195, 197 network effects, 181 ordinary savers and, 184 Prosper, 181, 187, 195 RateSetter, 181, 187, 196 Relendex, 181 risk management, 195–197 securitization, 183–184, 196 Peer-to-peer lending (continued) small business loans, 181 SoFi, 184 student loans, 182 Zopa, 181, 187, 188, 195 Pensions, cost of, 125–126 Perry, Rick, 142–143 Peterborough, England, social-impact bond pilot in, 90–92, 94–95, 104–105, 112 Petri, Tom, 172 Pharmaceuticals, decline of investment in, 114–115 Piracy Reporting Centre, International Maritime Bureau, 151 Polese, Kim, 210 Poor, Henry Varnum, 24 “Portfolio Selection” (Markowitz), 118 Prediction Company, 60–61 Preferred shares, 25 Prepaid cards, 203 Present value of cash flows, 19 Prime borrowers, 197 Prince, Chuck, 50–51, 62 Principal-agent problem, 8 Prisoner rehabilitation programs, 90–91, 94–95, 98, 108, 112 Private-equity firms, 69, 85, 91, 105, 107 Projection bias, 72–73 Property banking crises and, xiv, 69 banking mistakes involving, 75–80 behavioral biases and, 72–75 dangerous characteristics of, 70–72 fresh thinking, need for, xvii, 80 investors’ systematic errors in, 74–75 perception of as safe investment, 76, 80 Prosper, 181, 187, 195 Provisioning funds, 187 Put options, 9, 82 Quants, 19, 63, 113 QuickBooks, 218 Quote stuffing, 57 Raffray, André-François, 144 Railways, affect of on finance, 23–25 Randomized control trials (RCTs), 101 Raphoen, Christoffel, 15–16 Raphoen, Jan, 15–16 RateSetter, 181, 187, 196 RCTs (randomized control trials), 101 Ready for Zero, 210–211 Rectangularization, 125, 126 figure 2 Regulation NMS, 61 Reinhart, Carmen, 35 Reinsurance, 224 Relendex, 181 Rentes viagères, 20 Repurchase “repo” transactions, 15, 185 Research-backed obligations, 119 Reserve Primary Fund, 44 Retirement, funding for anchoring effect, 137–138 annuities, 139 auto-enrollment in pension schemes, 135 auto-escalation, 135–136 conventional funding, 127–128 decumulation, 138–139 government reaction to increased longevity, 128–129 home equity, 139–140 life expectancy, projections of, 124–127, 126 figure 2 life insurance policies, cash-surrender value of, 142 personal retirement savings, 128–129, 132–133 replacement rate, 125 reverse mortgage, 140–142 savings cues, experiment with, 137 SmartNest, 129–131 Reverse mortgages, 140–142 Risk-adjusted returns, 118 Risk appetite, 116 Risk assessment, 24, 45, 77–78, 208 Risk aversion, 116, 215 Risk-based capital, 77 Risk-based pricing model, 176 Risk management, 55, 117–118, 123, 195–197 Risk Management Solutions, 222 Risk sharing, 8, 82 Risk-transfer instrument, 226 Risk weights, 77–78 Rogoff, Kenneth, 35 “The Role of Government in Education” (Friedman), 165 Roman Empire business corporation in, 7 financial crisis in, 36 forerunners of banks in, 11 maritime insurance in, 8 Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs), 209–210 Roulette wheel, use of in experiment on anchoring, 138 Royal Bank of Scotland, 186 Rubio, Marco, 172 Russia, mortgage market in, 67 S-curve, in diffusion of innovations, 45 Salmon, Felix, 155 Samurai bonds, 27 Satsuma Rebellion (1877), 27 Sauter, George, 58 Save to Win, 214 Savings-and-loan crisis in US (1990s), 30 Savings cues, experiment with, 137 Scared Straight social program, 101 Scholes, Myron, 31, 123–124 Science, Technology, and Industry Scoreboard of OECD, 147 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 54, 56, 57, 58, 64 Securities markets, 14 Securitization, xi, 20, 37–38, 117–122, 183–184, 196, 236 Seedrs, 160–161 Sellaband, 159 Shared equity, 80–84 Shared-equity mortgage, 84 Shepard, Chris, xii–xiii Shiller, Robert, xv–xvi, 242 Shleifer, Andrei, 42, 44 Short termism, 58 SIBs.


pages: 491 words: 77,650

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

Crowdsourcing is by no means limited to labour markets: consumers, governments, and businesses have turned to the Internet in a wide range of areas—from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) asking citizens for help in its quest to identify exoplanets (http://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard-worlds-planet-9, archived at https://perma.cc/LR8S-7QUF), to start-ups raising capital for new business ideas through platforms such as Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter. com, archived at https://perma.cc/9DNZ-ACZ9). 3. Orly Lobel, ‘The law of the platform’ (2016) 101(1) Minnesota Law Review 87, 91. 4. European Commission, ‘Introduction to Deliveroo’ (European Commission 2016), http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/image/document/ * * * Notes 143 2016-6/deliveroo_13855.pdf, archived at https://perma.cc/6J2T-8XK9; Foodora, ‘About us’, http://www.foodora.com/about/, archived at https://perma.

If a large number of consumers are using a particu- lar app to hail taxis, it will become more attractive for drivers to sign up to that app. A large available pool of drivers, in turn, will make it easier and cheaper for consumers to find their next ride, further increasing the incen- tives for new drivers to join—and so on. It is unsurprising that gig-economy platforms will often try to kick-start this process by investing significant amounts of cash in subsidies for drivers as well as passengers. Hubert Horan, however, is sceptical that this is the entire story. Cash burn, he suggests, is not merely about harnessing network effects, but rather a step in platforms’ quest for monopoly power.


pages: 245 words: 78,125

Happy Inside: How to Harness the Power of Home for Health and Happiness by Michelle Ogundehin

clean water, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Indoor air pollution, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, McMansion, microplastics / micro fibres, Own Your Own Home, placebo effect, sharing economy

It’s another small thing that sets you up with a positive bias from the off. Be sure to make your expectations realistic, though – for example, a wish for seamless train travel rather than the purchase of a winning lottery ticket. ‘Never skip breakfast. It kick-starts your metabolism, gives you the energy to start your day with vigour, and keeps you focused.’ Prioritise breakfast. Never skip breakfast. It kick-starts your metabolism, gives you the energy to start your day with vigour, and keeps you focused. Porridge in particular is a golden charm as it’s an excellent source of vitamins and minerals as well as complex carbohydrates that release their energy slowly, thus less reaching for sugary pick-me-ups come 11 a.m.

Again, have it prepped by your bed the night before and you can do it without thinking. Otherwise, have them ready for taking with your breakfast. Jump-start the neurons. Open curtains and blinds as soon as you get up, especially if you have blackout screening. A shot of daylight sends a ‘wake-up’ message to your brain and gives your internal body clock a kickstart. In the winter, it can be helpful to invest in an alarm that mimics the sunrise, rather than sounding a klaxon, as darker mornings make bouncy starts that much harder. The second best way to jump-start your brain? Have a shower; it’ll wake you like nothing else. Otherwise, splash your face with cold water.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Schwartz, “Hackers Offer Free Porn to Beat Security Checks,” Dark Reading, June 20, 2012. 42 The guard was disabled: Caroline McCarthy, “Bank Robber Hires Decoys on Craigslist, Fools Cop,” CNET, Oct. 3, 2008. 43 Soon half a dozen police cars: David Pescovitz, “Bank Robber Uses Craigslist to Hire Unsuspecting Accomplices,” Boing Boing, Oct. 1, 2008; “Armored Truck Robber Uses Craigslist to Make Getaway,” King5.​com, Sept. 21, 2009. 44 The most popular of these sites: Kickstarter, “Stats,” accessed on May 25, 2014, https:/​/​www.​kickstarter.​com/​help/​stats, indicating Kickstarter had raised $1,131,653 since launching. 45 Criminals are of course happy: Jason Del Rey, “Kickstarter Says It Was Hacked (Updated),” Re/code, Feb. 15, 2014. 46 The answer was: “Apple Fingerprint ID ‘Hacked,’ ” BBC News, Sept. 23, 2013. 47 Using elements of both: John Bowman, “iPhone 5S Fingerprint Hacking Contest Offers $20K Bounty,” Your Community (blog), CBC News, Sept. 20, 2013. 48 Finally, white wood glue: Frank, “Chaos Computer Club Breaks Apple TouchID,” Chaos Computer Club, Sept. 21, 2013. 49 Donations have been made: Andy Greenberg, “Meet the ‘Assassination Market’ Creator Who’s Crowdfunding Murder with Bitcoins,” Forbes, Nov. 18, 2013. 50 As a result, the master criminal-hackers: Marc Santora, “In Hours, Thieves Took $45 Million in A.T.M.

Crowdfunding is a process by which money is collected from a crowd of backers who agree to support either a new start-up company or a nonprofit project, usually described in great depth on a Web site. The most popular of these sites are Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and tens of thousands of projects have successfully been funded, raising in excess of $1 billion from the crowd. Criminals are of course happy to hack anybody raking in that much money and have already successfully compromised the Kickstarter Web site. That said, criminal hackers have much bigger and more nefarious crowdfunding plans in mind, such as hacking the iPhone in your pocket. When Apple released its iPhone 5s mobile phone, it included a feature known as Touch ID, a fingerprint-recognition scanner touted as a “convenient and highly secure way to access your phone.”


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The Great Post Office Scandal: The Fight to Expose a Multimillion Pound Scandal Which Put Innocent People in Jail by Nick Wallis

Asperger Syndrome, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Dominic Cummings, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, lockdown, paper trading, social distancing, Wayback Machine, work culture

Inspired by the superb book Beyond Contempt, which detailed Peter Jukes’ crowdfunded reporting of the News International phone-hacking trial at the Old Bailey, I wondered if there was any way I might be able to try something similar. After looking at various options, I settled on a Kickstarter campaign. Kickstarter is an ‘all-or-nothing’ crowdfunding platform. Supporters make pledges and give the Kickstarter website their account details. If you don’t reach your target, your supporters’ money stays in their accounts, and everyone walks away. If I failed to reach my target there would be no hassle or fallout, and at least I could say I tried.

Alan seemed convinced he would do so insofar as they allowed him to give important information to the court. ‘I don’t even have to look at them,’ he said. Once we were back in the Rolls Building, Alan said, ‘There’s something I want to show you.’ He produced from his pocket several homemade business cards, all of which had the logo of my Post Office Trial website on them, with a link to the Kickstarter page on the back. ‘Where on earth did you get these from?’ I asked. ‘I had them made,’ Alan replied. He told me that whilst the crowdfunding period was live, he’d been handing them out or leaving them lying around at meetings when he came to London. I was touched. Alan and I have different perspectives on certain issues, to put it mildly.

INDEX A Abdulla, Naushad 329 Abraham, Ann 409 Adedayo, Teju 316, 450 Allan, Lucy, MP 387 Allen, Nigel 147, 230, 236 Allen, Roger 450 Altman, Brian, QC 194, 431–436, 437–438, 447, 459–461, 465, 473 Andre, Dionne 391 Apparent bias 348 Appeals system in England & Wales 345 Arbuthnot, Lord (James) 86, 100–101, 101, 158, 168, 171, 175, 177, 186–190, 191, 198, 205, 211, 214, 215, 240–246, 271, 333, 381, 423, 434, 438, 474, 476 accuses the Post Office of lying 435 appears on Inside Out 158 asks David Cameron to intervene 271 calls for judge-led inquiry 423 calls on Paula Vennells to resign 291 gets involved 100 goes on Today 241 leads parliamentary campaign 171 role in the Chinook campaign 86 secures adjournment debate 241 tells Alice Perkins about Horizon 168 writes to the CCRC 333 Arch, Nicki 354–363, 355, 376, 403, 457, 471 Aria Grace Law 400, 425, 428, 430, 432 Ashraf, Kamran 62–68, 83, 396, 425, 440–442, 471 conviction quashed 441 Aujard, Chris 206–208, 240, 412 Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) problems with 196, 219 training 196 B Bailey, Adrian, MP 256 Bajaj, Amar 89 Baker, Colin 32, 146, 148 Baker, Mark 128, 146–148, 225, 243, 249, 256, 257, 331, 344, 453, 454 appears at BIS Select Committee hearing 256 appears at the inquiry 453 concerns over Horizon 146 helps Pete Murray 249 helps Taro Naw 93 helps Wendy Buffrey 128 is described by the High Court as ‘redoubtable’ 344 is snubbed by Alan Bates 243 Baker, Simon (former Post Office project manager) 172–176, 180–182, 187, 197, 206 Baker, Simon, QC (barrister for Post Office) 441 Baker, Sue 363 Balancing to zero 40 requirement to 47 Barang, Jasvinder 316, 440 conviction quashed 441 Bardo, Matt 281, 394, 398 Bates, Alan 58–61, 83, 88, 89, 100, 151, 155, 159, 169, 171, 177, 186, 188, 190, 198, 203, 213, 217, 221, 240, 243, 247, 252, 256, 269–271, 273, 285, 290–295, 309, 338, 345, 366, 369, 386, 392, 398, 404, 408, 419, 420, 421, 423, 436, 469, 474, 475 becomes a Subpostmaster 51–54 cross-examination in Common Issues trial 325–327 founds the JFSA 97–99 given notice by the Post Office 59 launches legal action 295 launches Parliamentary Ombudsman complaint 408 settles legal action 372 snubs Mark Baker 243 Bates v Post Office 306 case management conference 335 Common Issues judgment 343–346 appeal against 349 dismissal of appeal against 367 Common Issues trial 309, 315–334, 343–346 Group Litigation Order hearing 298 Horizon trial 335–341, 346–349, 364–365 judgment 376 recusal application 348 appeal 352 hearing 350 settlement agreement 372, 383, 419 Steering Committee 419 strikeout judgment 313 BBC News website 218 BBC North East 218 BBC Radio 4 218, 378, 406 BBC South West 225 BBC Surrey 155 Beal, Nick 329, 344 cross-examination in Common Issues trial 330 BEIS Select Committee inquiry 411–419 Fujitsu’s written evidence 415 Nick Read’s written evidence 413 oral evidence hearing 392 Paula Vennells’ written evidence 411 Bell, Peter 419 Benefits Agency 8 Bentwood, Richard 434 Binley, Brian, MP 266–267 BIS Select Committee inquiry 49, 254–269, 273 Angela van den Bogerd 260–266 George Thomson 254–259 Ian Henderson 260–266 Paula Vennells 260–266 Blackstone’s ratio 397 Blakey, David conviction quashed 473 Bloom, Detective Sergeant Hayley 434 Boeing 737 Max crashes 45 Bourke, Patrick 289 Branch Focuses 258 Branch suspense account 37 Branch user forum 260 Brennan, Lisa conviction quashed 472 Bridgen, Andrew, MP 177, 240, 244 Bristow, David 100, 155, 158 Brooks, Richard 170 Brown, Alan 89 Brown, Tom 190, 224 Buffrey, Doug 125 Buffrey, Wendy 125–131, 355, 376, 392, 396, 425, 426, 427, 470, 471, 474 conviction quashed 472 Burden of proof 122 Burgess-Boyde, Sarah 278 Burgess, Tim conviction quashed 472 Busch, Lisa, QC 444–448, 455, 460 Butoy, Harjinder 474 conviction quashed 473 C Cable, Sir Vince 273 Callanan, Lord 390, 435 Callendar Square bug 46, 89 Cameron, Alisdair 24, 313, 391 Cameron, David, former PM 173, 271, 273 Capon, Barry conviction quashed 472 Carter, Julie 277, 391 Carter, Kevin 391 Cartwright King Sift Review 192–193, 209, 224 Cash, Andy 193 Castleton, Lee 78–84, 89, 97, 383 Castleton, Lisa-Marie 78 Caveen, Jayne 382 Cavender, David, QC 323–329 Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR) 238 Chatur, Mahebub 471 Chinook helicopters 85–87, 100–101, 160 Chip and pin machine 71 Clark, Nicholas conviction quashed 472 Clarke Advice 191–193, 224, 430–436, 444, 459–461 disclosure management document 432 first Advice 191, 459 second Advice 193, 459 Clarke, Simon 191–193, 410, 432, 459 Cleife, Julie 440 conviction quashed 441 ‘Clint’ 3, 11–16, 192 Coffey, Jonathan 273 ‘Colin’ 173–174, 183, 187, 212–213, 274 Collins, Tony 88 Collinson, Patrick 18 Common Issues trial 309, 315–334, 343–346 Alan Bates’ evidence 325 first day 315 judgment 343 Pam Stubbs’ evidence 327 Post Office witness evidence 329–333 Communication Workers Union (CWU) 30, 148, 254, 258, 401, 453 Compensation payments, receipt of 403 Computer Weekly 86, 88–92, 101–102, 118, 134, 151, 155, 282, 430, 469 breaks the story 88 Contempt of court 430–436 Convictions, quashed 426, 472 Coomber Rich 119 Cooper, Joe 284 Cormack, Lord 423 Coulson, Lord Justice 352 Court of Appeal hearings 428–435, 457–467 Flora Page stands down 434 judgment day 470–474 limb 2 argument (affront to the public conscience) 428, 444–449 Paul Marshall stands down 444 Post Office alleges contempt 431 Cousins, Wendy 466 Coyne, Jason 336–337, 364–365 Craddock, Jenny 155 Credence system 166 Crichton, Susan 171, 176, 179, 180, 182, 193, 196, 206 Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) 292, 311, 333, 387, 396–400, 423–425, 440, 450, 466, 472 grounds for referral 424 Croft, Jane 318 Crowdfunding 309 Kickstarter 311 Crown Post Offices 4 losses at 83 Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) 20 D Daily Mail 76, 277, 382, 398 Darlington, Scott 316, 421, 426, 458 conviction quashed 472 Dar, Louise 329, 371 Davies, Mark 240, 254, 271, 354, 363 appears on Today 241 meets the Panorama team 289 Davies, Olivia 445, 471 Davison, Margaret 16, 56 Debt notices (debt recovery letters) 38, 347 de Garr Robinson, Anthony, QC 299, 307, 338, 339, 341, 349, 350 Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) 386 Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) 135, 243, 254, 273, 274, 330, 331, 386, 413, 435, 470 Detica Report 195–196 Dickinson, Helen 332 cross-examination in Common Issues trial 332 Dickson, John 167 Dinsdale, Mark 236, 237 Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) 378 Disclosure 120, 140, 307 Horizon error logs 416 Discrepancies acceptance of 37 access granted to Subpostmasters 53 balance to zero 40 debt notices 38, 347 Settle Centrally 38, 109, 347 in dispute 347 Settle to Cash or Cheque 37, 109 suspected or unreported 49 Transaction Acknowledgements 56 Transaction Corrections 38, 56 applying for 56 challenging 56 Donnelly, Kathleen 307, 309 Duncan, Lord 387 Dunks, Andy 417 E Edwin Coe 279 Ernst and Young audit 166 F Falconer, Lord Charlie 433 False accounting 39, 132–133 definition 133 plea bargaining 42, 222, 268, 458 strict liability offence 132 Theft Act 1968, section 17 132 the trap 222, 268, 458 Farbey, Mrs Justice 431, 437 Fed, The See National Federation of Subpostmasters (NFSP) Fell, Stanley 465 Felstead, Tracy 4–6, 27–30, 280, 355, 376, 392, 396, 425, 426, 428, 444, 457 conviction quashed 472 Flinders, Karl 318, 338, 373 Fontaine, Senior Master 298–300, 424 Ford, Julie 89, 147 Fowles, Dr Sam 445 Fraser, Mr Justice 306–307, 313, 314, 319, 323–324, 330, 336, 339, 341, 343, 377–378, 387, 417 recusal application 349–354 Freeths 293, 474 French, Jane 155 commissions first Inside Out investigation 155 commissions second Inside Out investigation 220 Fujitsu 320, 323, 348, 365, 366, 378, 379, 382, 411, 413, 415–418 accountability 417 cross-examination of Richard Roll 336–342 evidence to BEIS Select Committee inquiry 415 headquarters 156, 181 ICL takeover 8 judicial criticism 417 provision of witness evidence 416 Full Authority Digital Engine Control (FADEC) 85 Furey, Andy 256, 314, 392 Furniss, Gill, MP 391 G Gahir, Rajinder 231 Galaxy software 195 Garrard, Roch 88 Gilhooly, Donna 302 Gill, Bal 363 Gill, Kashmir conviction quashed 472 Glover, Amanda 159, 166 Goddard, Jane 220 Godeseth, Torstein 348 Gordon, Ben 461 Gould, Nick 400 Grabiner, Lord 350–352 Graham, William conviction quashed 472 Grant Funding Agreement (GFA) 330, 331, 344 Greenhill, Sam 318 Greenhow, Calum 382, 392 Green, Patrick, QC 294, 298–299, 323, 330–333, 338, 346–353, 366, 370–371, 378, 384, 420 addresses Master Fontaine 299 cross-examines Post Office witnesses 329 explains the mediation process 384 responds to the recusal application 351 sets out the claimants’ case 319 Griffiths, Gina 199–204, 247–248 withdraws from the mediation scheme 247 Griffiths, Martin 199–204 Group litigation/Bates v Post Office first judgment 306 Group Litigation Order (GLO) 295, 305 H Hadrill, Keith 141 Hall, Alison 428 conviction quashed 472 Hamilton, David 70 Hamilton, Jo 70–77, 83, 88, 89, 95, 97, 100, 118, 143, 158, 159, 162, 179, 221, 241, 252, 271, 290, 310, 316, 333, 338, 343–345, 350, 371–372, 376, 425, 426, 428, 458, 470 appears in Computer Weekly 89 appears in Taro Naw 95 appears on BBC Inside Out South 159 appears on BBC Panorama 290 attends Bates v Post Office 310 attends founding JFSA meeting 97 conviction quashed 472 finds out her conviction will be quashed 426 has her conviction quashed 472 helps Seema Misra 118 is prosecuted and sentenced 77 is referred by the CCRC 396 meets James Arbuthnot 100 takes on a Post Office 70 Harrison, Sian 318 Hartley, James 294, 298, 305, 309, 325, 345, 348, 349, 369, 370, 372 attends mediation 369 defends the settlement 383 putting the case together 306 reacts to Common Issues judgment 345 reacts to the recusal application 349 teaming up with the JFSA 294 Head, Andy 214 Head, Chris 390 Head Postmasters definition 23 Hedges, Tom 413, 439, 475 conviction quashed 472 Henderson, Allison 428 conviction quashed 472 Henderson Chambers 293 Henderson, Ian call for a judge-led independent inquiry 392 contradicts Paula Vennells 263 is told about remote access 181 Second Sight appointed 176–179 starting the Second Sight investigation 179–185 Henry, Edward, QC 437 Herbert Smith Freehills 370, 389, 401 Higginson, Andrew 439 Hill, Max 378 Historical Shortfall Scheme 401, 421, 425 application window 401 eligibility criteria 401 History of the Post Office 18 Hogg, Issy 77, 97–99, 118, 133, 155, 159, 171, 177, 245 Hollinrake, Kevin, MP 400 Holmes, Marion 475 Holmes, Peter 252, 458 conviction quashed 472 Holroyde, Lord Justice 431–436, 437, 444, 447–449, 459–464, 471–472 Hooper, Sir Anthony 197, 206, 208–209, 213, 215, 245 Horizon system arrival of Horizon Online 98 back-end data input 55 balancing the books 35 bugs Callendar Square bug 46, 141 one-sided transactions 184 Receipts and Payments Mismatch 139, 143, 188, 320, 458 Reversal bug 46 Riposte Lock/Unlock bug 46 business impact analysis 16 cash account 14 Clint’s involvement 11 dealing with a surplus 36 development of EPoS system 12 discrepancies 37, 38, 49, 109 auditors’ visit 49 level of access granted to Subpostmasters 53 early days 3 fixing bugs by Fujitsu 160 helpline 35–41, 49, 53, 55, 63–64, 71–73, 78–80, 98, 107, 111–112, 126, 136, 143, 147, 164, 169, 180, 216, 229–230, 278, 347, 356 balance to zero option 40 Software Support Centre 40 Horizon Online 136, 140, 167, 171, 172, 188, 192, 299, 379 Legacy Horizon 379 length of time data kept 56 locating errors 36 logging on and off 4 logistics 9 NFSP endorsement 32 prototype 14 Riposte message store 13, 46, 342 rolling discrepancy over into next trading period 36 rollout 22, 134, 136 Sio Lohrasb 22 training 4, 35, 43, 71, 104, 105, 110, 112, 126, 164, 187, 216, 257, 258, 356, 465 Transaction Acknowledgements 56 Transaction Corrections 38, 55, 72, 105, 110, 126, 127, 139, 180, 184, 236, 422 applying for 56 challenging 56 Transaction Information Processing (TIP) 16 upgrades and patches 45 Horizon trial 335–341, 346–349 Howard, Gillian conviction quashed 473 Howe and Co 49, 50, 269 submission to BIS Select Committee inquiry 470 Hudgell, Neil 400, 402 Hudgells 400, 474 Humphrys, John 241 Hussain, Neelam 466 Hutchings, Lynette conviction quashed 472 I Information technology (IT) 11, 44 Boeing 737 Max crashes 45 Callendar Square bug 46, 89, 141 classification of 12 fixing of by Fujitsu 160 Horizon upgrades and patches 45 logging of by Fujitsu 416 Receipts and Payments Mismatch 139, 143, 320, 458 Reversal bug 46 Initial Complaint Review and Mediation Scheme 197 application window 198 BIS Select Committee inquiry 254–269 Angela van den Bogerd 260 Paula Vennells 260 Case Questionnaire Response (CQR) 198 Case Review Report (CRR) 198 eligibility criteria 198 Post Office Investigation Report (POIR) 198 Post Office’s Final Report 271 refusal to allow convicted claimants 241 suitability for 213 Westminster Hall adjournment debate 241, 243–246 Working Group 197 terminated 271 Inquiry first evidence heard 453–455 first oral evidence session 453 MPs call for 393 review announced 423 review made into statutory inquiry 476 scope 423 Sir Wyn Williams appointed 423 Inside Out South 155, 158, 163, 214, 220, 234 International Computers Ltd (ICL) 8 Irranca-Davies, Huw, MP 241 Ishaq, Khayyam conviction quashed 472 Ismay report 136–137, 166, 410, 457 Ismay, Rod 136 J Jackson reforms 370 Jenkins, Gareth 124, 138, 181, 191, 348, 430 Johnson, Boris, PM 390 Jones, Bryn 92 Jones, Darren, MP 411, 455 Jones, David, MP 100, 101 Jones, Dylan 95 Jones, Kevan, MP 244, 393 Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) 102, 134, 136, 151, 166, 169, 174, 177, 181, 186, 190, 194, 197, 198, 205, 213, 217, 220, 234, 242, 245, 251, 252, 254, 256, 258, 279, 286, 291, 292, 294, 305, 309, 313, 314, 346, 373, 383, 385, 401, 402, 408, 436, 454, 471 approves Second Sight 178 is formed 99 joins forces with Kay Linnell 177 jointly launches the Mediation Scheme 197 makes complaint to the Parliamentary Ombudsman 408 meets MPs at Portcullis House 171 reacts to dissolution of the Working Group 273 settles High Court litigation 372 starts working towards a High Court litigation 292 K Kalia, Parmod 321–323, 450 conviction quashed 450 reply from Angela van den Bogerd 322 Kamran, Siema 62–68 Kickstarter campaign 311 Kit swapouts 217 Knight, Nigel 316 Knight, Sue 190, 224, 252, 316 L Latif, Adrees 381 Law Commission 121–122, 455 Lawrence, Patrick, QC 437 Legacy Horizon 192, 379 Legal aid 292 Legal presumption of reliability in computers 455 Letwin, Oliver, MP 101, 175 Lewell-Buck, Emma, MP 391 Lewis, Julian xiii Lilley, Peter, MP 32 Limb 2 428, 444–449 Linnell, Kay 177, 206, 208, 209, 211, 214, 256, 257, 258, 292, 298, 338, 343, 369, 384, 404, 408, 420, 421, 474 Litigation funding 293, 294, 305 ‘Local’ Post Offices 168 Lock, Pamela 451 conviction quashed 473 Lohrasb, Sio 22 Longman, Jon 115 Lyons, Alwen, OBE 182, 188, 412 M Machines and Artificial Intelligence 455 Mahmood, Tahir conviction quashed 472 Malicious prosecution 420, 421, 426, 428 Mandelson, Peter, MP 100 Manning, Frank 227, 319 Marshall, Paul 400, 420, 428, 430–435, 437–438, 444, 459, 476 McCormack, Tim 16 McDonald, Jackie 143, 145, 458 conviction quashed 472 McFadden, Pat, MP 134 McLachlan, Professor Charles 123–124, 134, 138–142, 144, 218, 283, 332, 336 Media coverage BBC News website 218 BBC regional programmes 218, 225, 252 BBC Surrey 155 Computer Weekly 86, 88–91, 92, 101, 102, 118, 134, 151, 155, 282, 430, 469 Daily Mail 76, 277, 382, 398 Inside Out, other regions 220 Inside Out South 155, 158, 163, 214, 220, 234 Panorama 281, 290, 393, 400 Private Eye 166, 170, 171, 218 Radio 4 218, 378, 406 Taro Naw 92–96, 155 The One Show 238, 242, 245, 298, 302 Today 241 Mediation 369–375 See also Initial Complaint Review and Mediation Scheme Meggitt, Graham 92 Membury, William 418 Merritt, Tracey 101, 179, 252, 316 Message store 13 See also Riposte message store Metropolitan Police Service 387, 430, 479 Miliband, Ed, MP 433 Miscarriage of justice 86, 120, 137, 194, 214, 268, 277, 278, 282, 323, 393, 411, 413, 435, 451, 477 Misra, Davinder 102 first meeting with Nick Wallis 151 Misra, Seema xi, 102–119, 123, 138–145, 151–154, 162, 178, 179, 221, 290, 336, 350, 376, 396, 425, 426, 428, 444, 457 conviction quashed 472 Moloney, Tim, QC 431, 447, 455, 457–461 Murray, Ian, MP 244 Murray, Pete 249–250, 453 N National Federation of Retail Newsagents 81 National Federation of Subpostmasters (NFSP) 30, 31–34, 51, 60, 115, 127–128, 146, 156, 254, 291, 321, 330, 344, 363, 382, 392, 451, 458, 477 Baker, Colin 148 Baker, Mark 146 denials of problems with Horizon 32–33, 51, 60, 96, 146, 291 formation of 24 Grant Funding Agreement (GFA) 330, 344 Greenhow, Calum 382, 392 Rudkin, Michael 156 Thomson, George 148, 256 National Lottery 110 Network Transformation scheme 173, 330 Nicholson, Bob 406 Norris, Adrian 114 Noverre, Keith 106, 114 NT event log 141 O Oates, Graham 97 O’Connell, Dawn 461–464 conviction quashed 472 O’Connell, Mark 462 O’Connell, Matthew 462 Official Secrets Act 1989 25 One Show, The 238, 242, 245, 298, 302 One-sided transactions 184 Osborne, Kate, MP 390, 393 Overnight Cash Holding 69 Owen, Albert, MP 244 Owen, Damien conviction quashed 472 Owens, Les 171 P Page, Carl conviction quashed 472 Page, Flora 401, 425, 428, 432–435, 437–438, 459, 474–475 Page, Lewis 431–435 Panorama 281, 393, 400 Scandal At The Post Office (2020) 408 Trouble At The Post Office (2015) 290 Parekh, Vijay conviction quashed 472 Parker, Stephen 417 Parker, Tim 345, 427 Parliamentary Ombudsman complaint 408, 423, 436 Patel, Sandip, QC 425 Patel, Varchas 441 Patel, Vipin 440 conviction quashed 441 Pathway 8 Perkins, Alice 168, 172, 175, 186, 412 Peters and Peters 425, 458 Phillips, Dawn 346 Phillips, Steve 225, 245, 252 Picken, Mr Justice 431, 437, 460 Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) section 69 121 Pooler, Michael 318 Post Office annual reports 367 apologies to Subpostmasters 373, 475 attitude to MPs xiii, 190, 197, 240, 244, 266, 271 attitude towards Subpostmasters 81 audit function 21, 50, 195, 231 automation of the network 7–16, 32 belief in Horizon 50, 120, 121, 187 board sub-committee 411 concerns over Horizon 410, 457 debt recovery process 347 dependency on government 173, 274, 293 document shredding 192, 457, 459, 473 enforcement of the Subpostmasters Contract 194, 388 estate 15 evidence to select committees 260, 411, 413, 435 history 18 inability to function as a going concern 425, 468 interpretation of the Subpostmasters Contract 83, 309, 345 Investigation Branch (IB) 19 investigation function 184, 189, 217, 267, 276 Investigations Department (POID) 20 joins Time to Change 354, 363 lack of concern over Horizon 79, 136, 410, 471 number of prosecutions xiii, 30, 155, 158, 171, 397, 398, 408, 466, 500, 501 publicly defends Horizon 95, 175, 178, 477 recusal attempt 346 relationship with Fujitsu 10, 120, 161 relationship with the NFSP 32, 96, 330 responses to media 89, 158, 189, 299, 478 response to CCRC 397 Security and Investigation Services (POSIS) 20 Security Group 20 services available 7 strategy for litigation 312, 313, 314, 415 PostOfficeTrial.com 311 Post Office Victims website 60 Pre-action letters of claim 169 Private Eye 166, 170, 171, 218 Richard Brooks 170 Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA) 42, 117 orders under 333 Prodger, Matt 178, 189, 221 Prosecution statistics 397, 466 Putland, Rob 411, 415 R Ramms, Joseph 23 Rasul, Mohammed conviction quashed 472 Read, Nick 371, 411, 413, 468 Reasons to Urge (RTU) meeting 80 Receipts and Payments Mismatch 139, 143, 320, 458 Recusal application 348 apparent bias 348 appeal dismissed by the Court of Appeal 352 halts the Horizon trial 349 hearing 350 refusal 352 Rees-Mogg, Jacob, MP 387 Remote access 181, 299, 341, 366, 413, 414, 415 Gareth Jenkins’ confirmation of 181 Post Office denial of 183 Richard Roll’s confirmation of 341 Robert Worden’s confirmation of 366 Reversal bug 46 Ridge, Elaine 332 Riposte Lock/Unlock bug 46 See also Callendar Square bug Riposte message store 13, 341 Robinson, Anna Marie 92 Robinson, Della 354 conviction quashed 472 Robinson, Tim 220, 282, 394 Rodgers, Shann 454 Rolfe, Martin 156 Roll, Richard 159, 181, 338 at Fujitsu 160–162 cross-examination in Horizon trial 339 Panorama 290 the recorded conversation 285–289 Royal Mail 19 Rozenberg, Joshua 350 Rudkin, Michael 156, 252 Rudkin, Susan 252, 426, 440 conviction quashed 441 S Sabir, Mohammad 329 Sayer, Siobhan conviction quashed 472 Schedule of Sensitive Material 121, 458 Scott, John 136, 192 Scully, Paul, MP 390, 477 Second Sight 175, 176–191, 205–209 appointment 177 Briefing Reports 215 Post Office’s reply to Briefing Report 2 218 summit following the Post Office’s reply to Briefing Report 2 240 evidence to 2015 select committee 260 Final Report 276 Post Office’s response 276 Interim Report 186, 188 launch of 190 Spot Review SR05 189 notice of termination 271 Post Office board sub-committee 412 Security Group 20 Service level agreement between the Post Office and Fujitsu 161 Settlement agreement announced 372 finally revealed 419 Sewell, Lesley 182 Shaheen, Mohamed 222 Shaheen, Rubbina 222, 458 conviction quashed 472 Shaikh, Eleanor 376 Shepherd, David 354 Shoosmiths 159 withdrawal from case 206 Shredding of documents 192, 459 Sidhpura, Chirag 376 Simpson, Alan 140 Singh, Jarnail 124, 138, 144, 180, 192 Singh, Nippi 100 Skinner, Janet 393, 396–398, 403, 428 conviction quashed 472 Smith, Dave 136 Smith, Jacqui 134 Smith, Martin 191 Smith, Sandy 238 Software Support Centre (SSC) 40, 160, 338 Spackman, Conor 282 Stanley, Peter 172 Stein, Sam, QC 455, 458 Stockdale, Liz 329 Stock units 5 Storey, Susannah 412 Strict liability offence 132 Strikeout application by Post Office 311 Stubbs, Martin 226 Stubbs, Pam 225, 226–238, 252, 319, 371 cross-examination in Common Issues trial 327–334 gives evidence 327 is suspended 232 moves into a temporary branch 228 Sturgess, Geoffrey 26 Subpostmasters appointment of 61 definition 21, 23 Subpostmasters Contract 25, 47, 293, 309, 319, 323 Section 12:12 25, 59, 324 Suspense accounts, branch 37 removal of 37 Suspense accounts, internal 208 Sweeney, John 281 Sweetman, Stuart 32 Swinson, Jo, MP 188, 245 T Taro Naw 92–96, 155 Tatford, Warwick 142, 143 Taylor, Andrew 474 Tecwyn, Sion 92 Theft Act 1968 section 17 132 Therium 293, 383 Thomas, Eira 34 Thomas, Noel (Hughie) 34–43, 89, 252, 426 conviction quashed 472 Thomas, Sian 95 Thomson, George 148, 256 Thomson, Pauline conviction quashed 472 Thomson, Rebecca 88 Time to Change 354, 363 Tobin, Sam 459 Tolhurst, Kelly, MP 386 Training 4, 35, 43, 71, 104, 105, 110, 112, 126, 164, 187, 216, 257, 258, 356, 465 Branch Focuses 258 Transaction acknowledgements 56 Transaction corrections 38, 55, 72, 105, 110, 111, 126, 127, 139, 180, 236, 422 applying for 56 challenging 56, 110 Transaction Information Processing (TIP) 16 Trousdale, Chris 440 conviction quashed 441 Turner, Karl, MP 394 Tweedie, Neil 277 U ‘Unders and overs’ tin 36 V Valters, Jon 155 van den Bogerd, Angela 180, 197, 208, 218, 240, 254, 256, 289, 318, 322, 331, 332, 338, 344, 346 cross-examination in Common Issues trial 331 cross-examination in Horizon trial 346 questioning at Select Committee hearing 261–266 Vennells, Paula 174, 175, 176, 178, 188, 273, 291, 297, 322, 330, 335, 368, 382, 385, 393, 411, 476–479 apologises 382, 475 call to be stripped of CBE 476 gives evidence to BIS Select Committee 260–265 incentive payments 368 is appointed as Post Office CEO 172 is doorstepped 382, 478 meets James Arbuthnot 175 meets the JFSA 178 resignation boards of Dunelm and Morrisons 476 Cabinet Office 393 Chair of the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust 438 Church’s ethical investments advisory group 413 response to BEIS questions 410–414 Short Term Incentive Payments (STIP) 368 Verity, Andy 273 W Wagstaff, Caroline 372 Wakely, Mike 58 Walker, Janet 187 Ward, Gail conviction quashed 472 Warman, Matt, MP 455 Warmington, Ron 474 call for a judge-led independent inquiry 392 frustration at lack of progress 208 querying destination of ‘missing’ money 381 Second Sight appointed 176–179 starting the Second Sight investigation 179–185 Warren, Ian conviction quashed 472 Westminster Hall adjournment debate 243–246 Post Office’s response 251 Wildblood, Mark 354 Williams, Margery conviction quashed 472 Williams, Paul 329 Williams, Rachel 252 Williams, Sir Wyn 423, 453–454 Wilson, Julian 97, 169, 252, 296–297 conviction quashed 472 Wilson, Karen 98, 169, 252, 316 Wilson, Rob 140 Winn, Andrew 237 Witherow, Tom 382, 398, 438 Withers, Jim 278 Wood, Mike, MP 177 Worden, Dr Robert 336–337, 364–365 Wyllie, Kym 190 Y Yates, David conviction quashed 473 Z Zahawi, Nadhim, MP 261–264 Alan Bates A Horizon terminal in 2003 Jo Hamilton and Seema Misra Noel Thomas Lee Castleton Pete Murray outside Hope Farm Road Post Office Ron Warmington Lord Arbuthnot Kay Linnell Kamran Ashraf and Siema Kamran Mark Baker Nicki Arch Pam Stubbs Chirag Sidhpura Julian Wilson David Hill, Emma Jones, Karen Wilson and Trevor Wilson Henry Warwick, Patrick Green, Ognjen Miletic, Deirdre Connolly, Kathleen Donnelly and Reanne Mackenzie Cheering Subpostmasters and their supporters on 16 December 2019 Seema Misra with the Horizon trial judgment Jayshreeben Patel, Varchas Patel and Vipin Patel Richard Roll Sue Knight Victorious Subpostmasters celebrate after their convictions were quashed on 23 April 2021 Tom Hedges and Marion Holmes Wendy Buffrey Scott Darlington and Steve Darlington Seema Misra, Janet Skinner and Tracy Felstead Peter Holmes and Marion Holmes Chris Trousdale, Neil Hudgell, Vipin Patel, Varchas Patel, Jayshreeben Patel, Siema Kamran, Kamran Ashraf, Jasvinder Barang and family Parmod Kalia and Teju Adedayo Martin Griffiths Photo credits: Nick Wallis, Erika Baker, Marion Holmes, the Wilson Family, the Griffiths Family, Pete Murray, Nicki Arch, Unknown.


pages: 322 words: 84,752

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Russia’s Pussy Riot does aggressive culture jamming. In Ukraine, the Femen network of young women bare their breasts in public but then talk about pension reform. The Russian art collective Voina painted a two hundred–foot penis on a Saint Petersburg drawbridge to protest heightened security. Ukrainian activists launched a Kickstarter campaign to buy themselves a “people’s drone” that would let them watch Russian troop movements in their country.14 The internet of things is putting tough regimes into digital dilemmas on a regular basis, because leaders have to choose between two equally distasteful actions. Should they keep the internet on for the sake of the economy?

And these days, when individuals feel that their government is not providing the governance goods needed in specific domains, digital media provides the workaround. Average Americans who felt that the U.S. government was not doing enough to support the Green Movement in Iran in 2009 could dedicate their own computational resources to democracy activists. Citizens unhappy with government efforts at overseas development assistance turn to Kickstarter.com to advance their own aid priorities. The next cyberwar might be started by Bulgarian hackers, the Syrian Electronic Army, or Iranian Basiji militias, but it might also be started by Westerners using basic online tools to launch their own Twitter bots.14 Even when state failure is partial, or perhaps especially when state failure is partial, people increasingly organize to provide their own governance goods through the internet.

See also internet of things; political internet internet exchange point, 2, 296 Internet Governance Forum, 33 internet interregnum, xxiv, 42, 66, 110, 220, 229 internet of things, xi, xix, 297; affecting current events, 142; bot usage easier in, 205; civic strategy for, xvii, 234–35, 243; civil society groups and, 202; collective action and, 111–12, 136–39; conflict in, dynamics of, 155; connective action and, 168–73; consequences of, 148–49, 219; control of, 224, 226–27; defined by communication between devices, xiv; design of, 228–29; diffusion of, 34–35; encoding with democratic virtues, 232–33; evolution of, 45–46, 65–66; expression and experimentation in, 243; governance and, 110, 119–23, 148, 157–61; growing the size of big data, 140; human security and, 65; ideological package of, 125–26; market for, 57; numbers of devices in, xi–xii; openness of, 111, 226–27; open sharing of data from, 244–46; opting out of, 246–48; political culture in, 230, 232, 233; political impact of, xiv, xxi, 65, 66, 68, 99, 174–75; as political tool, 224; preparing for, xxiii–xxiv; stability and, 68, 88, 112, 158, 253; structural threats to, 183; surveillance and censorship tasks, 223; taking on dirty networks, 99; tithing for the public good, 243–46; weakening radical ideology, 111, 123–24, 126, 133; weaponizing of, 110, 112–19 internet revolution, 60 Internet Society, 13 interoperable networks, 162 I Paid a Bribe project, 170–71 IRA (Northern Ireland), 83 Iran, 115; bots in, 205–7; developing network infrastructure, 183; doctoring images, 123–24; fighting piracy, 98; Green Movement in, 105, 115, 161, 221–22; hacking by, 40; nuclear program of, cyberattack on, 115–16; protests in, 136–37; social media of, 31, 43, 201, 220 Iraq War, 20 Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), 81, 82, 118, 217 Islamists, moderating positions of, 131–32 Israel: cyberwarfare by, 40, 41, 154–55; Pillar of Defense assault, 59 Israeli Defense Forces, 59 Israel Security Agency, 114 ITU. See International Telecommunications Union Japan, fighting piracy, 98 Joint Threat Intelligence Group, 31 Jordan, Arab Spring in, 156 Jubilee 2000, 49–50 Karber, Phillip, 193 Kenya: Map Kibera project in, 88–91; money transfer in, 159–60; slums in, 83 Kiberia mapping project, 120 Kickstarter.com, 86, 105, 161 Kiirti platform, 171 Kissinger, Henry, 12 Kolena Laila, 76–78, 79 Kony, Joseph, 81 Kony 2012, 81 Kosovo Liberation Army, 83 Kovačič, Primož, 88, 89–91, 100 Kraken Botner, 32 Kyrgyzstan, 20 Latin America, drug wars in, 216 Lavabit, 26 Lawful Interception Gateway device, 115 Lee Hoi-chang, 128 LG televisions, 212–13 liberation technologies, 256–57 Li Chengpeng, 192–93 life expectancy, in failing and failed states, 95 Lim, Merlyna, 121 Liu Ya-Zhou, 129 Liza Alert, 170 Logic of Collective Action (Olson), 137 Lonely Planet Guide, 75 Lord’s Resistance Army, 178 Los Zetas, 216 Louis Philippe, 108 machine learning, 141 MacKinnon, Rebecca, 234 Maduro, Nicolas, 93 mafia states, 96–97 Maher, Ahmed, 136, 139, 168, 173 Malaysia: digital dilemma in, 87; elections in, 128–29; Islamists moderating message in, 132 Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, 211–12 Maldives, revolution in, 238 Mali, rebel groups in, 80–81 Maluf, Paulo, 253 malware, 30, 113–14, 115–16 Mandela, Nelson, 52 Mandiant, 38, 39 Manning, Chelsea, xxii, 235, 238 Map Kibera, 88–91 mapping, 70–71, 88–91, 101; of dirty networks, 98; refuting government claims, 176–77; social-media, 157–58 maps: disconnection with, 67; of nations, 67; political power and, 67, 101–2, 120, 160 Marco Civil, 165 marquee slums, 89 Marx, Karl, 241 McLuhan, Marshall, 16 media monopolies, 228 media use, political change and, 167 media-watchdog organizations, 56–57 Meier, Patrick, 70, 100, 239 metadata, 24, 189, 297 Mexico: bots as political tool in, 31; drug wars in, 17–22, 94, 161 Miami Herald, 181 Microsoft, xiv, 8, 248, 249; commitment to, 63–64; partnering with Egypt, 74–75; sovereignty of, 64 military: defining periods of political history, 153; losing control over technology, 118–19; media strategies of, 117 Milošević, Slobodan, 238 Mirim College, 40 mobile money, 55, 56 mobile phones: company ownership, xxiv; production of, 58; providing new political structure, 73; surveillance of, 133 Mobilization Lab, 119 modernity, 125–26 money-transfer systems, 159 Montenegro, 97 Monterrey (MX), 161; public alert system in, 120; social media in, 17–22 MOOC (massive open online course), 252 Morocco, Arab Spring in, 156 Morozov, Evgeny, 44 M-Pesa, 102–3, 105, 159–60 MS-13, 216 Mubarak, Hosni, 45, 74, 121, 221, 252 Mugabe, Robert, 92 Muhammad, Feiz, 217 Mukuru kwa Reuben, 83 Muslim Brotherhood, 131–32 Myanmar, 45; digital dilemma in, 87; organized crime in, 97.


pages: 300 words: 79,315

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Everything should be made as simple as possible, George Santayana, index card, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex

Well, it could be with a phone call or an e-mail, but to whom? Decide. If you don’t decide now, you’ll still have to decide at some other point, and what this process is designed to do is actually get you to finish the thinking exercise about this item. If you haven’t identified the next physical action required to kick-start it, there will be a psychological gap every time you think about it even vaguely. You’ll tend to resist noticing it. Until you know what the next physical action is, there’s still more thinking required before anything can happen. When you get to a phone or to your computer, you want to have all your thinking completed so you can use the tools you have and the location you’re in to more easily get things done, having already defined what there is to do.

Empty Your Head Put in writing (in appropriate categories) any new projects, action items, waiting-fors, someday/maybes, and so forth that you haven’t yet captured. Review “Projects” (and Larger Outcome) Lists Evaluate the status of projects, goals, and outcomes one by one, ensuring that at least one current kick-start action for each is in your system. Review “Next Actions” Lists Mark off completed actions. Review for reminders of further action steps to capture. Review “Waiting For” List Record appropriate actions for any needed follow-up. Check off received items. Review Any Relevant Checklists Is there anything you haven’t done that you need to do?

Figure out what kind of life and work and life-style would best allow you to fulfill that contract. What kind of job and personal relationships would support that direction? What key things would you need to put in place and make happen right now, and what could you do physically as soon as possible, to kick-start each of those? You’re never lacking in opportunities to clarify your priorities at any level. Pay attention to which horizon is calling you. In truth, you can approach your priorities from any level, at any time. I always have something that I could do constructively to enhance my awareness and focus on each level.


pages: 296 words: 86,610

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency by Ian Demartino

3D printing, AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, buy low sell high, capital controls, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forensic accounting, global village, GnuPG, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, initial coin offering, Jacob Appelbaum, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, printed gun, QR code, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, Skype, smart contracts, Steven Levy, the medium is the message, underbanked, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

It is only when they want to move that Bitcoin out of their ChangeTip account and turn it into fiat that they have to start learning about wallets, private keys, and various other aspects of the Bitcoin ecosystem. ChangeTip isn’t the only service enabling users to contribute to their favorite content creators. Another service, ProTip, was created by Christopher Ellis and crowdfunded through Kickstarter. It intends to make accepting Bitcoin donations as simple as putting a Bitcoin address anywhere on a website. This goal is worthwhile, because one of ChangeTip’s problems is that it isn’t easy for content creators to integrate. ChangeTip is best used in environments like Reddit or Twitter where everything is set up for the user.

—Kevin Systrom, cofounder of Instagram One of the most interesting developments in Bitcoin has been start-up funding. Crowdfunding has taken the world by storm. It is full of success stories and industry-creating giants. Oculus, which was eventually purchased by Facebook for $2 billion and has singlehandedly resurrected the virtual reality industry, got its start on Kickstarter. Likewise, smartwatch company Pebble was so successful that companies ranging from LG to Samsung to Google and Apple got into the industry. There is also equity-based crowdfunding, which is like normal crowdfunding except the funders receive shares of the company rather than a product or one of the rewards typical in crowdfunding campaigns.

Although I would advise you to speak to a lawyer before making any commitments to the cryptocommunity you might not legally be able to keep, I doubt the SEC is going to be too concerned with legitimate businesses raising money in a transparent and open way, especially with so many illegitimate businesses doing the same thing. However, it is definitely illegal to sell ownership of your company in any form of share or stock. For business owners in the US, offering voting rights is a viable alternative. Another alternative is to give away rewards similar to Kickstarter. The SEC doesn’t care if you give away free pizza, or whatever product you sell, to “token” holders. One of the many names Bitcoin has been given is “programmable money” and this describes a critical feature of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. They are more often called “the currency of the Internet.”


pages: 251 words: 80,831

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

There are also a few cases where billion-dollar companies were started by more than three people: 12 percent of billion-dollar companies had four co-founders; a very small percentage had five or more. These numbers are similar to those in the random group, suggesting no specific advantage or disadvantage to any of these situations, including the solo-founder scenario. Again, it’s a nonfactor. A study done by Jason Greenberg and Ethan Mollick on projects crowdfunded on Kickstarter even showed a slight advantage for solo founders.1 Projects started by solo founders were more likely to succeed as companies and had higher preorder revenues. There are some clear advantages to starting a company solo. Co-founder conflict—whether a clash of personalities, a struggle for power, or lack of a shared vision—is one of the main reasons startups fail.

Now unemployed, he started cold-calling scientists working on the technology. One of them, Herbert Boyer, a professor at University of California, San Francisco, would end up becoming his co-founder. Boyer, a pioneer in the field of recombinant DNA, agreed to commercialize the technology. Genentech kick-started the modern biotech industry, was the first company to produce synthetic insulin for diabetic patients, and later invented many of the critical drugs patients use today.6 Genentech eventually amassed massive shareholder value and was acquired for $47 billion in 2009. Ideation is an essential part of every startup.

“It’s been hard; there are so few investors who can get their brain around how unique what we are doing is,” Foley said. “It’s been a head scratcher as to why they haven’t been rushing to put capital into the category.” They ended up raising a total of $3.5 million in a series A round from unknown angel groups, and another $300,000 in product preorders on Kickstarter. “Every round, for six rounds. Andreessen, Bessemer, Sequoia… they passed again and again.” It was only in the series E round—by which point Peloton’s customer base and revenue numbers were too good to ignore—that well-known VCs like Kleiner Perkins joined the mission and invested. Despite these prominent examples, fundraising was easier for many startups that eventually became billion-dollar companies.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

When it comes to evaluating risk, this interconnected digital crowd comprises people who are financially sophisticated and can provide the fresh and innovative insight that will clarify the questionable dealings in the financial services business. A more open and collaborative approach would restore trust in banks, kick-start venture capital, unfreeze the paralysis of lending markets, and lay a foundation for a financial service industry that continues to underpin the growth and prosperity of the world’s economies. WHERE THINGS WENT WRONG If the financial crisis taught us one thing it is that the financial service industry is absolutely at the core of our economic structures.

The community at VenCorps (made up of thousands of entrepreneurs, scholars, scientists, angel investors, service providers, and government officials) then reviews and ranks each entry using a five-criteria weighted scorecard. During a challenge the top nine start-ups (as determined by the community) go on to the next round, where they can win an investment (typically $50,000). That may not sound like a lot in typical VC terms, but it’s enough to kick-start a small enterprise, as some of VenCorps’ early successes have demonstrated. On a sunny spring day in 2009, for example, Wise and others from VenCorps were meeting with IBM to discuss how the VenCorps platform might be used to solve some really big societal problems. Only a few days later VenCorps and IBM’s Smarter Cities program launched The Congestion Challenge, whose tagline, “Help Make Traffic History,” became a rallying cry for the VenCorps community.

That’s the estimated size of the Linux economy, including Linux-related hardware, consumer electronics, and related services. That’s up by a factor of five since 2006 and it’s more than the GDP of some small countries like Costa Rica, Lebanon, and Bolivia. Finally, for good measure, consider two considerably smaller numbers: 0 and 1. Zero is the cost of using Linux and one is the number of people it took to kick-start this incredible process. On the Right Side of History Although much in the Linux community revolves around the persona and leadership of Linus Torvalds, the truth is that the Linux community is now a highly sophisticated organism. While Linux may not have stock options, corporate campuses, or free haircuts, its community includes a core of five thousand developers and a much broader ecosystem of users-contributors.


pages: 347 words: 44,532

Lonely Planet Pocket Florence (Travel Guide) by Planet, Lonely, Maxwell, Virginia, Williams, Nicola

G4S, haute couture, Kickstarter, retail therapy, urban planning

Top Sights Duomo ( Click here ) Uffizi Gallery ( Click here ) Palazzo Vecchio ( Click here ) Best of Florence Eating Osteria Il Buongustai ( Click here ) Cantinetta dei Verrazzano ( Click here ) Grom ( Click here ) ‘Ino ( Click here ) Drinking Coquinarius ( Click here ) La Terrazza ( Click here ) Gucci Museo Caffè ( Click here ) Obikà ( Click here ) Le Renaissance Café ( Click here ) Caffè Rivoire ( Click here ) Gilli ( Click here ) Getting There From Piazza della Stazione Walk southeast along Via de’ Panzani and Via de’ Cerretani and you will find yourself at the duomo. From here, Piazza della Signoria and the Uffizi Gallery are a short walk south down Via dei Calzaluoli. The Sights in a Day Kick-start the day on Piazza della Repubblica with a quick breakfast at the Liberty-style bar in Gilli ( Click here ), then walk to the Uffizi, pausing to admire the exquisite sculpted facade of Chiesa e Museo Orsanmichele ( Click here ) en route. Devote the morning to world-class art at the Uffizi Gallery ( Click here ).

Top Sights Piazza dei Miracoli ( Click here ) Best of Florence Art Museo Nazionale di San Matteo ( Click here ) Museo dell’Opera del Duomo ( Click here ) Battistero ( Click here ) Eating Osteria Bernardo ( Click here ) Il Montino ( Click here ) Il Crudo ( Click here ) Drinking Keith ( Click here ) Sottobosco ( Click here ) Salza ( Click here ) Getting There Train Regular services leave Florence (€7, 1¼ hours) for the conveniently located Pisa Centrale station. Car Take the toll-free SCG FI-PI-LI (SS67) from Florence. Street parking costs €2 per hour, but you must be careful to stay outside the city’s Limited Traffic Zone (ZTL). There’s a free car park outside the zone on Lungarno Guadalongo. The Sights in a Day Kick-start your Pisan peregrination in Borgo Stretto, the city’s medieval heart, with a coffee and sweet treat at the bar of historic Salza ( Click here ). Then wander alongside the Arno to visit the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo ( Click here ) with its rich collection of painting and sculpture from the Tuscan school.


pages: 428 words: 134,832

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

Moses-era regulations requiring new construction to include off-street parking spaces still prevail—and the more parking there is, the more people tend to drive. Over Sadik-Khan’s shoulder I could see the rusting piers of the Brooklyn waterfront and the multiple lanes of traffic on the Bronx-Queens Expressway, a Moses project that kick-started the decline of the Red Hook neighborhood. “We’ve stopped looking at the streets as these utilitarian, 1950s-style corridors for moving cars as fast as possible. We really look at them as valuable public spaces. In many ways, the Department of Transportation is the largest real estate developer in New York City.”

It all started with a pair of visionary mayors, the likes of which no North American city has ever seen. But it never would have happened if it weren’t for that most maligned of vehicles, the humble city bus. The Subway on the Street I had a confession to make to Carlos Pardo, who had volunteered to introduce me to the system that kick-started the transformation of Bogotá. “I don’t like buses,” I told him. “Actually, I hate them.” I laid out my objections. While there is something aristocratic about riding the rails, in most of North America a ride on a standard-issue city bus is a second-class experience. After being forced to wait outside, in all kinds of weather—or, at best, in some malodorous Plexiglas shelter—you pay for the privilege of boarding the slowest, bulkiest vehicle on the road, one whose progress is impeded by every double-parked car and FedEx truck with its flashers on.

To really bloom, all that the City of Roses needs is a little more tolerance for density in its core, policies—like higher parking rates—that discourage drivers from bringing cars downtown, and for TriMet to pay a little more attention to the way it irrigates intact traditional neighborhoods with buses, streetcars, and light rail. But if Portlanders really want to kick-start the process, they need only look 300 miles to the north, to a Canadian city that has lately become a transit metropolis on overdrive. “Vancouverism,” for Better and Worse It’s hard not to see Vancouver, British Columbia, and Portland, Oregon, as the long-lost twins of Cascadia, separated when they were still young.


pages: 872 words: 259,208

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

air freight, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brixton riot, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, congestion charging, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentleman farmer, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, loadsamoney, market design, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open borders, out of africa, Parkinson's law, Piper Alpha, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside, reserve currency, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War

Millington, standing for Common Wealth and supported by local vicars, had fought a remarkably aggressive campaign whose tone can be summarized by a banner he put up in the middle of the market town which read, ‘This is a Fight between Christ and Churchill.’ By 1945, there was a whiff of Oliver Cromwell in the air. The Labour conference which kick-started the election campaign one hot afternoon in Blackpool is still remembered for the youth of the delegates. Denis Healey was there, in battledress and beret, fresh from the battlefront in Italy, preaching red-hot socialist revolution. Across Europe the upper classes were ‘selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent’ he told the cheering hall.

In effect, the weaker British economy was subsidizing the fast-growing West German one because of the huge expenditure on the British Army of the Rhine. The entirely predictable result of the balance of payments gap was that the pound was under constant pressure. There were periodic devaluations which damaged the reputation of the politicians in charge at the time – though the 1949 Labour devaluation is widely credited with kick-starting the Tory good times which followed. Trying to maintain British power through the sterling area (not just most of the Old Commonwealth, except Canada, but other countries including most of Scandinavia and traditional trading partners such as Portugal) meant that defending the value of the pound was an issue inflamed by pride and political sensitivity.

The harnessing of youth spirit for maximum commercial return proved as tricky and unstable as the early days of harnessing nuclear fission – though it was finally achieved by the eighties, when the death of punk allowed entirely commercial and packaged pop unquestioned dominance. In the early days it was not always quite as obvious that money would always trump vitality. There were still battles to be had. The Who was a west London band which had, like so many others, emerged from skiffle and been kick-started by the success of the Beatles. They were encouraged by their manager, Peter Meadon, to dress stylishly and address themselves to the new audience of Mods. But their violence and guitar-smashing, while delighting their live audience, kept them away from mainstream venues for ages. Throughout a stellar career during which they gave the Beatles a run for their money in the concept-album stakes, the Who were never properly tamed.


pages: 297 words: 95,518

Ten Technologies to Save the Planet: Energy Options for a Low-Carbon Future by Chris Goodall

barriers to entry, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion charging, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, land tenure, load shedding, New Urbanism, oil shock, profit maximization, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, statistical model, undersea cable

One of wind’s primary but often underestimated virtues is that it delivers electricity without such financial volatility. The output of a wind farm may be uncertain, but the cost is not. And, of course, wind power is independent of political intervention—countries that invest in wind are less reliant on the two or three countries that provide much of the world’s natural gas. KICK-STARTING AN INDUSTRY Denmark began to build substantial numbers of wind turbines in the 1990s and became the first nation to generate a significant fraction of its electricity from this source. The early years were characterized by the installation of hundreds of what are now considered very small turbines.

If we can completely charge a car battery in five minutes, we will simply get used to driving into a “filling” station, plugging the car in, and having a coffee. And if electric cars remain too expensive because of the up-front cost of the battery, then car-leasing companies will come forward to offer better financing terms. The world may not need Shai Agassi’s scheme for kick-starting the electric revolution after all. CARS AND THE GRID The way to battery-based driving will encounter substantial obstacles, but the economic and environmental arguments are too compelling for the electric car not to eventually win the day. Electric cars will save drivers money and, with private cars and light commercial vehicles responsible for 20 percent of European carbon dioxide emissions and more in the U.S., they represent a big step forward on the road to a low-carbon future.

He says that by the end of this century, we could capture 9.5 billion tons of carbon each year simply by adopting biochar manufacture on a large scale in tropical agricultural systems. This figure is striking; if we achieved this level of carbon capture today, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide would be falling. KICK-STARTING THE BIOCHAR REVOLUTION What do we need to do to get meaningful amounts of biochar into the world’s soils? In countries where we can install substantial numbers of large-scale plants, such as those that BEST Energies or EPRIDA will produce, all we probably need is for governments to acknowledge that biochar should be included in carbon trading schemes.


pages: 309 words: 96,434

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, call centre, crack epidemic, credit crunch, deindustrialization, East Village, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, race to the bottom, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, white picket fence, World Values Survey, young professional

Because much of the area remained among the poorest and most deprived in Britain, the gates and high security were marketed to offer reassurance to the finance professionals who were the pioneers of the new economy, living on the frontline. For Mrs Thatcher and Michael Heseltine, who was instrumental in kick-starting Docklands as secretary of state for environment, the deprivation of the area was a central justification for what was being created. The development slotted in perfectly with one of the defining concepts of Thatcherite economics: ‘trickle-down’. This is the idea that the creation of wealth in an area will ‘trickle down’ to the poorer parts which need it the most.

He replied that they should be put in a concrete bunker underneath the West-way, the flyover through London, and left there. Most people in the audience thought his comment was a joke and didn’t take it seriously. Joking apart, Frank Field has always been something of a soothsayer for New Labour; his thinking in the mid 1990s was instrumental in kick-starting the whole approach towards antisocial behaviour. Field’s comments about concrete bunkers and his suggestions for the police to act as ‘surrogate parents’ reveal the extent to which these policies are underpinned by a philosophy of control and exclusion. The consequence of excluding problem families from social housing is the creation of ghettoes of terrible conditions described in the last chapter.

There is one man who is able to generate real excitement in places. Eric Reynolds is a property developer with a difference. With his shock of blond hair and well-cut suits, he is known to be a shrewd businessman who is not shy of making money. He also knows a thing or two about creating cutting-edge places and was responsible for kick-starting the transformation of Camden Town in the 1970s by setting up the market at Camden Lock and the rock venue Dingwalls. Later he painted the shopping centre at the Elephant and Castle pink and was at the heart of the campaign to save Spitalfields, the east London market on the border with the City.


pages: 312 words: 92,131

Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning by Tom Vanderbilt

AlphaGo, crowdsourcing, DeepMind, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunning–Kruger effect, fake it until you make it, functional fixedness, future of work, G4S, global supply chain, IKEA effect, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, performance metric, personalized medicine, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, Steve Jobs, zero-sum game

Sites like CourseHorse and ClassPass provide a marketplace for lessons (an online version of the posters for guitar and Spanish lessons that have long adorned coffee-shop bulletin boards). Maker spaces like Portland’s ADX and Chicago’s Lost Arts give people the space and tools to let them play around with serious machines and ask their neighbors for advice. Charles Adler, who co-founded Kickstarter before opening Lost Arts, told me the name comes not from looking back to the past but from the chance to “lose yourself in self-discovery.” He’d been motivated by the experience of trying to build furniture to house his DJ equipment. He had an idea but like many novices struggled to get to the next step.

He had to navigate slowly, deliberately, sometimes to the impatience of passersby who saw no visible reason why this fit young man shouldn’t be moving faster. He found himself in support groups mostly populated by stroke victims, where he was the youngest member by decades. A few weeks in, his speech therapist suggested singing might help. Among other things, the rhythm and slower articulation of singing seem to help kick-start the flow of speech. And so, much as I had done, he went to the internet and found Britpop. He and his future wife, a shoe designer named Roz, joined up (Roz, who came to support Adrian, has since become a dedicated member, even if, as she jokingly insists, she cannot sing). Amid a heavy schedule of chemotherapy, among all his other therapies, he was now singing Oasis, with people.

it’s often “preserved” in the face: One study, for example, found that in twenty-four patients with Broca’s aphasia twenty-one had the “capacity to sing in some degree.” See A. Yamadori et al., “Preservation of Singing in Broca’s Aphasia,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 40, no. 3 (1977): 221–24. As Oliver Sacks suggests: Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 240. kick-start the flow of speech: See Benjamin Stahl, “Facing the Music: Three Issues in Current Research on Singing and Aphasia,” Frontiers in Psychology, Sept. 23, 2014. “Lombard effect”: See Steven Tonkinson, “The Lombard Effect in Choral Singing,” Journal of Voice 8, no. 1 (1994): 24–29. “Choral directors are from Mars”: See Sharon Hansen et al., “On the Voice: Choral Directors Are from Mars and Voice Teachers Are from Venus,” Choral Journal 52, no. 9 (2012): 51–58.


pages: 166 words: 49,639

Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think by Luke Johnson

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, false flag, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Grace Hopper, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, James Dyson, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Kickstarter, mass immigration, mittelstand, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, patent troll, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traveling salesman, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators

And there is equity backing out there: if professional investors won’t give it to you, there are all sorts of pockets of institutional and private cash for a sound project, from government agencies to angel investors. It has never been easy to tap these sources of finance, so you need to be good – and persistent. Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks, did more than 240 presentations to raise the early-stage funding to really kick-start his coffee-bar chain. A second imagined obstacle is income: people get addicted to a nice safe salary as an employee, and are unwilling to give it up for the uncertainties of the entrepreneurial life. It is true that plenty of the self-employed earn less than they would working for others – and may put in longer hours.

In 1902, Dr Willis Carrier, an engineer recently out of Cornell University earning just $10 a week, invented a mechanism he called process cooling, for use in a printing plant in Brooklyn. Reputedly he had his brainwave while waiting for his train on a cold, foggy night. He patented his ‘Apparatus for Testing Air’ four years later – and kick-started an entire industry. Carrier employed a centrifugal system that used the evaporation of a refrigerant liquid to cool and dehumidify the environment. Carrier was a classic American man of action. He said: ‘I fish only for edible fish, and hunt only for edible game, even in the laboratory.’ Remarkably, the business he founded remains the world leader today, a division of United Technologies Corporation with annual sales of $11 billion.


pages: 193 words: 47,808

The Flat White Economy by Douglas McWilliams

access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer age, correlation coefficient, Crossrail, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, George Gilder, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, vertical integration, working-age population, zero-sum game

Manchester Science Parks (MSP) boast of five locations and 150 science and tech companies across the Greater Manchester region including the ‘Corridor’ centred around Oxford Road, traditionally the university sector in the city. In addition the £950 million MediaCityUK development in Salford was kick-started by the move of some BBC personnel and functions to Salford. Cebr’s report for the Glasgow Chambers of Commerce on the Glasgow media cluster36 showed that a third of all the Scottish jobs in media were based in Glasgow with over 100 production companies and 300 facilities operators, whose combined turnover is about £1.2 billion annually.

We have seen from the analysis in Chapter 6 that if London does badly, it is not necessarily to the advantage of other parts of the UK because slower growth in London would be likely also to lead to slower growth of complementary activity in other parts of the UK. But more importantly, slower growth in London would reduce the ability to use the model of recycling the £39 billion surplus of tax over expenditure in London (nearer £50 billion if commuters are taken into account) to kick-start the economies of other regions. The public finances model that developed particularly under Gordon Brown (both as Chancellor and Prime Minister) was to use the surplus taxation raised in London to finance public spending in other regions. This could to some extent alleviate some of the deprivation that existed outside London.


pages: 168 words: 50,647

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

I had grown the eCommerce business, which sold fold up, portable bars to caterers and hotels, by 527% over the same two-year period that wages for jobs in the U.S. were growing 0.5% per year. Jimmy was back, and Doug had quit his job in New Zealand. The travel shirt idea had been put on hold—getting shirts custom tailored in the Philippines is easier said than done. Instead, they had raised $341,393 through a Kickstarter campaign for their Minaal travel backpack at the end of 2013 in just thirty days, so they’d shifted focus to the faster growing product line. Jesse Lawler was back. His freelance software development had grown from a one-man show into a software development agency for iPhone Apps, run from his house in Vietnam.

Jimmy and Doug from Minaal wanted to make a stylish travel bag specifically for entrepreneurs, something that was both practical and would look good in a board room. They were able to find one of the best bag factories in the world, have their prototypes made for free, and then pre-sell the product using Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform. Ten years ago, companies that sold products in the U.S. would never announce who their suppliers were overseas for fear that competitors would use them. That’s starting to break down. Most suppliers are listed on the internet on sites like Alibaba.com and easy to find.


pages: 22 words: 5,377

New Year, Same Trash: Resolutions I Absolutely Did Not Keep by Samantha Irby

Kickstarter, Mason jar

I would always feel kind of guilty about it, but none of those assholes ever wanted to see me in the flesh anyway, and now that I’ve moved to Michigan we all can breathe a little easier and stop feeling bad for making plans we never intended to keep. I love them and everything, but can’t you just post a picture of what you’d wear if we actually did meet up to chill, so I can keep these pajamas on and continue mainlining these old episodes of 30 Rock?! 14. Support the art of people I love. Thankfully a lot of my artist friends made Kickstarters and sold things I could buy over the internet without ever having to interact with another human being, so this was easy for me. 15. Make good on all those tentative brunch plans. But I don’t like getting out of bed. Or going anywhere. Or watching people I would rather occasionally interact with on Twitter eat soft eggs.


pages: 25 words: 5,789

Data for the Public Good by Alex Howard

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Atul Gawande, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, Kickstarter, lifelogging, machine readable, Network effects, openstreetmap, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, social software, social web, web application

That has already happened with weather data and with America’s GPS satellite-navigation system that was opened for full commercial use a decade ago. And many firms make a good living out of searching for or repackaging patent filings.” As Clive Thompson reported at Wired last year, public sector data can help fuel jobs, and “shoving more public data into the commons could kick-start billions in economic activity.” In the transportation sector, for instance, transit data is open government fuel for economic growth. There is a tremendous amount of work ahead in building upon the foundations that civil society has constructed over decades. If you want a deep look at what the work of digitizing data really looks like, read Carl Malamud’s interview with Slashdot on opening government data.


pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Fail again. Fail better” as a lighthearted motto. I’ve always liked the attitude; we can’t be perfect, we won’t always win, but we should strive to improve. The trouble is, Beckett’s dictum doesn’t work for climate—not at this stage in the game. If we keep failing to lower emissions, if we keep failing to kick-start the transition in earnest away from fossil fuels and to an economy based on renewables, if we keep dodging the question of wasteful consumption and the quest for more and more and bigger and bigger, there won’t be more opportunities to fail better. Nearly everything is moving faster than the climate change modeling projected, including Arctic sea-ice loss, ice-sheet collapse, ocean warming, sea-level rise, and coral bleaching.

It was these same systems of human ranking that were deployed to justify the mass kidnapping, shackling, and torturing of other humans in order to force them to work that stolen land—which led the late political theorist Cedric Robinson to describe the market economy that gave birth to the United States not simply as capitalism but as “racial capitalism.” The cotton and sugar picked by enslaved Africans was the fuel that kick-started the Industrial Revolution. The ability to discount darker people and darker nations in order to justify stealing their land and labor was foundational, and none of it would have been possible without those theories of racial supremacy that gave the whole morally bankrupt system a patina of legal respectability.

— I will never forget the experience of being at the main camp when the news arrived, after the months of resistance, that the Obama administration had finally denied the pipeline permit. I happened to be standing with Tokata Iron Eyes, a fiercely grounded yet playful thirteen-year-old from Standing Rock who had helped kick-start the movement against the pipeline. I turned on my phone video and asked her how she felt about the breaking news. “Like I have my future back,” she replied, and then she burst into tears. I did too. Thanks to Trump, Tokata has again lost that sense of safety. And yet his action cannot and does not erase the profound learning that took place during all those months on the land.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

Benefit corporations must also produce an auditable report every year detailing their progress toward generating the public benefit they have promised to create. You can incorporate as a benefit corporation in thirty-six US states81—including Delaware, and there are at least 3,500 benefit corporations in operation, including Kickstarter, Patagonia, Danone, Eileen Fisher, and Seventh Generation.82 Choosing to incorporate as a benefit corporation offers a number of tangible advantages to firms hoping to make the world a better place. It makes clear that neither the directors nor the managers have a legal responsibility to maximize shareholder value.

Since 2010 Tesla’s efforts have helped to drop the price of battery storage by at least 73 percent.96 New farming technologies introduced by firms like Jain Irrigation and John Deere are rapidly becoming industry standard, making it cost effective for many farmers to use water and fertilizer much more efficiently.97 Sometimes the innovation is not technological, per se. Solar City, for example, pioneered a new model of financing solar panels that greatly expanded demand and saw the idea spread across the industry.98 Firms can thus help to kick-start a number of reinforcing processes that have the potential to drive change at scale. By demonstrating a new business model—and in the process potentially driving down costs and persuading consumers to demand it—they can push competitors to adopt the same practice, diffusing it widely across the industry.

—Hiro Mizuno, executive managing director and chief investment officer, GPIF “Capitalism as we know it has gotten us this far, but to take the next steps forward as a society and species we need new ways of seeing and acting on our world. That’s exactly what Rebecca Henderson’s book helps us do. This is a smart, timely, and much-needed reimagining of what capitalism can be.” —Yancey Strickler, cofounder and former CEO, Kickstarter, and author of This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World “A breakthrough book, beautifully written, combining deep humanity, sharp intellect, and a thorough knowledge of business. It rigorously dismantles old arguments about why capitalism can’t be transformed and will reach people who haven’t yet connected with the need for deep change.”


pages: 198 words: 53,264

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments by Michael Batnick

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, hindsight bias, index fund, initial coin offering, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, multilevel marketing, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Pershing Square Capital Management, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, short squeeze, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Y Combinator

Sacca became a billionaire in under 10 years and before the age of 40 because he is an expert at spotting unicorns, private companies that have reached the $1 billion valuation mark. Lowercase Capital was one of the first investors in Uber, putting $300,000 into the concept. Recently, it owned as much as 4% of the company, giving the fund a 5,000 bagger.7 Some of Sacca's other home runs include Instagram, Uber, Kickstarter, Slack, Automattic (WordPress parent company), Twilio, and most notably, Twitter. By the time of the initial public offering, he and Sacca's funds had accumulated 18% of the company. He originally invested in Twitter at a $5 million valuation,8 and it's currently valued at $15 billion, giving Sacca a 3,000 bagger.

Penney, Ackman targeting, 90 Jobs, Steve, 148 Johnson, Edward, 68, 69 Johnson, Ned, 69 Jonas, Stan, 39 Jones, Paul Tudor, 15, 52, 103, 119, 159 Jordan, Michael, 105 JP Morgan, liquidity, 19 Kahneman, Daniel, 5, 15, 75, 87 Kahn, Irving, 4 Keller, Helen, 31 Kennedy Slide, The, 70 Keynes, John Maynard, 117, 121, 157 education, 122 endowment fund control, 123 First Bursar, 123 Kickstarter, Sacca investment, 149 King's College assets, decline, 126 endowment, 123–124 Estates Committee memo, 125 Klarman, Seth, 57 Knetsch, Jack Louis, 75 Kovner, Bruce, 103 Krass, Peter, 27 Kuwait, pension fund, 40 Leverage, impact, 41 Lewis, Michael, 39 Listerine, comparison, 91 Little Book of Common Sense Investing, The, (Bogle), 159 Livermore, Jesse (JL), 13, 15–16 bankruptcy, 21 Boy Plunger, 18, 20 lesson, 22 rebound, 19 windfall, evaporation, 18 Loeb, Dan, 92 Long‐Term Capital Management (LTCM), 104 arbitrage strategies, 41 fall, 42 Federal Reserve Bank of New York takeover, 42 founding, 38–39 problems, Russia (impact), 41 success, 40–41 Long‐term investment program, building, 62 Loomis, Carol, 40, 41 “Loser's Game, The” (Ellis), 38 Lowell Shoe, 80 Lowenstein, Roger, 4, 7, 68 Lowercase Capital, 149 Macro traders, problems, 103 Manhattan Fund (Tsai), 69, 71 Margin of safety, 5, 8 Market capitalization, 7 growth, 120 psychological forces, impact, 124 Market participants, stock motivation, 109 Market Wizards (Schwager), 159 Markowitz, Harry, 147, 152 Marron, Donald, 40 Marx, Karl, 4 Mauboussin, Michael, 38, 100, 131 MBIA, Inc.


pages: 220

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business by Mikkel Svane, Carlye Adler

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, credit crunch, David Heinemeier Hansson, Elon Musk, fail fast, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, remote working, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Tesla Model S, web application

GigaOM got back to us pretty quickly and asked for an exclusive. We were thrilled. Om Malik did the interview himself. Then, right before it ran, TechCrunch reached out. “We want to run this story. Give us the details.” Christoph wrote back, “You didn’t respond, so we gave the story to Om Malik.” That kick-started an exchange with Michael Arrington that had me shaking in my sneakers. “Don’t ever email me again,” Arrington wrote. I tried to step in and smooth things over between Christoph and Arrington, emailing some funny remarks. They were no better received. “Take me off your email list,” Arrington responded.

It was a very creative phase: No investors, no upset customers, no VC pressure.” Michael Hansen is still one of my best friends. He very much personifies the original soul of Zendesk and is still with us, now based in Australia, or is it Hong Kong? Michael is still a gypsy. Over three years he traveled the APAC region and kick-started our operations from Melbourne to Manila to Tokyo. He’s not the biggest fan of bureaucracy, processes, and all the other big company stuff, and he struggles with some of the elements of growth. But things change all the time in a 180 Page 180 Svane bother03.tex V3 - 10/24/2014 10:53 P.M. Epilogue company that is growing quickly, and that is not always easy.


pages: 222 words: 54,506

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com by Richard L. Brandt

Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, deal flow, drop ship, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Free Software Foundation, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, new economy, Pershing Square Capital Management, science of happiness, search inside the book, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, software patent, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

It’s not exactly something to help sell books, at least not in the short run. But because bad reviews were allowed as well as good, customers learned they could rely on Amazon.com to point them to books that wouldn’t disappoint them—at least to a certain extent. Friends and family of authors often help out with reviews on Amazon to help kick-start sales. Negative reviews are usually genuine, unless posted by an author with a competing title. Very early on, Bezos started adding best-seller lists on Amazon. By 1998, Amazon customers could see where books ranked on any of two thousand different lists. One of Bezos’s favorite stories is that of a book called Endurance, by Alfred Lansing.

While Apple and Google waited for the record labels to decide if they would license music for streaming, Bezos decided to take a chance, launch the service first, and ask for permission later. By storing the music online, people can access it from any device. Amazon will charge $20 per year for twenty gigabytes of storage space. (Google charges $5 for the same amount of storage, but not for music files.) Amazon is kick-starting the service by offering up to five gigabytes for free, or twenty gigabytes for free for one year for anyone who buys an album from its MP3 3 store. As of early 2011, Bezos would only say that there are “hundreds of thousands” of customers using Amazon Web Services. Wall Street analysts estimate it will be a $750 million business for Amazon in 2011, and $2.5 billion in 2014.


pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

Memes, then, are what happens when one greedy industry meets another.” In other words, social networks play favorites, while PR companies, producers, journalists, and others have the power to influence what rises to the top. A video featured on YouTube’s home page will accrue tens or hundreds of thousands of views simply by virtue of being placed there. Kickstarter, an ostensibly meritocratic crowdfunding platform, regularly features selected projects in its newsletter and on its home page. Such a distinction can bring thousands of dollars into a project’s coffers, which is often the difference between achieving a fund-raising goal—and being seen as a success—and walking away with nothing.

It was then that Ruckus—who, in his initial post, said that a threesome was “perhaps one of the greatest things imaginable (right behind midget tossing)”—said that he would institute a mechanism to allow the group members to vote on who would complete the threesome. Ruckus threw in some sweeteners (today, on Kickstarter, this would be known as adding a “stretch goal”). If the group reached 300,000 members, his girlfriend would let him take and share pictures of the event. And if the group became the largest on Facebook—surpassing the 850,000-member group that at the time was the site’s largest—then, there’d be a video in it for all of Ruckus’s new fans.

Then we sit in judgment, parsing their tweets or postings, moving them up or down in a mental hierarchy, deciding if they’re still worthy of following. We decide whether to heart Tumblr posts or repin their image, with each decision point serving as a critical judgment, a de facto review, one that might improve their ranking on Klout or Favstar. We rate their ideas on Kickstarter, and if we deem them worthy, we donate and share the listing. We endorse colleagues on LinkedIn and request endorsements from others. On dating apps such as Tinder, we rate on a simple binary, swiping away those we don’t want to meet and hearting those we do. On many commenting platforms, we rate other comments and give stars or other plaudits to individual commenters.


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Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

At one point, Luckey said he was thinking of just doing his headset with some friends as a Kickstarter project. (Kickstarter was a site where people could conditionally pay for new products that would only exist if funding goals were met.) But he didn’t even have any working prototypes of his own technology anymore. Iribe wrote him a check for $3,700 for the parts. That impressed Luckey, who shook hands. They were in business, along with Iribe’s friends. By July 4, Luckey had built the headsets to give Iribe his first demo. The demo made Iribe nauseated, but he was famously prone to motion sickness. The Kickstarter run would be more professional, manufactured in bulk in China.

The Kickstarter went live on August 1, 2012. If the sum from prospective buyers reached $250,000, the project would proceed. Oculus made its goal in two hours. A few days later, when the amount hit $2,427,429, they finally stopped taking money. By then professional investors were making bids. Oculus wound up raising $16 million in its “A” round. By late 2013, Oculus was coping with classic start-up problems of developing a product while trying to manage a ballooning workforce. It had only thirty employees but was planning to triple its size in order to fulfill the now-delayed Kickstarter orders.


pages: 285 words: 58,517

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

When it comes to savings accounts, millennials are turning to digital-only banks such as Fidor, companies that go as far as to provide outside developers with APIs (application programming interfaces), which give developers tools to interface with the banks’ software source code to let them innovate the banks’ platforms. Those in need of loans can crowd-source via Kickstarter or Lending Club. This trend is even moving beyond the individual. Many small businesses have turned to Square or ApplePay to take credit and debit card payments. The rise of network orchestration as a business model for financial services has led to great opportunities for customer self-service, peer-to-peer interaction, and collective collaboration.

See also big data; data collection; intellectual capital subscription model using, 80 Innocentive, 15, 73 innovation Google and, 167–168, 183, 190 new core beliefs needed for, 196–197 in open organizations, 116, 118 Instagram, 21, 42, 60, 78, 79, 143 intangible assets big data collection from, 100 categories of, 41–42 digital technology for producing, 42, 45 importance of shifting to, 46 inventory of, 144–145 management practices for, 42–44 market valuation of tangible versus, 40, 46 move from tangible assets to, 44–45 questions to ask about, 44–45 integration, 31, 98–99, 100 intellectual capital business model based on, 15, 132 digital networks and, 12 as intangible asset, 41–42 inventory of, 126, 144, 145, 146, 148–149, 163 market valuation related to, 40 mental model values on, 138 network orchestrators’ use of, 15 network platforms and, 159 internet of things, 30, 32, 101, 148, 162 Inventory step in PIVOT, 126, 144–153 asset types included in, 145, 146 Enterprise Community Partners example for, 152–153 goal of, 144–145 of human capital assets, 147–148 of intellectual capital assets, 148–149 of network capital assets, 149–151 of physical capital assets, 147 possible gaps during process of, 151 task force team needed for, 145–147 iPads, 30 iSentium, 98 JPMorgan Chase, 133 Jobs, Steve, 62 John Deere & Company, 101 Joint Special Operations Task Force, 55–56 Kalanick, Travis, 85, 197 Kashi, 103–104, 105 Kellogg Company, 103–104, 105 key performance indicators (KPIs), 20, 96, 135 Kickstarter, 130 King, Mark, 73 Knudstorp, Jørgen Vig, 67, 68 Kodak, 46, 49–50, 54 law of increasing returns, 12 leaders and leadership, 27, 55–63 accessibility of, 60 assessing business model with, 131 big data use and, 100 capital allocation strategy and, 49, 50, 51, 53 change leader in PIVOT process and, 132 decision making and, 61 employee loyalty and, 57 individual personality characteristics and, 61–62 Joint Special Operations Task Force example of, 55–56 Kellogg’s purchase of Kashi and, 103–104 mismatch between employees, customers, and networks and, 104–105 move from commander to co-creator in, 56, 59–61, 71 network orchestrator business model and, 23–24 new environment requiring changes in, 58–59 open organizations and, 114, 115, 116 Pinpointing mental models of, in PIVOT process, 137–139 relationship changes affecting, 56–58 scoring your company on, 121–122 shared vision and, 61 skills evaluation of, 138 value creation and, 62–63 values evaluation of, 138 legacy firms best practices of, compared with network companies, 20 business model adoption by, 23 importance of moving to digital technology by, 34–35 Lego Group, 67–68, 70, 72, 73 Lending Club, 130 Lenovo, 48, 50 Levinson, Sara, 109 Li & Fung, 110 LinkedIn, 8, 10, 15, 21, 44, 79, 80, 87, 91, 97, 107, 160, 171, 174, 199 loyalty to brands, 57, 58 of customers, 41, 65–66, 71, 76, 97–98, 194 of employees, 57, 97 of networks, 10, 158, 174, 180 loyalty programs, 80, 81, 96, 97–98, 100, 110, 174 L2 Digital IQ Index, 110 Ludwig, Terri, 128, 140, 141, 163, 164, 183, 184 Lundgren, Terry, 110 Lyft, 44, 113–114, 155, 197 Macy’s, 109–110, 144 management practices big data analysis and use and, 100–101 for intangible assets, 42–44 management team business model assessment and, 131 See also leaders and leadership Mankiw, Gregory, 49 market valuation business model comparison for, 18–19 capital allocation strategy and, 53–54 of tangible versus intangible assets, 40, 46 mass career customization, 91 Match.com, 15, 21, 41 McChrystal, Stanley, 55–56, 58 McKinsey & Company, 50, 51, 52, 106, 199 McRaney, David, 191–192 measurement, 28, 95–102 Dickey’s Barbecue Pit example of use of, 95–96 external data in, 97–98 goals of, 99–100 move from accounting to big data in, 99–101 new kinds of assets requiring new approaches to, 96–97 scoring your company on, 121–122 timeliness of data in, 98–99 Mellendick, Craig, 140, 152 mental models.


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Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, connected car, CRISPR, data science, disinformation, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, hydraulic fracturing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, market design, megaproject, megastructure, microbiome, moral hazard, multiplanetary species, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, personalized medicine, placebo effect, printed gun, Project Plowshare, QR code, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Skype, space junk, stem cell, synthetic biology, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic

Brockman. New York: Harper Perennial, 2014a. Vrije Universiteit Science. “Robot Baby Project by Prof.dr. A.E. Eiben on evolving robots / The Evolution of Things.” May 26, 2016. youtube.com/watch?v=BfcVSb-Q8ns. Wang, Brian. “$250,000 Slingatron Kickstarter.” NextBigFuture. July 29, 2013. nextbigfuture.com/2013/07/250000-slingatron-kickstarter.html. Wei, F., Wang, G.-D., Kerchner, G. A., Kim, S. J., Xu, H.-M., Chen, Z.-F., and Zhuo, M. “Genetic Enhancement of Inflammatory Pain by Forebrain NR2B Overexpression.” Natural Neuroscience 4, no 2 (2001):164–69. Werfel, Justin. “Building Structures with Robot Swarms.”

Another type of RNA (transfer RNA) brings amino acids over to the ribosome, attaching them to the appropriate sticky spots. Each amino acid is then chemical bonded to the amino acid next to it, forming a long chain. When you assemble these amino acids in a certain order, they fold up into the complex shapes that allow proteins to move around, kick-start chemical reactions, and do all sorts of other tricks needed so that you can continue to do things like eat chips or yell at the news. Okay, so that’s a little complicated. Let’s use an analogy. Think of your DNA as the library of information for how to make machines. In this analogy, if you opened the book of DNA at a random place it might say something like “TNOIJ, EVLAV, POTS, SNEL, EBUT, SNEL, EBUT, TRATS, EVLAV, GNIR, SNEL . . .” and so on for many thousands of pages.


pages: 359 words: 110,488

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bioinformatics, corporate governance, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Google Chrome, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, obamacare, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Wayback Machine

A talented engineer who loved to build stuff, he was also dabbling with a side project in his spare time: bicycle lights that lit up both wheels and the road, providing improved visibility and safety for the rider at night. He’d pitched the concept on Kickstarter and, much to his surprise, was able to raise $215,000 in forty-five days. It was the seventh-largest sum raised on the crowdfunding platform that year. What had been a hobby suddenly looked like it could become a viable business. Kent told Elizabeth about his successful Kickstarter campaign, thinking she wouldn’t mind. But he badly miscalculated: she and Sunny were furious. They viewed it as a major conflict of interest and asked him to transfer his bike-lights patent to Theranos.

During his visit to Palo Alto, she had shown him the miniLab and the six-blade side by side and he had volunteered for a demonstration, receiving what appeared to be accurate lab results in his email in-box before he even left the building. What he didn’t know was that Elizabeth was planning to use the Walgreens launch and his accompanying article containing her misleading claims as the public validation she needed to kick-start a new fund-raising campaign, one that would propel Theranos to the forefront of the Silicon Valley stage. * * * — MIKE BARSANTI WAS vacationing in Lake Tahoe when he received a call on his cell phone from Donald A. Lucas, the son of legendary venture capitalist Donald L. Lucas.


pages: 480 words: 112,463

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gravity well, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, out of africa, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spinning jenny, synthetic biology, TED Talk, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic, Works Progress Administration

Sue, ‘Captive Breeding and Husbandry of the Golden Orb Weaver Nephila Inaurata Madagascariensis at Woodland Park Zoo’, Terrestrial Invertebrate Taxon Advisory Group, 2014 <http://www.titag.org/2014/2014papers/GOLDENORBSUEANDERSEN.pdf> [accessed 3 January 2017] An Individual’s Guide to Climatic Injury (Ministry of Defence, 2016) ‘A Norse-Viking Ship’, the Newcastle Weekly Courant (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 5 December 1891), section News ‘Apollo 11 – Mission Transcript’, Spacelog <https://ia800607.us.archive.org/28/items/NasaAudioHighlightReels/AS11_TEC.pdf> [accessed 7 December 2017] Appleton Standen, Edith, ‘The Grandeur of Lace’, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 16 (1958), 156–62 <https://doi.org/10.2307/3257694> Arbiter, Petronius, The Satyricon, ed. by David Widger (Project Gutenberg, 2006) <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5225/5225-h/5225-h.htm> [accessed 14 August 2017] Arena, Jenny, ‘Reboot the Suit: Neil Armstrong’s Spacesuit and Kickstarter’, National Air and Space Museum, 2015 <https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/armstrong-spacesuit-and-kickstarter> [accessed 7 December 2017] Arnold, Janet (ed.), Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d: The Inventories of the Wardrobe of Robes Prepared in July 1600, Edited from Stowe MS 557 in the British Library, MS LR 2/121 in the Public Record Office, London, and MS v.6.72 in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC (London: W.

Most sources from the era say twenty-one, so this is the figure I have stuck to here. Amanda Young, however, who wrote a book on the topic for the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, says the Omega contained twenty-six layers. 28Today, the suits are beginning to degrade and decay, as the chemicals within the layers react with one another. A campaign on Kickstarter has even been launched to revamp the very suit Armstrong wore on mankind’s first voyage to the moon. Arena. 29DeGroot, p. 149. 30‘What Is a Spacesuit’; Allan Needell, in Amanda Young, p. 9. 31Case and Shepherd, p. 33. 32Collins, pp. 127, 100, 192. 33Ibid., pp. 115–16; Case and Shepherd, p. 16. 34DeGroot, p. 209; Amanda Young, p. 75. 35Aldrin and McConnell, pp. 122–3; Heppenheimer, p. 218; Monchaux, p. 111. 36Walta Schirra, in Glenn et al., pp. 47–8. 37Heppenheimer, p. 222; Kluger; Monchaux, p. 104. 38A.R.


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The Future of Fusion Energy by Jason Parisi, Justin Ball

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, heat death of the universe, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, performance metric, profit motive, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stuxnet, the scientific method, time dilation, uranium enrichment

5.Fusion Technology 5.1Magnets 5.2Plasma Heating and Current Drive 5.2.1Inductive 5.2.2Neutral beam 5.2.3Electromagnetic wave 5.3First Wall 5.4Divertors 5.5Tritium Breeding Blanket 5.6Vacuum Vessel 5.7Diagnostics 5.8Radioactive Waste and Remote Maintenance 5.9Generating Net Electricity PART 3THE STATE OF THE ART 6.The Past: Fusion Breakthroughs 6.11920s: Understanding Stars 6.21950s: A Kick-Start for Fusion 6.31960s: Superconducting Magnets 6.41960s: The Tokamak 6.51970s: Bootstrap Current 6.61980s: H-Mode 6.71980s: Plasma Shaping 6.81990s: Deuterium–Tritium Fuel 6.92000s: Supercomputers 7.The Present: ITER 7.1ITER’s Goals 7.2ITER’s Strategy 7.2.1Heating systems 7.2.2Divertor 7.2.3First wall 7.3ITER’s Schedule and Cost 7.4Transition to DEMO 7.5Other Things to be Excited for 8.The Future: Designing a Tokamak Power Plant 8.1Power Plant Design from First Principles 8.2Maximizing Net Electric Power 8.3Maximizing Plasma Pressure 8.4Maximizing Plasma Current 8.5Maximizing Magnetic Field Strength 8.6Minimizing External Power 8.7Minimizing Heating Power 8.8Maximizing Plasma Density 8.9Minimizing Current Drive Power 8.10Maximizing Material Survivability 8.11Striking the Right Balance PART 4SPECIAL TOPICS 9.Alternative Approaches to Fusion Energy 9.1Stellarators 9.2Inertial Confinement Fusion 9.3Private Fusion Startups 9.3.1Tokamak Energy Ltd 9.3.2General Fusion 9.3.3Lockheed Martin 9.3.4TAE Technologies 9.3.5Lawrenceville Plasma Physics 9.3.6Helion Energy 9.3.7Commonwealth Fusion Systems 10.Fusion and Nuclear Proliferation 10.1Nuclear Physics: A Double-edged Sword 10.2Building Nukes 10.2.1Uranium enrichment 10.2.2Plutonium production 10.2.3Weapon designs 10.3Conventional Fission Reactors 10.4Breeder Reactors 10.5Fission Proliferation Risks 10.6Fusion Proliferation Risks 10.7The Nuclear Energy Transition 10.8Reshaping Geopolitics 10.9Being a Role Model 11.Fusion and Space Exploration 11.1Basics of Spaceflight 11.2Fusion Thruster PART 5CONCLUSIONS 12.When Will We Have Fusion?

Figure 6.2:The proton–proton chain (left), which dominates energy production in smaller stars like our Sun, and the CNO cycle (right), which dominates in larger stars. In 70 years, humans went from thinking that chemical reactions might power the stars to a fully-developed theory of the nuclear processes underlying stellar physics. 6.21950s: A Kick-Start for Fusion Following World War II, scientists took fusion research from the stars and began work on bringing it down to Earth. Initially, the only application was nuclear weapons — specifically to follow-up on the Manhattan project and build “super,” the hydrogen bomb. However, on March 24, 1951, a little-known scientist named Ronald Richter in Argentina changed this all.6 On this date, he and the Argentinian president Juan Perón held a press conference claiming that they had achieved “enormous temperatures of millions of degrees” and produced the “controlled liberation of atomic energy” in a “solar reactor apparatus” called the “thermotron.”

This lengthens the time when fission is possible, enhancing the yield of the weapon. The second layer is a spherical core of Pu-239 known as the “pit.”23 This is what fissions and produces most of the bomb’s energy. The innermost layer, the neutron initiator, is known as the “urchin.” It is typically made of beryllium and provides a strong neutron source to kick-start the fission chain reaction. Figure 10.9:The designs of four types of nuclear weapons. A gun-type bomb (top left) fires one U-235 segment into another. An implosion bomb (top right) simultaneously detonates a large number of chemical explosives, collapsing the fissile fuel inwards. A boosted implosion bomb (bottom left) includes D–T fusion fuel in an implosion bomb to act as an additional source of neutrons.


pages: 32 words: 10,468

Getting Things Done for Hackers by Lars Wirzenius

anti-pattern, Debian, Firefox, full text search, Inbox Zero, Kickstarter, Merlin Mann, security theater

When you’re actually doing the task, especially if it is urgent or stressful, it can be nice to not have to think about each step every time you do the task. 35 36 CHAPTER 14. AUTOMATION AND CHECKLISTS Chapter 15 Getting started You’ve read all about the GTD system, and you’ve decided to go for it. Now what? There’s at least two approaches for getting started. The one I did was to start big. I allocated a whole weekend and did nothing else than kickstart my GTD system. I cleared my dining table to use as a giant inbox. I collected every bit of paper, every unopened letter, every unread book and magazine, every appliance that needed fixing, and everything else that I needed to do anything about, and put them on the table. When I found large items that were too big for the table, I wrote down what it was, where it was, and what I needed to do about it, on a separate piece of paper, and put that on the table instead.


pages: 229 words: 61,482

The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want by Diane Mulcahy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, deliberate practice, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial independence, future of work, gig economy, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, mass immigration, mental accounting, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, passive income, Paul Graham, remote working, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social contagion, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the strength of weak ties, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, wage slave, WeWork, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Obtaining our own skills-based certifications: coding certificates, chartered financial analyst (CFA), certified financial planner (CFP), or actuary, insurance, or real estate licenses. These are just a few examples of credentials that can be obtained by passing a test and/or taking a course (often online). Fundraising through sites like Kickstarter, making it easier to pursue our creative, startup, or nonprofit ventures (Raise enough money and you, too, can record your own CD, manufacture that fun new widget, or launch a nonprofit to save the world). The list goes on, but we can see that with so many low-cost and highly convenient options to learn at our keyboards, there’s no longer any reason to rely on a company or a job to provide us the opportunity to build skills.

Manager schedules car payments cash flow, negative categorizing workers, eliminating Center for a New American Dream survey certifications Certified Financial Planner (CFP) Board checkbook diagnostic exercise Christakis, Nicholas Christensen, Clayton Clark, Dorie Reinventing You Stand Out cognitive biases cognitive resources collective bargaining, by contractors college graduates, unemployment and underemployment comfort zone Comment step in speaking in writing commitment dropping or reducing exit strategy from connecting without networking inbound connecting offer and ask outbound connecting consulting pricing strategy Consumer Federation of America contractors autonomy of collective bargaining by eliminating category vs. employees pricing strategy savings plans contracts corporate ladder corporate time suck costs of full-time employees of home ownership Create step in speaking in writing credentials-based economy, vs. skill-based Curate step in speaking in writing curated groups daily work schedule Dash exercise debt from education perspectives on decisions, either/or vs. and deferred life plan delegating denial, job security and Department of Labor (DoL) dependent contractor Dickson, Peter digital nomads directors and officers (D&O) insurance disability insurance disability issues, leaving work involuntarily diversifying expertise and portfolio of gigs risk of excess Doodle “double opt-in,” for introductions downsizing dream job Eagleman, David earned income education accessing debt from elevator pitch Ellis, Linda, “The Dash” Employee Mindset employee-in-a-job model employees advantages of being vs. contractors corporate benefits impact of Gig Economy learned helplessness about time prorated and portable benefits tax rate employers contribution retirement plans student loan repayment benefits tax compliance rate end dates, negotiating Entrepreneur Magazine equity in home ownership Ernst & Young eulogy virtues Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation exercises calendar diagnostic checkbook diagnostic on priorities exit strategy creation facing fears and reducing risks finding gigs personal burn rate surrogation and success taking year off vision of success defined vision of success refined exit strategy creating for leaving job for reducing uncertainty for startup Expensify experimenting, gigs for expertise, diversification and failure, expecting and preparing for fear exercise for facing facing fee-only financial planner financial flexibility corporate perks in increasing with more income from low personal burn rate planning from savings and time off financial team, for independent workers finding gigs exercises Fitbit fixed costs income security from low flexibility debt and ownership impact see also financial flexibility Forbes 401(k) Fowler, James Fox, Jessica, Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets Framingham Heart Study, social connections Freelancer Freelancers Union FreshBooks full-time employees job disappearance as last resort fundraising Gabriel, Allison Gaignard, Jayson, Mastermind Dinners Gallup poll Generation X Gig Economy finding gigs of future good work vs. good job growth labor issues MBA course newness of pitch for outbound connect retirement to mix work and leisure rules for success size of Gilbert, Daniel giving time away Gladwell, Malcolm, Outliers Glassdoor, Employee Confidence Survey goal creep “good jobs,” future of The Good Jobs Strategy (Ton) government positions, layoffs Graham, Paul Granovetter, Mark Great Generation (65 and older) Groupon Gupta, Prerna Hanauer, Nick Handy, Charles happiness Harford, Tim Harvard Business Review Harvard Joint Center on Housing Studies Harvard Study of Adult Development health insurance health issues, leaving work involuntarily healthcare costs in retirement help from others Hill, Steven Raw Deal hindsight, power of home ownership vs. access to home impact on middle class myths of real costs Honest Dollar hosting, inbound connecting through Huffington, Arianna hyperbolic discounting “in-between space,” time off to create income security from low fixed costs from multiple income sources from opportunities pipeline from skills building supplemental income in retirement independent workers eligibility for retirement savings financial management savings plans self-insure for unemployment Individual 401(k) inflation information gathering interest, tax deduction for Internal Revenue Service on employee vs. contractor income tax forms, Schedule C interruptions, schedule free of introductions, asking for Intuit investment interval IRA job hunting job interview, time off explanation in job security jobbatical.com jobs, transition to work JP Morgan Chase Kasser, Tim, The High Price of Materialism Katz, Larry Kickstarter Kitces, Michael Kreider, Tim Krueger, Alan Krueger, Norris, Jr. Labor Department labor market, proposals to reform LaLonde, Robert layoffs learning by doing, gigs for LearnVest leaving job, exit strategy for Lee, L.R.W. life insurance Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) loss aversion Maker’s Schedule Manager’s Schedule marketing, for new jobs Marsh, Nigel Mastermind Dinners (Gaignard) material wealth, vs. personal fulfillment MBA students, planning by McDonald’s mental tasks, combining with physical Merchant, Nilofer MetLife, Study of the American Dream Microsoft middle class impact of home ownership middle managers Mihalic, Joe Mint.com Moment money, perspective on mortgage mortgage calculator National Labor Relations Act National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) negative cash flow net worth, in principal residence networks maintaining 99designs Obituary exercise offer in connecting 168 Hours (Vanderkam) opportunity, income security from opportunity mindset outbound connecting Outliers (Gladwell) overconfidence ownership, vs. access paid leave part-time side gigs passion, pursuing in time off passive income Peers.org pension plans personal branding personal burn rate personal fulfillment, vs. material wealth perspective, time off to change Pew Research Center physical tasks, combining with mental pilot tests planning for best-case scenario in financial flexibility for time off playtime portfolio of gigs building for experiments learning by doing opportunity for connections Postmates power, and expanding time predictors of future feelings priorities checkbook diagnostic exercise on extended family as of others, impact of private sector, job creation decline pro-bono legal adviser Proctor & Gamble Profiting from Uncertainty (Schoemaker) public assistance, eliminating public speaking purchases, time cost of Qapital QuickBooks quitting job, exit strategy for Rae, Amber rates of return, for housing Raw Deal (Hill) referrals, asking for regret, risk of Reich, Robert Reinventing You (Clark) rejuvenation, time off for relationships, impact on success renting growth in households vs. ownership reputation RescueTime resources, allocating to short-term activities vs. long-term goals resume, gaps for time off resume virtues retail workers retirement healthcare costs in new vision of plans to work longer before saving to finance traditional savings plans supplemental income in rewards, time for longer-term risk assessment of of boring life debt and of diploma debt facing fear by identifying size of risk reduction by acceptance by eliminating exercise for facing fear by assessing options with insurance by mitigating risk by shifting risk risk taker, learning to be Rohn, Jim Rolf, David Roth IRA Rowing the Atlantic (Savage) S Corporation S&P 500 companies, average life sabbaticals safety net, creating Sagmeister, Stefan Savage, Roz, Rowing the Atlantic saving for retirement traditional plan savings, financial plan and increase ScheduleOnce Schoemaker, Paul, Profiting from Uncertainty Schrager, Allison security creating from diversifying for income for job self-employment income tax form for risk assessment SEP IRA service workers Shared Security Account Shell, Richard Simmons, Gail skill-based economy, vs. credentials-based economy skill-based employment system, vs. tenure-based employment system skilled workers skills, income security from building Slaughter, Anne-Marie Snapchat social capital, of introducer social contagion social media Social Security Social Security Administration Society for Human Resources Management sole proprietor, independent worker as South by Southwest (SXSW) speaking inbound connecting through skills for specialization spending, auditing Stand Out (Clark) Star Plates start dates, negotiating startup exit strategy for Strayed, Cheryl Stride Health strong ties in network student loans success as contagious defining vision of external versions new American dream as definition refining vision of surrogation sweat equity bucket Target TaskRabbit tax data analysis Tax Policy Center taxes deductions for mortgage interest Schedule C withholding teaching technology for delegating outbound connecting by leveraging technology companies tenure-based employment system, vs. skill-based employment system time age-related difference in perception calculating use employees’ learned helplessness about expanding horizon for savings plan for longer-term rewards management mindfulness about and purchase cost reaction to wasting reclaiming tracking investments time frame, for goals time off benefits developing ideas for exercise financing friends and family reaction gaps in resume from between gigs, vs. paid time off planning for Toastmaster tolerance of risk Ton, Zeynep The Good Jobs Strategy Top Chef Topcoder total cost of home travel Twitter Uber drivers uncertainty, cognitive biases about unearned income unemployment insurance unemployment protection, for self-employed universal basic income (UBI) universality of benefits universities, faculty members Upwork Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center vacation. see also time off Vanderkam, Laura, 168 Hours Vanguard, online calculator Virtues exercise volunteer positions during time off wage insurance Walmart Ware, Bronnie weak ties in network wealth gap WeWork withholding taxes Wolff, Edward work flexibility full-time job disappearance future of workers eliminating categorization of last resort workers’ compensation working lives, end of worst case, facing fear by starting with writing skills inbound connecting through Xero YouCanBook.me ABOUT THE AUTHOR Diane created and teaches The Gig Economy, which was named by Forbes as one of the Top 10 Most Innovative Business School Classes in the country.


pages: 615 words: 168,775

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

Executives banded together across industries to influence politicians. Scientists and financiers dared to play with DNA, the very stuff of life. Troublemakers tells these stories, which feature some of the most famous names in Silicon Valley history, while also profiling seven other individuals in depth. Bob Taylor kick-started the precursor to the Internet, the Arpanet, and masterminded the personal computer. Mike Markkula served as Apple’s first chairman, with an ownership stake equal to that of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Sandra Kurtzig, an early software entrepreneur, was the first woman to take a technology company public.

And Al would think for a half a second and say, ‘Yes, we can do that.’ ”37 The technical discussions in Ann Arbor ran so long that they continued while Taylor drove a number of participants to the airport. During the car ride, Wes Clark proposed an idea: rather than networking computers together directly, the group should build an underlying backbone network of routers to streamline connections between computers and help make the network more reliable.38 His contribution was critical. Taylor kick-started the network. He got it funded. He helped to cajole researchers to contribute to it. No wonder Paul Baran, the inventor of packet switching, called the Arpanet Taylor’s “baby.”39 But after the Ann Arbor meeting, once it was clear the network was going to be built, Taylor stepped back and Roberts stepped forward.

Again and again over the course of the next decade, Taylor would try to interest the company’s leadership in the technology coming out of the computing labs at PARC. His efforts would meet with little success. In early 1972, the lab was at a critical point. The MAXC computer was almost complete. Soon Bob Metcalfe would connect it to the Arpanet, the computer network that Taylor had kick-started in 1966 when he was at ARPA. Researchers were beginning to complain that the final-stage refinements were “depressing” and too far removed from basic research.42 Around this time, Jerry Elkind, Taylor’s PhD-bearing boss, asked whether Xerox should “buy the ARPANET.” ARPA was looking for an outside institution to run the network as a public service akin to the national phone network.43 After some discussion with Taylor, Elkind, along with Xerox’s head of research, Jack Goldman, put together a group “to analyze the opportunity for buying ARPANET and to recommend the action Xerox should take.”44 In the end, Xerox, like AT&T (which had also considered a purchase), declined to bid for ownership of the Arpanet, and in 1975, the Defense Communications Agency took over operational responsibility.


pages: 564 words: 168,696

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

Rather, it is the history of encounters between these different cultures which explains precisely why the scientific revolution occurred when it did. With this in mind, I want to tell a new history of the scientific revolution. In this chapter, we explore how encounters between Europe and the Americas kickstarted a major reassessment of natural history, medicine, and geography. Much of what we know about the science produced in the New World during this period comes from the perspective of European explorers, a legacy of the history of colonization that this chapter examines. But if we look a little closer, using sources such as Aztec codices and Inca histories, we can also uncover another side to this story, one that highlights the hidden contributions of Indigenous peoples to the scientific revolution.

The key event here was the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean, particularly following the conquest of Istanbul in 1453. Byzantine refugees and Venetian traders returned from the Ottoman lands with hundreds of new scientific manuscripts. Some of these were ancient Greek originals, others were more recent Arabic and Persian commentaries. It was this exposure to all these new texts and ideas that really kickstarted the scientific revolution in Europe. Copernicus is a perfect example of this. On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres combined ideas found in Arabic, Persian, Latin, and Byzantine Greek sources to produce a radical new model of the universe. Cultural exchange had a profound effect on the development of science in Renaissance Europe.

But perhaps the most important breakthrough was the invention of the periodic table, in which all the chemical elements were ordered by atomic weight, beginning with the lightest element, hydrogen. First proposed by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869, the periodic table predicted the existence of many as-yet-unknown elements, as there were gaps waiting to be filled in, thus kickstarting a race to find them. There was a certain amount of national rivalry here. Scientists often chose to name new elements after the country of their birth. When the Russian chemist Karl Klaus discovered a new element in the middle of the nineteenth century, he called it ‘ruthenium’, from the Latin word for Russia.


pages: 387 words: 120,155

Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference by David Halpern

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, different worldview, endowment effect, gamification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, IKEA effect, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, libertarian paternalism, light touch regulation, longitudinal study, machine readable, market design, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, nudge unit, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, precautionary principle, presumed consent, QR code, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, supply chain finance, the built environment, theory of mind, traffic fines, twin studies, World Values Survey

By using a more realistic model of human behaviour and motivation, in conjunction with the staff of jobcentres across the UK (and now other countries), we have been able to get hundreds of thousands of people back to work faster. It’s helping not only to heal the economy more quickly; it’s also healing lives. Kick-starting an economy It was tough running a small business in 2010. Robert was a small builder and much of his work had dried up. The larger house builders that had filled most of his order book had stopped building. Commissions from private clients were almost as bad. People were worried about job security and were putting off the extensions they might have planned.

The second example concerned a much messier area, sometimes known as operational policy: how policy should be translated into practice by tens of thousands of public servants and, in this case, by the millions of unemployed people passing through the benefits system as they try to get back to work. The third example provided a glimpse into policy where the levers of government are even more indirect: trying to kick-start a stalled economy. It’s for individual businesses to decide whether to invest or hunker down; for banks to decide whether to lend or not; and for consumers to decide whether to spend or save: but nudges can affect some of these decisions. The line between these methods of government and private sector action is far from perfect.

A policymaker – or public service provider – can be much more confident about importing an intervention that has been replicated in five or six countries than one that has only been shown to work in one place alone. Another key element of this clearing house or platform should be that it will capture and highlight gaps. In this respect, it should work more like a ‘kick-starter’ for systematic reviews and intervention studies. After five or six countries, states or professional bodies have searched for an answer or review and not been able to find what they are looking for, this needs to be picked up so that a What Works centre or some other body can step forward to plug the gap.


pages: 372 words: 111,573

10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness by Alanna Collen

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, biofilm, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, David Strachan, discovery of penicillin, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Helicobacter pylori, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, placebo effect, seminal paper, the scientific method

Over weeks, months and years, patients steadily become more cheerful, buoyed by their happiness pacemakers. Adding this electrical pacemaker to the vagus nerve can provide the necessary boost to nerve activity and mood. But under normal circumstances, those electrical impulses have a chemical origin – much like a household battery. These chemicals which kick-start nerve impulses are called neurotransmitters, and you’ll have heard of more of them than you might have guessed. Substances like serotonin, adrenalin, dopamine, epinephrine and oxytocin are mostly synthesised by our own bodies, and they are able to initiate a tiny electrical spark at the end of a nerve.

He never knew the scent of his mother’s skin, or the touch of his father’s hand. He never played with another child without plastic sheeting preventing the sharing of toys and laughter. To get David out of his bubble, a bone-marrow transplant from David’s sister was needed. The hope was that it might kick-start his immune system and free him of the disease. But his sister was not a transplant match. David had no choice but to remain inside his bubble for the rest of his life. Despite his devastating illness, David lived out his highly protected life in comparative health, and was not unwell once until his death at age twelve.

Whether this is the missing biological link between suffering stress and developing depression is not yet clear, but as with the gut–microbiota–brain axis, the evidence for it is growing. Depression often accompanies ill-health, from obesity to IBS and acne, but is usually attributed to the misery of the disorders themselves. The idea of a leaky gut leading to chronic inflammation and kick-starting both physical and mental health problems is an exciting one for medical science. Leaky gut is certainly not the cause of every illness, let alone the political and social ills some would like to blame on it. But the concept may need a rethink, and a rebrand, in the face of the scepticism it currently incurs.


pages: 379 words: 114,807

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

activist lawyer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Cape to Cairo, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, corporate raider, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, Garrett Hardin, Global Witness, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, out of africa, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, smart cities, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

In two provinces, Western and West Sepik, over a fifth of the land has been signed away. The customary rights of the forest communities to their neighborhood forests are supposedly enshrined in PNG’s statutes. But the country’s Land Act also contains provisions that allow those communities to do deals with outsiders to kick-start economic development—for instance, by establishing commercial farms in their territory. This is done by leasing forestland to the government, which in turn can issue “special agricultural and business leases” to private companies. This arrangement means the government can act as the policeman for the schemes to prevent isolated communities from being defrauded.

So too is their friend and fellow green grabber, the Dutch industrialist Paul van Vlissingen. Aside from his place on the founding board of the Peace Parks Foundation and membership of Club 21, Vlissingen was, on his own account, the largest private operator of African national parks. He put $18 million of his own money into kick-starting his African Parks Foundation, which he began in 2000. His foundation was dedicated to taking over ailing national parks and putting them on a sound management and commercial footing. Its seven parks today are in Malawi, Zambia, Chad, both Congos, and Rwanda and cover some 8.1 million acres. They include the Garamba park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), an ironic privatization given WWF’s determination a decade ago to give it back to its national government.

But there is now an organized migration further afield, with approval and assistance from governments at both ends. The men in khaki shorts and Springbok rugby caps are being offered millions of acres, some of it “virgin” bush and some of it already cultivated by smallholders and state farms, or grazed by herders. The hope is that their undoubted agricultural know-how can kick-start an agrarian revolution across the continent. Whatever else, it is a dramatic reversal of the ostracism the Boers suffered in the days of apartheid. The travel agent for these Boers with itchy feet is Agri South Africa, the post-apartheid successor to the old South African Agricultural Union, which was formed in 1904 to represent white farmers.


pages: 406 words: 113,841

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, basic income, benefit corporation, big-box store, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, government statistician, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, job automation, Kickstarter, land bank, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

And a similar one, funded by philanthropist Harold Alfond, was set up statewide in Maine in 2008, giving $500 to every newborn child in the state, so long as that child was enrolled in the state’s 529 college savings plan.10 Three years after it was created, about four in ten babies born in Maine were being enrolled in the education saving programs and were thus becoming eligible for the $500 gift. That wasn’t a great take-up rate, but it was a whole lot better than nothing. There are roughly four million babies born each year in the United States. Providing each one of these with $500 to kick-start their education accounts would cost $2 billion annually. That’s chump change for an economy as large as America’s, but it would have huge benefits down the line, encouraging more families to save for college and thus making higher education more affordable, and less of a debt generator, for millions of people.

Consider it a mortgage variant on being Born Again: a person who had originally put down almost no cash for a mortgage financed by a predatory loan would essentially spend five years, with the assistance of the government, building up a significant down payment so that he could then reenter the mortgage market to access a smaller loan, payable to the government instead of to a commercial lender, with no predatory conditions attached. There are many pluses to such a scenario. First, it would take large numbers of underwater properties off the housing market for at least five years, thus tightening the supply of for-sale homes and helping to kick-start local property values again. Second, it would keep homes occupied that would otherwise be abandoned, would prevent communities with large numbers of distressed properties from falling into blight, and would keep residents housed who would otherwise be at risk of homelessness. Third, it would build up a pool of affordable housing maintained by the government and available to low- and middle-income families.

In 2011, a Gallup Poll found that 72 percent of those surveyed supported expanding such public works as school repair programs, and three-quarters wanted to make available more public funds to hire teachers, police officers, and firefighters.10 In September 2012, another survey found that more than half of Americans wanted to increase spending on public infrastructure projects as a way of kick-starting the still-sluggish economy.11 For Katherine Newman, this was another no-brainer. “Fundamentally, the problem of poverty is a problem of people either not having jobs or not having jobs that pay enough,” she explained. Yes, even a healthy economy has a certain level of unemployment, as companies reinvent themselves and people shift between locations and between jobs.


pages: 349 words: 114,038

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

When physical products need to be built, there are many "assembly" firms that will make these; dedicated manufacturing is a thing of the past. Funding, which used to be sought from a few significant investors, can now be sought directly from prospective buyers through crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter. And of course, as I've explained before, the costs of communications, both internal and external -- the biggest cost of the classic firm -- have been reduced to near zero. Let me take a concrete example of a young business that wants to develop and sell a new high-tech product. The core design and engineering team consists of perhaps 10 people.

Possibly, as the Spanish worked their way across the landscape over several years, every smart and mobile Dutch speaker moved north, out of the way. It was literally just a matter of hopping into a boat and floating downstream on the Schelde River. You don't even need to row or steer. By the time they came to Antwerp, only the immobile or suicidally stubborn were left. This mass northwards emigration kick-started the Renaissance in the Netherlands, which for a long time was a beacon of tolerance and enlightenment in Europe. It's also, incidentally, one reason the Flemish still distrust French speakers, who sided with the Spanish. The older the blood, the harder it is to wash it off. I'm half Scottish, and 500 years later, we Gaels still don't trust anyone with an English surname.

We could build cheap dedicated devices that run the Cellnet: a pocket-sized box that is all battery, with powerful radios, and a couple of blinking lights just because. No screen, no fancy UI software, just a pocket-sized Cellnet node. It could double as a battery recharger for smartphones, which gives plausible deniability to anyone arrested with one, when they are banned. Kickstarter, anyone? The Cellnet would be extremely hard to spy on or disrupt. It is possible to capture WiFi traffic by being physically very close. However it's also quite easy to secure traffic between two peers to the extent that it cannot be read or modified or faked. The only way to get information is then to seize the phone itself.


pages: 389 words: 112,319

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Questioning these assumptions gave us food trucks. We used to assume that late fees and physical stores were necessary for video rentals. Questioning these assumptions gave us Netflix. We used to assume that you needed bank loans or venture-capital funding to launch a new product. Questioning these assumptions gave us Kickstarter and Indiegogo. To be sure, you can’t go through life questioning every single thing you do. Routines free us of the thousands of exhausting daily decisions we would otherwise have to make. For example, I eat the same thing for lunch every day and take the same route to work. I routinely reason by analogy and copy other people’s choices when it comes to fashion, music, and interior design (my living room looks like a page out of the Crate & Barrel catalog).

The next time you find yourself in a creative jam, ask, “What other industry has faced an issue like this before?” For example, Johannes Gutenberg had a printing press problem, so he looked to other industries—like winemakers and olive oil producers—who used a screw press to extract juice and oil. Gutenberg then applied the same concept to kick-start the era of mass communication in Europe. Organizations can take a cue from Pixar, the creative studio behind numerous box-office hits, such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo. The company encourages its employees to spend up to four hours a week taking classes at Pixar University, its professional-development program.

They decorated the ceilings, put up whiteboards for visitors to leave messages to the patients, and transformed the style and color of the patient rooms to make them more personal. They also put rearview mirrors on hospital stretchers to allow patients to see and connect with the doctors and nurses wheeling them around. IDEO’s presentation ultimately kick-started a broader discussion to improve the overall patient experience so that patients were “treated less like objects to be positioned and allocated, and more like people in stress and pain,” Brown explained.44 As these examples show, instead of creating artificial testing environments disconnected from reality, we’re better off observing customer behavior in real life.


pages: 573 words: 115,489

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The deceptively simple answer of the Number 10 advisor had been just that: deceptive. As it turned out, the advisor in question was on a plane to China at the moment Prosperity without Growth? (with its conciliatory question mark) landed unheralded on the Prime Minister’s desk. It was a matter of days before the G20 leaders convened in London to ‘kick-start growth again’. ‘What on earth had we been thinking?’ roared our former ally. It was a good question, in retrospect. Had we been naïve to suppose such fundamental concerns could be raised with impunity? Possibly. Had we overlooked the ambiguity inherent in the advice we received from Number 10?

The population of Hydra had declined by almost a third since I had last been there and the island’s continued existence as anything more than a playground for the rich depended heavily on the run-down ferry which an hour or so later would carry me back to Athens across the cold, moonlit sea.9 ***** The past is another country. They do things differently there. The confidence with which world leaders assumed it would be possible to ‘kick-start’ growth again. The belief that business as usual was waiting to return, just round the corner. Even the righteous anger that confronted me on the telephone on that rainy March night has a quaint, other-worldly quality to it now. It’s become much clearer in the interim how far out of balance our economies were.

The part-nationalisation of financial institutions was justified on the basis that shares would be sold back to the private sector as soon as reasonably possible, something that in many cases still hasn’t been achieved.35 Extraordinary though some of these interventions were, they were largely regarded as temporary measures. Necessary evils in the restoration of a free-market economy. The declared aim was clear. By pumping equity into the banks and restoring confidence to lenders, the world’s leaders hope to restore liquidity, reinvigorate demand and ‘kick-start’ the economy. Their ultimate goal was to protect the pursuit of economic growth. Throughout everything, this has remained the one non-negotiable: that growth must continue at all costs. Renewed growth was the end that justified interventions unheard of only a few months previously. No politician seriously questioned this goal.


pages: 412 words: 116,685

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

Just imagine how different—and limited—society would be today if only 50 to 150 people could attend any given sporting match, concert, political rally, museum, school, or mall. However, we are far from being able to replicate the density and flexibility of the “real world.” And it is likely to remain impossible for some time. During Facebook’s 2021 Metaverse keynote, John Carmack, the former and now consulting CTO of Oculus VR (which Facebook bought in 2014 to kickstart its Metaverse transformation) mused that, “If someone had asked me in the year 2000, ‘could you build the metaverse if you had one hundred times the processing power you have on your system today . . .’ I would have said yes.” Yet 21 years later, and with the backing of one of the world’s most valuable and Metaverse-focused companies, he believed the Metaverse remained at least five to ten years away and there would be “serious optimization” tradeoffs in realizing this vision—even though there were now billions of computers that were a hundred times more powerful than the hundreds of millions of PCs operating at the turn of the century.5 What’s Missing from This Definition So now we understand my definition of the Metaverse: “A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”

Imagine, for example, a model whereby Twitter users were awarded valuable Twitter tokens for reporting poor behavior, could earn more for reviewing previously reported tweets, and lost them if they violated the rules. At the same time, rather than rely on tips or posting promotional tweets on behalf of advertisers to generate income, super-users and influencers could be awarded tokens for hosting events. By the end of 2021, Kickstarter, Reddit, and Discord had all publicly described plans to shift to blockchain-based token models. Blockchain Obstacles There are still numerous obstacles facing a potential blockchain revolution. Most notably, blockchain remains too expensive and slow. For this reason the majority of “blockchain games” and “blockchain experiences” are still running mostly on non-blockchain databases.

See Apple iOS IP addresses, 38–39, 47, 108 “iPad Natives,” 13, 249 iPhone, 64, 146, 242–44 iPods, 149, 165, 183, 186 Ipsos, 137 Islamic State (ISIS), 291 isometric 3D (2.5D), 9, 30 Japan, 65, 136, 280, 296, 303. See also Nintendo; Sony; Square Enix “jitter,” 81 Jobs, Steve, 138, 148–49, 183, 186, 243, 261, 309 Johns Hopkins, 268 Johnson & Johnson, 166 Johnson, Peggy, 4n John Wick, 139 Jordan, Michael, 139 JPMorgan Chase, 167, 207–8 Keyhole, 4, 9 Khashoggi, Jamal, 11 Kickstarter, 229 Kid Cudi, 12 Kirkman, Robert, 260 Koduri, Raja, 94 Komorebi Collective, 228 Krafton, xiii, 115, 303. See also PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) Krugman, Paul, 24 Kubrick, Stanley, xi, 305 KYC (Know Your Customer) regulations, 301 Lanebreak, 254 language, 15–16, 108, 136–37, 210, 211.


pages: 253 words: 65,834

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms by Jeffrey Bussgang

business cycle, business process, carried interest, deal flow, digital map, discounted cash flows, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pets.com, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds

Paranoia is part of what drives a lot of entrepreneurs in a positive direction, just worrying that everything is going to go wrong and trying to mitigate every possible risk. As Intel’s Andrew Grove said, ‘Only the paranoid survive.’ ” The VCs bought the story and appreciated Christoph’s candor. He raised $5 million in initial financing, co-led by his former firm Polaris, to kick-start the company and recruit a team to pursue the opportunity. CONFIDENCE THAT CREATES CONFIDENCE FROM OTHERS An entrepreneur must be a confident person, of course, but it is not enough to be confident in oneself. The entrepreneur has to inspire confidence in others, which is a wholly different challenge.

But they’re a little green. So I figured, why don’t I mash them all together?” This mix of American entrepreneurship with Vietnamese know-how and passionate domain experience proved to be a great kickoff for the company. With the business plan developed and the team built, Henry and Bryan saw an opportunity to kick-start the company by merging it with an existing gaming operator, and so some more capital went in. With these humble beginnings, the company exploded on the gaming scene in Vietnam. Since its initial launch in the fall of 2005, VinaGames has grown rapidly with 14 million users—nearly half of all Vietnamese households!


pages: 204 words: 66,619

Think Like an Engineer: Use Systematic Thinking to Solve Everyday Challenges & Unlock the Inherent Values in Them by Mushtak Al-Atabi

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business climate, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, corporate social responsibility, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, follow your passion, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, invention of the wheel, iterative process, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, mirror neurons, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, remote working, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking

The premise of crowd funding is very simple, an entrepreneur who has conceived and designed a product and needs money to implement it, can start a crowd-funding campaign online, inviting interested people to pledge money in return for the product when the campaign is successful and the product is manufactured. Popular crowd funding platforms include kickstarter.com, pozible.com and pitchin.my. Besides funding commercial undertakings, crowd-funding is now being used for social entrepreneurial endeavours as well. Community projects are being made possible through the pledges of numerous contributors around the world. In my opinion, crowd-funding is a very promising way to raise funds for two reasons.

Index 5 Whys, 210, 213 awareness, 2, 13, 30, 45-48, 53-54, 58, 63, 151, 180 ABC, 99 abundance, 62, 101 abundant, 13 achievement, 3, 44, 47, 49, 51, 106, 120, 125, 168 ACID, 94 adaptability, 44, 49 adaptable, 23 adaptive, 83 aeronautical, 5 aeroplane, 7-8 Aerospace, 121 aesthetics, 101 affective, 47, 150-151 affordability, 101 affordance, 94, 100,128 Africa, 61 agriculture, 10, 14 Airbus, 6-7 aircrafts, 112 airframe, 7 airline, 8, 79-80, 180, 186 airlines, 111, 180, 186-187 Amazon, 77 analytical, 24 anthropometric, 132 anthropometry, 132-133 AoN, 167 APA, 148 architecture, 37, 94, 97 artefact, 67, 155 auditory, 19 automobile, 221 automotive, 178 avionics, 7 avoidance, 101 Bible, 11 biology, 19-20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 53, 126, 150 biomedical, 5, 15 Biomimicry, 89 Blattaria, 32 Blendtec, 140-141 Blue Ocean Strategy, 78-82, 215 BoM, 98-99, 102 Bozan, Tony 71 brain, 3, 6, 15-16, 19-28, 30-32, 34-36, 38-40, 42, 44-45, 49-50, 53, 67, 71, 89, 140, 143, 220 Brain Rewiring, 30-31, 49-50, 196, 217, 220, 222, 228 Brainology, 19-20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40 brainstorming, 71-72, 90, 215 Brimo, Adam 189-190 Business Plan, 182-183 CDIO, 3, 5-9, 20, 30, 34-35, 42, 69-70, CDIO, 3, 5-9, 20, 30, 34-35, 42, 69-70, 125, 145, 159, 175, 184, 220 checklist, 107, 111-114 Christensen, Clayton 186 Chunking, 39 Cirque du Soleil, 81-82 civilisation, 4, 10, 16, 67, 83 classification, 31-32, 73, 171 classifying, 31-32, 34, 172 cockroach, 31-32 cognitive, 10, 25, 35-36, 43-44, 136, 150-151 Cognitive Ergonomics, 133 collaborate, 172, 217 collaborating, 26, 172, 227 collaboration, 44-45, 58 collaborative, 150 commodity, 184, 186-187 communication, 12, 15, 26, 44, 55, 58, 63, 118, 137-138, 140-142, 144, 146, 148-152, 154, 156, 158, 168-169, 172, 175, 222 complexity, 5, 36, 110, 160-162 complexity, 5, 36, 110, 160-162 70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82-84, 86, 88, 90, 92, 115, 118, 137, 155, 175, 184, 220 concrete, 138, 141, 143-144 Configuration, 95 Configuration Design, 94, 96-97 Create, 2, 12, 27-28, 36, 39, 46, 67-69, 78-81, 113, 127, 138, 148, 173-174, 176, 180-181, 187-188, 191, 200, 202, 209, 211-212, 219, 226-227 Critical Thinking, 3, 9, 36, 44 Crossing the Chasm, 185 Crowdfunding, 195 Crowdfunding, 195 226, 228 cyberspace, 15-16 Design Optimisation, 99 Design Process, 54, 94-95, 126-128 designer, 6, 53-54, 89, 97-101, 138 desirable, 9, 91, 101, 178, 184 Detailed Design, 94, 98 Disruptive Innovation, 186-187 Drucker, Peter 159, 173 Dweck, Carol 20 ecological, 37, 227 economical, 7, 13, 94, 115, 212 economically, 9, 91, 101, 110 ecosystem, 179, 182, 188, 225 Edison, 19, 198, 201 efficiency, 14, 89 Einstein, 13, 39, 67, 198 Eliminate, 78, 80-81, 207 Elliot, 25-26 E-mail, 148 E-mail, 148 46, 48-50, 52, 54-56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66, 70, 156, 216-219, 221-223 emotions, 21, 24, 42, 44-46, 48, 53-54, 142, 144, 149, 151, 217, 222-223 empathy, 42, 53-54, 70, 151 enterprise, 55 entertainment, 16, 81, 142 entrepreneur, 26, 173-177, 181-182, 187, 191, 194-196, 220 entrepreneurial, 173-176, 180, 182, 184, 193-194, 218, 220, 226 Entrepreneurial Ecosystem, 178-183 entrepreneurialism, 44 entrepreneurialism, 44 180, 182, 184, 186, 188, 190, 192-196, 200, 216-220 EPIC Homes, 55-57 ergonomic, 26, 155 ergonomically, 133 Ergonomics, 126, 128, 130, 132, 134, 136 ERIC, 78-80, 191 evolution, 10, 30, 85-88, 115, 153-154, 186 evolutionary, 3, 9, 94-95, 191 Facebook, 55, 83, 88, 131, 157 failure, 2, 7, 29-30, 37, 59, 61, 100, 115, 128, 145, 188, 191, 196, 198, 200-207, 221 feasibility, 160 feasible, 9, 91, 101, 160 feedback, 28-30, 96-97, 126, 128-130, 185, 191, 200-201 financers, 182 Fishbone Diagram, 210, 213 Forming, 21, 40, 104, 154-155 FMRI, 21 Gantt Chart, 162-164 GDP, 226-227 GIHI, 226-227 Gladwell, Malcolm 27, 138 Global Entrepreneurship, 219 GNH, 226-227 GNHI, 227 Goleman, Daniel 42-43, 45-46, 49, 53 Gross Domestic Product, 226-227 Gross Institutional Happiness Index, 226 Gross National Happiness, 226-227 habits, 9, 20, 22-23, 27-28, 32-35, 50, 173 habitually, 137 happiness, 29, 34, 38, 45, 58, 174, 217, 226-228 hardware, 20, 98, 104-106 hardwired, 19-20, 24 hardwiring, 27 HATI, 192 HATI, 192 217, 227-228 Holistic Education, 42, 44, 216-219, 223 Human Centred Design, 126, 128, 130, 132, 134, 136 humankind, 12-13, 69 ideation, 69, 71, 74, 76, 89-90 IDEO, 126 ikea, 111, 149-150 Implement, 3, 5, 8-9, 16, 27, 34, 72, 104, 106, 108, 115, 137, 155, 161, 175, 184, 194, 220, 228 implementation, 7, 104, 113, 118, 163, 175 Increase, 51-52, 71, 78-80, 85, 100, 159, 168, 177, 198, 210, 212 infrastructure, 16, 115 infrastructure, 16, 115 174, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 186-188, 190-192, 194, 196, 200 innovative, 14, 26, 49-50, 56, 72, 78, 88, 111, 174-175, 177-178, 188, 200, 219, 228 innovator, 173, 185, 186, 188, 201, 219 INSEAD, 78 inspiration, 89 inspirational, 29, 58-59 integrated, 7, 42, 44, 90, 93, 95, 106, 151-152, 176, 218 Integrated Design, 94, 98 intellectual, 9, 34, 53, 81, 91, 98, 145, 181, 200, 225 intelligence, 43, 67, 106, 137 intention, 77, 225 intentional, 4, 22-23, 27, 36, 38, 69, 127 intentionally, 6, 50 IQ, 43-44 Joffres, Kal 191-192 Kahneman, Daniel 35, 134-135 Kelly, David 34, 126 kickstarter, 194 Kim, W. Chan 78 Kohlieser, George 63 leader, 13, 29, 34, 55, 58-61, 71, 117, 120, 146, 152-153, 173 leadership, 55, 58-59, 121, 154-155, 178 Lean Entrepreneurship, 191, 194 Lean Startup, 191, 193 learner, 16, 21, 28, 151, 201 lifecycle, 3, 184-185, 187 logbook, 145 management, 5-6, 12, 57-59, 81, 104, management, 5-6, 12, 57-59, 81, 104, 170, 176, 226 170, 176, 226 160, 162, 164, 166, 168, 170, 172 Mann, Darrell 71 Manoeuvrability, 164 manufacturability, 91, 98, 100 marketability, 184 Massive Online Open Course, 220 mastery, 23, 27-29, 69, 138, 174, 198 Mauborgne, Renée 78 measurement, 43, 107, 132-133, 219 media, 13, 34, 61, 128, 165, 180, 190 medication, 37 mentor, 30 Mesopotamia, 10 methodology, 82, 147, 150, 214 Middle Brain, 24, 44, 46, 142 mindset, 2, 5, 19-20, 26-30, 36, 38, 42, 69, 173-174, 200, 217 mission, 50-52, 58, 65, 183 Mission Zero, 224-226, 228 MOOC, 16, 43, 55, 64, 173, 194, 217, 216-221, 223 multidisciplinary, 5, 104, 137, 155 myelin, 22-23, 27, 30-31, 50 myelinate, 26 myelinated, 23 myelination, 23, 31 Network Diagram, 166-167, 170 neuron, 21-23, 27-28, 30-31, 50, 53 neuroscience, 22, 25 New Brain, 24-25, 32, 44, 141 NGOs, 191-193 Norming, 154-155 Operate, 3, 5, 8-9, 11, 16, 27, 29, 34, 100, 102, 110-116, 118, 120, 122, 124, 127, 130-131, 137, 151, 155, 161, 175, 178, 182, 184, 220 optimisation, 98 optimise, 106 optimism, 49-50 optimistic, 20, 174 optimum, 115, 203 Orang Asli, 55-56 Organisation chart, 152-153, 183 outliers, 27 overdesign, 100 Panasonic, 215 Panzer, 214 paradigm, 29, 69-70, 174 passion, 2, 196, 219 PDM, 167 performance, 20, 27, 29-30, 81, 89, 94, 106, 156, 170, 173, 176, 184, 186-187, 191, 198, 200-203, 226 Performing, 15, 21, 23, 27, 42, 47, 50, 70, 78, 87, 97, 113, 133, 154-155, 168, 222 personalisation, 16, 88 Picasso, 138-139 Piketty,Thomas 224 pitchin, 194 Polaroid, 97-98 positivity, 196 pozible, 194-195 presentation, 143-144 project based, 122, 225 Project Based Learning, 2 proposal, 34, 144, 162, 164 Oei,John-Son 55-56 Old Brain, 24, 44, 140 openlearning, 190, 219 Random Entry, 74-77, 215 recyclability, 98 recyclable, 101 Reduce, 9, 15, 78, 80, 85-86, 90-91, 168, 204, 225 redundancy, 100 relationship, 42, 45-47, 50, 52, 58,122, 131, 142, 152, 161, 178, 181, 223 Relationship Management, 45, 58 reliability, 90-91, 100, 107 reliable, 7, 124 renewing, 47 reptilian, 24 requirements, 7, 17, 69-70, 83, 94-95, 97-99, 106-107, 115, 159, 169, 184, 222, 225 resilience, 217, 227 resilient, 42, 174 Return on Failure, 191, 198, 200, 202, 204, 206 revenue, 81, 180-181, 225 rewire, 196, 220 rewired, 49 rewiring, 27 Risk Management, 168 Root Cause Analysis, 210 Rumsfeld, Donald 204 SaniShop, 61 sanitation, 14, 61, 175 satisfaction, 159-161, 169-170, 196, 214, 217 scalable, 191 Segway, 187-188 Self Management, 45, 48-49, 223 Self Assessment, 47 Self Awareness, 42, 46 Shakespeare, 19 shareholder, 167-177 Sim, Jack 61-62 simulation, 98, 138, 143 Sinek, Simon 29 Social Awareness, 45, 53, 57, 63, 223 SOPs, 212 Stakeholders Management, 170 stimuli, 19-20, 24, 26, 43-44, 48-49 Storming, 54, 154-155 subsystem, 7, 37, 94-95, 97, 107 subtasks, 166 SUCCES, 138 success, 2, 20, 28-30, 34, 38, 43, 45, 53, 59, 64, 70, 118, 124, 137-138, 142, 144, 59, 64, 70, 118, 124, 137-138, 142, 144, 170, 172-173, 178, 182, 198, 200-205, 216-219, 221-223 SWOT, 47-48, 58 System Architecture, 94-96 systematic, 3-4, 9, 34-35, 69, 90, 124, 191, 209, 220, 228 systematically, 5, 44, 90, 214 systemic, 36 tactile, 19 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas 204 Tandemic, 191-192 Taylor's Racing Team, 107, 116-121, 151 teamwork, 7, 26, 45, 58, 137-138, 140, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150, 152, 154, 156, 158 Tesla, 4 Trend Recognition, 82 trimming, 77, 215 Tuckman Model, 153-154 Twitter, 88 uncertainty, 75, 204 Value, 3, 5, 9, 12, 15, 27-28, 49, 52, 69, 78-81, 90-91, 93, 124, 152, 156, 168, 78-81, 90-91, 93, 124, 152, 156, 168, 212, 214-215, 218-219, 225, 228 Verification, 106 viability, 204 viable, 9, 52, 55, 91, 101 Viagra, 205 vision, 29, 50-51, 58-60, 183, 219, 224, 228 Vodafail, 190 Vodafone, 189-190 Vujicic, Nick 68 Wagner, Tony 44 Warner, Jim 46 Warner, Jim 46 165 WD, 198-199 wellbeing, 218 WMSDs, 133 WTO, 61


pages: 231 words: 69,673

How Cycling Can Save the World by Peter Walker

active transport: walking or cycling, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, car-free, correlation does not imply causation, Crossrail, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, fixed-gear, gentrification, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, meta-analysis, New Journalism, New Urbanism, post-work, publication bias, safety bicycle, Sidewalk Labs, Stop de Kindermoord, TED Talk, the built environment, traffic fines, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, transit-oriented development, urban planning

— If you browse the various cycling-related products seeking investment on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, it’s easy to get a sense of the scale of this new industry built around a combination of poor road design and the overstatement of the perils this brings. There are cycling tops with LEDs sewn into the seams, ultrareflective beanie hats, bolt-on bike indicator lights controllable from the handlebars of your bike, even gloves with orange blinking lights. You can buy lights with combined HD cameras in case someone drives into you. These are all symptoms and exaggerations, not answers. Elsewhere on Kickstarter you soon reach that other category of bike-related inventions: the solution in search of a problem.


pages: 245 words: 68,420

Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

business logic, crowdsourcing, John Gruber, Kickstarter, linked data, machine readable, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, TechCrunch disrupt

With more than $150,000 in a bank account meant to pay content creators and producers, Readability disbanded the program and donated the bulk of its coffers to charity. Of course, Readability isn’t the only organization trying to come up with alternatives to the advertising business model. But despite all the Kickstarters and other services out there, it’s clear no one has a workable answer to the compensation question yet—and most publishers, already obsessed with pageviews and continually adding clutter to their sites, are struggling to do much besides get riled up and angry. Attribution, copyright, and compensation are weighty issues, to be sure—issues I’m pretty hesitant to predict the precise future of.

After all, it’s beyond obvious that the old pay-per-eyeball thing isn’t working, and that too often, it’s the content creators who are left in the lurch, paid peanuts for what’s often thoughtful, researched, complex work. If you care about solving the problem, then your first step is to get comfortable experimenting, too—to accept that this isn’t all figured out yet, and to be willing to do things differently and see what happens. From launching Kickstarter campaigns to fund content projects to publishing a long article as a Kindle Single—a short ebook that Amazon sells for just a few dollars—there are lots of avenues to explore once you stop clinging to the old model. That doesn’t mean any of them are perfect, but they’re a place to start. And they won’t get better unless we work on them.


pages: 270 words: 64,235

Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code by Jeff Atwood

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, endowment effect, fail fast, Firefox, fizzbuzz, Ford Model T, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Chrome, gravity well, Hacker News, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Merlin Mann, Minecraft, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, price anchoring, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, science of happiness, Skype, social software, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. That’s why I don’t want to hear people’s ideas. I’m not interested until I see their execution. I was reminded of Mr. Sivers article when this email made the rounds earlier this month: I feel that this story is important to tell you because Kickstarter.com copied us. I tried for 4 years to get people to take Fundable seriously, traveling across the country, even giving a presentation to FBFund, Facebook’s fund to stimulate development of new apps. It was a series of rejections for 4 years. I really felt that I presented myself professionally in every business situation and I dressed appropriately and practiced my presentations.

I really felt that I presented myself professionally in every business situation and I dressed appropriately and practiced my presentations. That was not enough. The idiots wanted us to show them charts with massive profits and widespread public acceptance so that they didn’t have to take any risks. All it took was 5 super-connected people at Kickstarter (especially Andy Baio) to take a concept we worked hard to refine, tweak it with Amazon Payments, and then take credit. You could say that that’s capitalism, but I still think you should acknowledge people that you take inspiration from. I do. I owe the concept of Fundable to many things, including living in cooperative student housing and studying Political Science at Michigan.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Sometimes the adults who design systems can forget how much younger users are invested in finding ways to fill their downtime. Television, music, and video games can all be seen as preemployment time fillers for adolescents, and even those self-styled “rejuveniles” who are choosing not to abandon the games and pastimes of their youth.22 But those with the desire and access to the culture machine can kick-start their own do-it-yourself (DIY) movements. There are deep desires to categorize and annotate one’s own life as well as the lives of one’s friends and community. This moment is not about professional narratives so much as the development of new tools to create letters, diaries, photo collages, and home movies.23 At its best, these DIY archives transform lived experiences not into commodities sold back to us but instead as realized memory traces that we construct ourselves and communicate to communities of interest.

Like the Aquarians, he saw this work as a gift, and he offered all of this free of royalties for his inventions and patents—meaning that anybody or everybody could develop the Web. A few years later, Marc Andreesen and a group of other Web developers launched their own browser, known as Netscape, kick-starting the Web bubble of the mid- to late 1990s. This ignited a frenzy of wealth building, earned Berners-Lee a knighthood, and encouraged otherwise-sane people to claim that the invention of the Web had more potential than the discovery of fire. Hyperbole, to be sure, but there is no doubt that the Web was transforming the culture machine.


pages: 272 words: 64,626

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

Still, with a little forethought . . . Same thing for high finance. I worked on Wall Street just as lower trading commissions democratized the bull market beyond banks and pension funds. Fixed 75-cent-per-share commissions began evaporating after Wall Street’s Big Bang of 1975, which brought negotiated commissions. Lower inflation kick-started the bull market, but it was individuals paying 25-cent commissions, then 12-cent, then 6-cent commissions on their way to a pennyper-share net that provided the steam to drive it ever higher. TI sold calculators, Intel sold microprocessors, Motorola sold StarTAC cell phones. It was the abundance of those transistors that got things cheap enough to change entire industries, and I found myself smack dab in the middle of it.

Aerosmith and Metallica have had their libraries of songs stolen, so they allow them to be incorporated into the video game Guitar Hero; millions pay for the opportunity to play along with their favorite tracks. Very high definition movies are too big, for now, to download, so Blu-ray disc sales continue to grow. As we know, iTunes is tightly linked to iPods’ legitimized digital music sales. The Amazon Kindle e-book is a start, trying to kick-start a protectable electronic book platform. And newspapers and magazines need to create more than just a display bucket to webify their print words. New services—from alerts to social networking to finance to sports fan participation—need to do things paper versions can’t do. Stuff that is hard if not impossible to copy and steal.


pages: 197 words: 67,764

The Wichita Lineman: Searching in the Sun for the World's Greatest Unfinished Song by Dylan Jones

Donald Trump, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Kickstarter, Norman Mailer, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea

That feeling of boundlessness, I get chills a little bit thinking about it.’ Coincidentally, Campbell would often complain about suffering from claustrophobia, too, hating being contained within small places and increasingly thinking about home. Logically, this made no sense, as he needed to go west in order to make his fortune, which was kick-started by hundreds of hours cooped up in tiny recording studios; but towards the end of his career Campbell longed for the Big Country, and his interviews would be full of references to being trapped. The Webb clan lived in a trailer the size of a rowboat, situated at the end of the runway at Sheppard Air Force Base.

He was referring, obliquely, to his enormous canvas capturing the agony when the Luftwaffe and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria, at General Franco’s behest, carpet-bombed the Basque town of Guernica. Yet on the subject of painting, Picasso was just about as wrong as a genius can be. Social commentary is a spectrum, and not every work of art has the ambition of Guernica, just as not every song wants to kick-start a revolution. Painting, in common with all of the arts, invariably acts as a second- or third-hand accompaniment or counterpoint to its locale, a way of lifting the spirits in a darkened room or giving a Caribbean sunset extra gravitas. In some cases it’s designed to fit into the service lifts of Upper East Side apartment blocks, and in others it’s designed to sit in the lobbies of large Swiss banks.


Great American Railroad Journeys by Michael Portillo

Alistair Cooke, California gold rush, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, invention of the telephone, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, railway mania, short selling, the High Line, transcontinental railway, union organizing

Massachusetts, the home of America’s first railroad at Quincy, had three completed routes by 1835. More expansion followed the drawing of this 1853 map, and by 1870 it had one mile of railroad for every five and a half square miles of territory and per 954 inhabitants. TO BOLDLY GO . . . The work of Ross Winans was so admired in Europe that he was invited to kick-start the railroad age in Russia. In 1843 he sent sons Thomas and William, along with George W. Whistler, to Russia to help fashion the ambitious St Petersburg and Moscow railroad, Tsar Nicholas I’s belated entry into the technological age. A career spent assiduously protecting his inventions by patents helped to ensure he amassed a $20 million fortune before his death, when one obituary called him ‘a bold and original thinker’.

But Lincoln dreamt of better things and joined the legal profession, where his law partner noted: ‘His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.’ During his tenure, however, Lincoln did forge links with the nation’s burgeoning railroad system that are recalled to this day. It was by rail that Lincoln chose to enter Washington from his distant Illinois home after he was elected. As president, he signed the legal paperwork that kick-started the route that finally linked the east and west coasts. And, mournfully, the rail journey that took his body home after he was assassinated was talked about in hushed tones for years afterwards, as the country came together in a sense of shared grief. This rare photo shows Lincoln (circled) in the crowd at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, before his 1863 address.


The Polytunnel Book: Fruit and Vegetables All Year Round by Joyce Russell

clean water, Kickstarter, working poor

If this is a problem, raise them off the ground with twiggy sticks. Beefsteak varieties are always slower to ripen than cherry ones. Don’t be impatient: these giants of the tomato world will colour up nicely next month. If tomatoes are slow to ripen in a dull year, place a banana or one or two red tomatoes among the green trusses. These will help kick-start the ripening process. If border soil dries out rapidly, it is worth using a mulch. Using a mulch of comfrey is a great way to provide tomatoes with potash, but mix it with something like grass clippings to give better coverage over bare soil. Remember to keep feeding with liquid feeds, such as seaweed, every seven to ten days.

I don’t know why, but I find that pumpkins and squash grown in a polytunnel don’t keep quite as long as those grown outdoors. Butternut squash Liquid feed Plants in a polytunnel keep growing for more of the winter than ones grown outdoors. Any bit of sunshine can raise soil temperature and boost growth. Make a brew of liquid feed in the autumn and it will be perfect to give plants a kick-start in the early months of next year. If comfrey or nettles are growing in the garden, cut them now and put them to soak in a bin full of water. If possible, add some seaweed too. All are rich in minerals and will produce an excellent liquid feed (see Part 7). Enjoy the September harvest Tomatoes Aubergines Cucumbers Peppers Grapes Basil Sweetcorn Lettuce Salad leaves French beans Melons Butternut squash Courgettes September harvest Some harvesting hints • The grape harvest should be in full swing.


Chasing Slow: Courage to Journey Off the Beaten Path by Erin Loechner

clean water, fear of failure, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, Kintsugi, late fees, Mason jar, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson

* * * MY FAVORITE STYLING (AND LIFE?) TRICKS 001. When in doubt, add a plant. A rubber plant is foolproof to start with—nearly impossible to kill—and it’s known to clear the air of formaldehydes, chemicals, harmful vapors. You’ll have to clear the rest of the toxins (bitterness, regret, discontent) yourself, but a kickstart helps. No one ever said no to a little helping hand from nature. 002. Edit, edit, edit! Say no to the newest dish towel pattern. Resist another limited-edition hand-poured balsamic cedar soy candle. Practice self-control in the stationery aisle at Target, even when the floral envelopes are on sale.

While nursing Bee, I found she was allergic to milk and I’d need to cut out all dairy products. After researching many of today’s most-relied-upon foods and their alternate effects on digestion, I embarked on a thirty-day challenge to “just eat real food.” No processed foods, refined sugars, grains, or dairy products. The experience was transformative, and for a thirty-day kickstart to your own life change, I highly recommend whole30.com. X. You know, the X on your web browser? Click on it today. Get offline and get outside. This is my answer to a slower day, each and every time. Yoga. I don’t know what happened exactly, but all of a sudden here I am, borderline obsessed with yoga.


pages: 245 words: 71,886

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar, Anjana Ahuja

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bioinformatics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, dual-use technology, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, machine translation, nudge unit, open economy, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, side project, social distancing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, zoonotic diseases

In turn, those three would spread it to another nine in total; those nine to another 27. That is the nature of exponential spread. That WHO R&D Blueprint Meeting put the agency at the centre of the global response and served as the catalyst that got the world moving: the sharing of samples; more companies starting vaccine work; the kick-starting of networked clinical trials across the world that would allow us to pool findings on potential treatments. That meeting, plus the sense of urgency that many of us had radiated at Davos, was why we got Covid-19 diagnostics, treatments, vaccines in less than a year. ‘Are you a spy?’ asked the taxi driver, as I jumped into his cab at Munich airport on Friday 14 February 2020.

Action means a public health response, like isolation and social distancing, plus diagnostics, drugs and vaccines. If the WHO has been perceived by some to be toothless, it is because the 194 member states who collectively decide what it does voted for it to be that way. (Contrary to those perceptions, the agency played a critical role in guiding countries, fast-tracking research, kick-starting clinical trials and setting up the ACT-Accelerator.) Each member sends delegates to the World Health Assembly, and it is the assembly which appoints the director general and decides what the WHO does. The WHO did not police global health in the manner that many felt it should during the pandemic, because it was not designed or empowered to.


pages: 194 words: 63,798

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy by Moiya McTier

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Burning Man, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Webb Space Telescope, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, overview effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Sadly, Jo was overwhelmed by the crushing weight and negative energy from the supermassive black hole at its center. The black hole stole or heated up so much of Jo’s gas that it couldn’t make any more stars. It would have been so easy for Jo to do nothing and let its black hole finish the job. But about a billion years ago, in a last-ditch effort to overcome its black hole’s death grip and kick-start some star formation, Jo started careening towards the center of Abell 85 faster than the speed of sound. “Supersonic,” your scientists call it. Abell 85 is a large galaxy cluster, home to about five hundred galaxies. Jo knew that passing through a dense environment like that (not as dense as a black hole, of course, but still packed together compared to the pressureless vacuum of space) at such high speeds would force the gas near its edges to mix and make new stars.

Most scientists would dismiss Boltzmann Brains as silly, but that doesn’t stop physicists from getting into the most frustrating conversations about whether all of human existence is just one random brain floating for an instant in the universe. 3 Brown dwarfs are the limbo space between planets and stars. They aren’t massive enough to kick-start and sustain hydrogen fusion in their cores, though some of them get massive enough to fuse deuterium (also called heavy hydrogen) for a short while. Astronomers sometimes joke that brown dwarfs are failed stars, but we’re still trying to figure out where the mass cutoff between success and failure is.


pages: 376 words: 121,254

Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over the World by Thomas Feiling

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Caribbean Basin Initiative, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, drug harm reduction, gentrification, illegal immigration, informal economy, inventory management, Kickstarter, land reform, Lao Tzu, mandatory minimum, moral panic, offshore financial centre, RAND corporation, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, trade route, upwardly mobile, yellow journalism

Hoping to break this impasse, in the last third of the book I ask some basic questions. How much harm does cocaine do its users? Why do some people become dependent on cocaine while others don’t? What kind of treatment works best for those who want to quit cocaine? I hope that the answers I found and the conclusions I draw go some way to kick-starting the debate over how best to manage drug use in the future. Given the abject failure of current drug policy, the need for a workable alternative isn’t going to go away anytime soon. Author’s Note In June 2009, Barack Obama appointed Gil Kerlikowske as drug tsar. Many critics of the war on drugs had hoped that the new president would appoint somebody with a background in public health to head the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

These children have seen their parents be called crack-heads, they’ve seen the devastation, and they don’t want any part of it. For them, it’s heavy, heavy marijuana smoking.’ Neither the rise of the crack economy, nor the war on drugs could put young people off drug-taking for good. In 1999, more than half the students of the United States had tried an illegal drug of some kind. The marijuana drought that kick-started the crack economy had not lasted long, and by the late 1990s, marijuana was cheaper and more readily available than ever; 82 per cent of high school seniors said that they found it easy to get their hands on marijuana.8 Teenage marijuana smokers began cussing crack users for their compulsiveness and even assaulting them out of sheer spite.

Mass drug addiction is a recent phenomenon that has flourished in a specific culture, one notable for the stresses that many of those who live in it have to bear and the solitude that many of them bear it in. But modern city dwellers don’t just take drugs to escape the world. They also take drugs in a misguided attempt to kick-start their participation in it. They are actively encouraged to believe that there is a product that can be bought that can satisfy their every desire, including their desire to participate more fully or escape entirely. The market for escape is partially fed by our notions of success, many of which are as prohibitive and exclusive as our favourite goods.


pages: 433 words: 124,454

The Burning Answer: The Solar Revolution: A Quest for Sustainable Power by Keith Barnham

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Arthur Eddington, carbon footprint, credit crunch, decarbonisation, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, wikimedia commons

A lesser-known consequence of these events was a delay in the start of the semiconductor revolution by 16 years. After the war ended, the relatively new industrial laboratories in the US could redirect their attention from the war effort. By looking back at the progress of the quantum revolution in 1931, they were able to kick-start the semiconductor revolution. The entanglement of physics and politics that resulted from these events has had important ramifications for the development of the solar revolution. As we will see, President Eisenhower’s description of civil nuclear power as ‘Atoms for Peace’ was something of a misnomer.

But, as Orton points out, the early integrated circuits were very expensive. The new industry might have floundered before reaching commercial viability had it not been for US strategic ambitions, in particular, President John F. Kennedy’s decision in May 1961 to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. As Orton puts it ‘such a dramatic kick-start to a technological revolution smacked of divine intervention by a Higher Being …’ A new type of transistor was particularly suited to the new integrated circuits. This was called the field-effect transistor. It worked just with electrons, directly mimicking de Forest’s triode valve and operating near the surface of the crystal.

Being of lower quality and requiring less energy input, polycrystalline silicon is cheaper than crystalline silicon. It is also cheaper because, at least until recently, the young PV industry used silicon produced for, but discarded by, the silicon chip industry. Take-off for the solar revolution When, at last, towards the end of the twentieth century, the governments of Germany and Japan decided to kick-start the solar revolution with incentive schemes, polycrystalline silicon solar cells took their place in the van of the revolution. Demand grew, mass production took over and the price of the cells started falling as these governments had expected. Then, in 2004, costs stopped falling as a polycrystalline silicon shortage developed.


pages: 468 words: 124,573

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time by George Berkowski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business intelligence, call centre, crowdsourcing, deal flow, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, Paul Graham, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, ubercab, Y Combinator

While Google Glass has received a lot of attention because of Google’s profile, another equally fascinating, and potentially even more disruptive, technology company has captured headline. It is called Oculus VR and it might just be the first company to bring virtual reality to the masses. The company’s founder Palmer Luckey is a self-proclaimed virtual reality enthusiast and hardware geek. He launched a campaign on crowd-funding website kickstarter back in 2012 to build the Oculus Rift – a groundbreaking virtual reality headset for immersive gaming. The campaign was beyond successful and raised not only $2.4 million in funding, but also won the support of three huge gaming companies: Valve, Epic Games and Unity. That success attracted some of the gaming world’s best talent, almost $100 million in venture capital funding and the acquisition of the company by Facebook in March 2014 for $2 billion.

Advances in hardware, sensors, batteries, operating systems and platforms are now adapting to our lives and the way we prefer to do things. This is a huge shift towards convenience, usability and utility – and it’s a shift that will only become more pronounced. At the same time we’ve seen that you need to focus on big universal problems or needs – combined with a disruptive approach – to kick-start a billion-dollar app. As we’ll discover in Part II, founders of groundbreaking apps don’t just stumble into something great: they have fantastically ambitious visions from Day One. It is a combination of this vision to solve existing problems in novel ways, the refusal to take no for an answer and persevering in the face of scepticism that has launched apps that have changed our lives.

It’s by far the most impressive site of its kind, and it’s becoming increasingly global. Angel groups are very localised, so you’ll need to do some research in your local capital city or tech hub to see who is active. Check out mybilliondollarapp.com as well – I’ve put together a few great collections in 15 major cities to help kick-start your search. Venture Capitalists You’ve probably come across the name before, but what are venture capitalists (or VCs)? VCs are simply very experienced and knowledgeable (well, some of them) bankers. Just like normal bankers, they will lend you money. Unlike normal bankers they don’t charge interest!


pages: 62 words: 15,274

Sass for Web Designers by Dan Cederholm

c2.com, don't repeat yourself, Firefox, Kickstarter, Ruby on Rails, web application

More Sass and responsive design In particular, these two articles on responsive web design in Sass and media queries helped me craft Chapter 4 (http://bkaprt.com/sass/25/, http://bkaprt.com/sass/26/). Breakpoint: A plugin for Sass that makes writing media queries even simpler (http://bkaprt.com/sass/27/). Susy: A helper for Compass and Sass for creating responsive grid systems (http://bkaprt.com/sass/28/). Sassaparilla: A kick-start framework for creating responsive web design projects using Compass and Sass. Also has a great name (http://bkaprt.com/sass/29/). Sass tools FireSass for Firebug: A handy Firefox add-on that will display the original Sass filename and line number of Sass-compiled stylesheets, for debugging (http://bkaprt.com/sass/30/).


pages: 55 words: 17,493

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon

David Heinemeier Hansson, dumpster diving, Golden Gate Park, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Russell Brand, side project, Wunderkammern

These links do well with a little bit of human copy, such as “Like this? Buy me a coffee.” This is a very simple transaction, which is the equivalent of a band passing a hat during a gig—if people are digging what you do, they’ll throw a few bucks your way. If you have work you want to attempt that requires some up-front capital, platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo make it easy to run fund-raising campaigns with tiered rewards for donors. It’s important to note that these platforms work best when you’ve already gathered a group of people who are into what you do. The musician Amanda Palmer has had wild success turning her audience into patrons: After showing her work, sharing her music freely, and cultivating relationships with her fans, she asked for $100,000 from them to help record her next album.


pages: 231 words: 71,248

Shipping Greatness by Chris Vander Mey

business logic, corporate raider, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fudge factor, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, performance metric, recommendation engine, Skype, slashdot, sorting algorithm, source of truth, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, two-pizza team, web application

The first job is maintaining the software that’s in production and is almost certainly experiencing some kind of growing pains. The second job is spinning up the new project, and if it’s like most projects, it requires a huge amount of activation energy to kick-start and substantial mental toughness to survive the inevitable shin bashing as that kick-starter smacks you. Being in transition is a tough place to be, so make the transition short. Make it shorter than you think it should be. If you’ve ever noticed that things at the office go better than you’d expect when you take a long vacation, you’ll find that the same is true when you walk away from your old project.


pages: 244 words: 70,369

Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good by Kevin Smith

do what you love, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, McJob, Saturday Night Live, short selling, zero-sum game

This shaggy paean to those who follow the road not taken offered me a glimpse into a free-associative world of ideas instead of plot, people instead of characters, and Nowheresville, Texas, instead of the usual California or New York settings most movies elected to feature. That Nowheresville was actually Austin speaks volumes on how culturally bereft and state-capital ignorant I was at the time. That night, Richard Linklater and his film not only captured my imagination, they kick-started my ambition. The simplicity of the story and filmmaking, the unpolished cast, the nontraditional storytelling—it was like cumming with someone else for the first time: Suddenly, you never wanted to cum by yourself again; figuratively speaking, this movie was teaching me how to fuck. By the time we hit the turnpike tollbooth on the Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel, I finally said it aloud.

Scott and I sat with Dershowitz at a press conference, where the legendary lawyer insisted his teenage kid should be able to watch Clerks as a precautionary tale without needing permission from a parent to do so, because the moral of the story he wanted his son to be able to learn was so essential: Go to college or you’ll end up like these two losers behind convenience-store counters. When the time came to actually face the MPAA and argue for an R over the NC-17, we were repped by a Miramax lawyer. Alan Dershowitz, it seemed, only had been retained for that press conference to kick-start publicity. But pay him to actually be a lawyer on the film’s behalf? Why bother! All that freedom of speech and anticensorship talk was hot air, as Harvey told us that if the MPAA upheld the NC-17, then editing out the objectionable material was going to be our next step. We’d take on the establishment to a point, but only for the noise it created.


pages: 243 words: 76,686

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Airbnb, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Burning Man, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, context collapse, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, full employment, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, Minecraft, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Port of Oakland, Results Only Work Environment, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Snapchat, source of truth, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, union organizing, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 81. Conclusion 1. Wendell Berry, “A Native Hill,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, ed. Norman Wirzba (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2002), 27. 2. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 197. 3. T. L. Simons quoted in “Long Lost Oakland,” Kickstarter, 2018: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/eastbayyesterday/long-lost-oakland. 4. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2007), 257. 5. Martha A. Sandweiss, “John Gast, American Progress, 1872,” Picturing United States History: https://picturinghistory.gc.cuny.edu/john-gast-american-progress-1872/ 6.


pages: 381 words: 78,467

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

Aside from the important work that has resulted in creating replacement body parts, altering genes, and better understanding aging, there is another huge reason to be optimistic about the prospects of rebuilding humans when they get sick: the ability to sequence the human genome, or the complete set of human DNA. The Human Genome Project (HGP), which was coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), kick-started this field. Francis Collins, now the director of the NIH, was the leader of the HGP, which set as its goal to sequence all the DNA in the human body. On June 26, 2000, the first draft of the human blueprint was announced at the White House. “Humankind is on the verge of gaining immense new power to heal.

According to David Popenoe, codirector of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, “As of 2002, over 50 percent of women ages 19 to 44 had cohabited for a portion of their lives, compared to 33 percent in 1987 and virtually none a hundred years ago.”39 However, if cohabitation hadn’t kick-started with the sexual revolution, it would have happened anyway in response to longer life expectancies. That’s because it is a relationship structure that allows individuals to be in a serious relationship without being forced to make a premature lifelong commitment. Waiting until the time is right works in tandem with planning a marriage that is more likely to be stable and happy; couples have time to figure out who they are and what kind of relationship is best for them.


pages: 333 words: 76,990

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets by Peter Oppenheimer

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computer age, credit crunch, data science, debt deflation, decarbonisation, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, household responsibility system, housing crisis, index fund, invention of the printing press, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Live Aid, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, stocks for the long run, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, tulip mania, yield curve

Although there is insufficient data on interest rates to show this for all the cyclical bear markets throughout history, in most cases there is a tendency for equity markets to begin to recover after a period of falling rates. Although this can sometimes take a period of time, because the initial rate falls may not be enough to generate expectations of an imminent economic recovery, an easing of monetary policy is usually an important part of the process of kick-starting growth again and pushing equity prices higher. Various factors are common to cyclical bear markets. Taking the history of these types of bear markets together shows us that the average cyclical bear market experiences a fall of about 30% and lasts for about 27 months. The level of the market has, on average, not recovered to its previous level until just over 4 years after the decline in nominal terms, and 6 years in real terms (although the averages in real terms are highly variable).

In this way, it is not always easy to recognise where a particular event-driven crisis ends as the shock often triggers follow-on waves of rising uncertainty, falling investment and, possibly, an economic downturn. Oftentimes, such events, particularly if traumatic, can elicit a powerful policy response that kick-starts a recovery or fuels another problem. For example, the Russian debt default and Asian crises of 1997/1998 resulted in a global easing of monetary policy at a time when domestic demand in the developed economies was strong. The cost of capital fell still further. Import costs fell sharply and boosted already strong corporate margins.


pages: 250 words: 75,151

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place by Felix Marquardt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, digital nomad, Donald Trump, George Floyd, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joi Ito, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sustainable-tourism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Yogi Berra, young professional

It allows us to show compassion towards both victims of racism: the immigrant and the racist. Of course, embarking on an external journey does not guarantee we will embark on the crucial internal journey that may eventually allow us to leave Othering behind. But it can play a decisive role in kickstarting that process. This is exactly what happened to Abdi and Jeff. Abdramane thrived at Ranch Sieben because his external journeys, from his childhood walks to his international travels, were mirrored by an internal journey that had taught him, fundamentally, that whether you’re in Mali or Montana, people have plenty in common with each other.

Beyond the essentials of life like shelter and food – which may be grudgingly given – refugees also need to be offered a community. Too often, though, the bureaucratic processes that surround asylum claims isolate them. These processes can separate them from other refugees and, perhaps more importantly, from the host population. Upon arrival, we should be doing everything we can to kickstart the refugee’s ability to start building a network and become part of a community – and in this digital age, as shown by the EVE Online example, it is easier than ever to meet somebody who shares an interest of yours in real life. Unfortunately, however, a set of policies adopted in many countries, from Britain’s Hostile Environment to the United States’ border internment camps, frustrates refugees’ ability to build community.


pages: 257 words: 77,612

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime by Bradley Hope

Airbnb, battle of ideas, bitcoin, blockchain, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital map, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, operational security, Potemkin village, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Then he took peanut butter jars, completely cleaned out with soap, and put the remaining coleslaw vegetables inside, adding garlic powder and a squeeze of sweet-and-sour sauce. Sugar, or even ingredients that contained sugar, was hard to come by inside because it could be used to brew alcohol. But the sweet-and-sour sauce had just enough to kick-start the fermentation process. Ahn stored the jars filled with his concoction in bread bags under his bed. After a week, he revealed his creation of jailhouse kimchi to the other prisoners. It was a hit. * * * — Finally, the work of Christopher Ahn’s legal team seemed to be paying off. On July 16, 2019, Judge Jean Rosenbluth, of the U.S.

Sources are the unsung heroes of journalism, and some of mine took big risks to help me understand their world better. In 2021, my longtime friend and collaborator Tom Wright and I left our jobs at The Wall Street Journal to found a journalism start-up company called Project Brazen. This book was one of the first two projects we launched at the company, with all of the proceeds used to kick-start the business, hire staff, and invest in storytelling. My thanks to Tom for reviewing parts of the manuscript and offering his friendship and support always. Many thanks also to Project Brazen’s advisers, Stefano Quadrio Curzio and David Giampaolo. Paul Whitlatch, the talented editor who commissioned Tom’s and my first book, Billion Dollar Whale, in 2018, as well as a second book, which I co-authored with Justin Scheck, Blood and Oil, convinced me that I had it in me for a third book project in only six years.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

In the first week, more than 3,500 people from the United States, China, Japan, France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Korea, Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda contributed a total of $4 million. There was no brokerage, no investment bank, no stock exchange, no mandatory filings, no regulator, and no lawyers. There wasn’t even a Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the blockchain IPO. Matching investors with entrepreneurs is one of the eight functions of the financial services industry most likely to be disrupted. The process of raising equity capital—through private placements, initial public offerings, secondary offerings, and private investments in public equities (PIPEs)—has not changed significantly since the 1930s.78 Thanks to new crowdfunding platforms, small companies can access capital using the Internet.

The Oculus Rift and the Pebble Watch were early successes of this model. Still, participants couldn’t buy equity directly. Today, the U.S. Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act allows small investors to make direct investments in crowdfunding campaigns, but investors and entrepreneurs still need intermediaries such as Kickstarter or Indiegogo, and a conventional payment method, typically credit cards and PayPal, to participate. The intermediary is the ultimate arbiter of everything, including who owns what. The blockchain IPO takes the concept further. Now, companies can raise funds “on the blockchain” by issuing tokens, or cryptosecurities, of some value in the company.

In 2009, she became the first woman to win a Grammy solo for engineering her own album, Ellipse. She took all her Twitter followers to the award ceremony by wearing what has become known as the “Twitter dress.” Her outfit, designed by Moritz Waldemeyer, featured an LED zipper that streamed her fans’ tweets around her shoulders. In 2013, Heap kick-started the nonprofit Mi.Mu to invent a musical glove system. It combines mapping software with motion detection sensors so that performers can control lights, music, and video with user-customized gestures. The invention won top prize at the 2015 Berlin Awards for WearableIT/FashionTech. The gloves are quickly catching on.


pages: 567 words: 122,311

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, constrained optimization, data science, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, frictionless market, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, Network effects, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, platform as a service, power law, price elasticity of demand, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social software, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, web application, Y Combinator

Abandonment Not everyone buys something. At its simplest, abandonment rate is the opposite of conversion rate. But a purchasing process often has several steps—reviewing items in a shopping cart, providing shipping information, entering billing details, and so on. In some cases, the process may even involve a third-party site: Kickstarter sends users to Amazon to provide their credit card information, and Eventbrite links to PayPal so buyers can pay for tickets. The number of people who abandon a funnel at each of these stages is the abandonment rate. It’s important to analyze it for each step in order to see which parts of the process are hurting you the most.

Customers will often rationalize away the risk and pocket the savings. But if you make money from revenues, then the customer will likely split the winnings with you. Products that boost revenues are easier for people to believe in—just look at lotteries and get-rich-quick schemes versus savings plans and life insurance. Eventbrite and Kickstarter know this. An ecosystem will form around you. This is similar to the platform model. Salesforce and Photoshop are good examples of this: Salesforce’s App Exchange has thousands of third-party applications that make the CRM (customer relationship management) provider more useful and customizable, and Photoshop’s plug-in model added features to the application far more quickly than if Adobe had coded them all itself.

Changes in churn, segmented by channels, show whether you’re growing your most important asset—your customers—or hemorrhaging attention as you scale. Buffer Goes from Stickiness to Scale (Through Revenue) Buffer is a startup that was founded in 2010 by Tom Moor, Leo Widrich, and Joel Gascoigne. Joel kick-started Buffer because of a pain he was experiencing: the difficulty of posting great content he was finding regularly to Twitter. Solutions already existed for scheduling tweets, but nothing as simple and easy to use as what Joel was looking for, so he joined forces with Tom and Leo, and they built Buffer.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

The plan was to entice multinationals to set up Asian operations at Songdo, where they would be able to reach any of East Asia’s boomtowns quickly by air. It was to be a special economic zone, with lower taxes and less regulation, inspired by those created in Shenzhen and Shanghai in the 1980s by premier Deng Xiaoping, which kick-started China’s economic rise.15 But in an odd twist of fate, Songdo now aspires to be a model for China instead. The site itself is deeply symbolic. Viewed from the sky, its street grid forms an arrow aimed straight at the heart of coastal China. It is a kind of neoliberal feng shui diagram, drawing energy from the rapidly urbanizing nation just over the western horizon.

That is holding them back. Smart cities could also evolve from the bottom up, if we let them. Both the evolution of the Internet, and the history of city planning, shows us that. But it is also crucial to recognize that the Internet didn’t just emerge out of thin air. The US government played a huge role in kick-starting it. As Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote, “Private enterprise had no interest in something so visionary and complex, with questionable commercial opportunities. Indeed, the private corporation that then owned monopoly control over America’s communications network, AT&T, fought tooth and nail against the ARPANet,” the Defense Department’s research network that pioneered the technologies that power the Internet.40 One can find National Science Foundation research grants in the DNA of almost every major advance in the software, hardware, and network designs that power the Internet today.

As Jacob explained to me later, in August 2012 he had taken on a new role advising his peers in several other American cities on how to replicate the success of the Office of New Urban Mechanics. Philadelphia, the first to come knocking “actually called and asked ‘Can we just franchise what you guys do?’ ” Jacob proudly said.53 He was also working to help spread to other cities some of the projects kick-started in Boston. One such tool, Community PlanIt, was an online game designed by Eric Gordon, a visual and media arts professor at Emerson College, to enhance the value of community meetings. When we spoke, Community PlanIt had been successfully rolled out in two of Boston’s suburbs as well as Detroit.


pages: 459 words: 128,458

The Dream of the Iron Dragon by Robert Kroese

friendly fire, gravity well, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, pattern recognition, time dilation

Hell, they’d left so little mark on North America that nobody had known for sure until the 1960s that the Vikings had been there. No, hiding a note under a rock wasn’t going to cut it. If they were going to change the future, they were going to have to go big. Go to Otto I with plans for the steam engine and the Bessemer furnace. Show his advisers the formula for gunpowder and teach them how to make penicillin. Kickstart the industrial revolution seven hundred years early. Then when humanity finally met the Cho-ta’an, they’d be so far ahead technologically that they’d be able to set the terms. There was, of course, no way to know what sorts of side effects such an action would have on history. Maybe humanity would wipe itself out with nuclear weapons in the fourteenth century.

The Dawn of the Iron Dragon follows the crew of Andrea Luhman as they establish a secret facility in Iceland and then trade, negotiate and pillage their way across Europe, contending with power-hungry kings and devious Cho-ta’an agents, with one goal in mind: to build a ship capable of reaching space. The Dawn of the Iron Dragon will go on sale on Amazon in May 2018, but you can get an advance copy by pre-ordering in hardcover, paperback or ebook. Unless you got in on the Saga of the Iron Dragon Kickstarter, this is your only chance to get a hardcover. I’ll even sign it for you! Pre-order your copy now! Review This Book! Did you enjoy The Dream of the Iron Dragon? Please take a moment to leave a review on Amazon.com! Reviews are very important for getting the word out to other readers, and it only takes a few seconds.

Lucy Rogers, author of It’s Only Rocket Science, who helped me with the space travel stuff; Jackson Crawford, translator of the Poetic Edda, who kept me from mangling Old Norse too badly; Michael Carpenter, who checked my chemistry; Jake Steinman, who assisted with the sailing parts; and Charles Morello, who helped me with the railgun specs and combat tactics; My beta readers: Suzy Cilbrith, Bill Curtis, Mark Fitzgerald, Lauren Foley, Brian Galloway, Mike Hull, Scott Lavery, Christopher Majava, Viktor Nehring, Paul Alan Piatt and Mark Thompson; And the Saga of the Iron Dragon Kickstarter supporters, including: Tom Cannon, Chris DeBrusk, Rick DeVos, Christopher Finlan, Brian and Donna Hekman, Tom Hickok, Aaron James, Andrea Luhman, Arnie M., Matthew J McCormick, Steven Mentzel, Kristi Michels, Cara Miller, Kyle “Fiddy” Pinches, Chad and Denise Rogers, Justin Schumacher, Thomas James Slater, Johannes Stauffer, Christopher Turner, and Gabe Zuehlsdorf.


pages: 432 words: 143,491

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus by Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott

Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, gig economy, global pandemic, high-speed rail, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, lockdown, nudge unit, open economy, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Skype, social distancing, zoonotic diseases

We asked them whether Britain was equipped to fight a pandemic and if the politicians understood the severity of the threat. We wanted to know what the scientists told ministers and why so little was done to equip the National Health Service for the difficult days ahead. Why was it that the government failed to act more swiftly to kick-start the Whitehall machine and put the NHS onto a war footing, and what were the consequences? They told us that, contrary to the official line, Britain was not in a state of readiness for the pandemic. Emergency stockpiles of personal protective equipment (PPE) had severely dwindled and were out of date because they had become a low priority in the years of austerity cuts.

Located at the very centre of China, Wuhan grew around an inland port on the banks of the Yangtze, the world’s third largest river behind the Nile and the Amazon. The dusty orange waters of the river cleave the city in two as it flows west to east from the Tibetan plateau to the coast at Shanghai. Wuhan was one of the great engines of China’s industrial revolution, kick-starting the country’s steel industry and becoming a major manufacturing centre for textiles, machinery and consumer products. But it is also a place of much political symbolism as the birthplace of the Chinese Republic, which was formed after an uprising in its Wuchang district in 1911. The revolution overthrew the Qing dynasty, the country’s last imperial rulers, and led finally to the abdication of the six-year-old Puyi, who became known as the ‘last’ Emperor.

‘As soon as the first whiff of something came out of Wuhan what the good regimes did was mobilise their testing laboratories,’ said the Downing Street adviser, ‘but over the last five years, we’ve made all of ours private and commercial.’ It was therefore important, the adviser said, that the government should reach out to Britain’s large network of private biochemical laboratories, seeking help in mass producing tests, as countries such as Germany would do so successfully. But there was no attempt to kick-start testing in the private sector in the crucial initial weeks. ‘We should have communicated with every commercial testing laboratory that might volunteer to become part of the government’s testing regime, but that didn’t happen,’ said the adviser. It would be more than two months before there was a proper attempt to seek the assistance of the private laboratories.


pages: 394 words: 110,352

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation by Jono Bacon

barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), collaborative editing, crowdsourcing, Debian, DevOps, digital divide, digital rights, do what you love, do-ocracy, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, Guido van Rossum, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jono Bacon, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, openstreetmap, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, software as a service, Stephen Fry, telemarketer, the long tail, union organizing, VA Linux, web application

Here are some tips that might help you improve your chances of success: Make donating easy Be sure to make donating a piece of cake. Most people will want to donate online with a credit or debit card or with PayPal. For Severed Fifth we used PayPal to gather the donations, but you can also use a service such as KickStarter, which rallies prospective donors around a target figure. Regardless of the service you choose, make sure that donating is a breeze and only takes a few minutes. Pick a goal A donation drive should have a target and focus and not just be a case of “give us money, please!” Whether it is a target outcome (e.g., the recording in the previous Severed Fifth example), a target amount, or anything else, be sure to have a goal that people feel passionate about supporting with their wallet.

It was a great example of focused collaboration. Of course, there are many different forms of collaboration, and when assessing what collaborative opportunities are available to us in our communities, we often need to assess what tools we have available because these affect what we can do. Collaboration is difficult to kick-start if people don’t have the tools they require to participate. We discussed this more in Chapter 5. Social media is heavily optimized toward some forms of collaboration and not others. As an example, social networks are fantastic for communication, but at the time of this writing they lack tools for collaborating around art and media, around code and software, and around documents.

I wasn’t so much worried about the delivery (I was a fairly outgoing teen) but more the structure, story, and design of my slides. I really wanted people to enjoy my presentation; I didn’t want it to feel like a dorky presentation done by a pimply teenager (which of course it was). Fortunately, it went pretty well. This kick-started years of trial and error in developing my own presentation mojo. Over the course of my career, I have seen some brutally awful presentations and some stunningly entertaining and thoughtful ones. I have always wanted to be in the latter category, and while I don’t consider myself an expert in presentation magic, I have come away with some tips I want to share with you all.


pages: 90 words: 17,297

Deploying OpenStack by Ken Pepple

Amazon Web Services, cloud computing, database schema, Infrastructure as a Service, Kickstarter, Ruby on Rails, web application, x509 certificate

Complete instructions and links to the development repositories can be found via the RHEL Packaging page on the OpenStack wiki or by going to their build page directly at http://yum.griddynamics.net/. Fedora Packages Another consulting company called Mirantis provides Nova Fedora packages based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages. They provide both Cactus release and trunk packages. Instructions for installing these RPMs and configuring them with a kickstart script are available at the Mirantis blog. Microsoft Windows It is unlikely that you will be able to fully install Nova on Microsoft Windows. Microsoft Windows lacks many of the Nova-supporting Python libraries and is not supported by Nova orchestration features (which are mostly Linux operating system commands).


pages: 1,409 words: 205,237

Architecting Modern Data Platforms: A Guide to Enterprise Hadoop at Scale by Jan Kunigk, Ian Buss, Paul Wilkinson, Lars George

Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, business intelligence, business logic, business process, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, continuous integration, create, read, update, delete, data science, database schema, Debian, deep learning, DevOps, domain-specific language, fault tolerance, Firefox, FOSDEM, functional programming, Google Chrome, Induced demand, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, job automation, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, level 1 cache, loose coupling, microservices, natural language processing, Network effects, platform as a service, single source of truth, source of truth, statistical model, vertical integration, web application

Finally, after the configuration is loaded, the machine fetches an OS-specific installation binary (often a minimal OS setup executed in memory only) and subsequently executes it. OS setup After bootstrapping, the minimal installer does the rest of the work, contacting the OS-specific configuration service. For Red Hat Linux, a common tool for this task is Kickstart, which defines all of the parameters that should apply to the installation of the OS on a particular machine. In other words, Kickstart is a template that mimics an interactive user entering the desired details while configuring the OS during the setup process. All of the choices are recorded in files and handed to the installer, which automatically executes the installation.

Afterward, you can configure the installation scripts to use the local mirror repository and install as if you had direct internet access. After you have decided which repository to use—whether online or local—the installation is performed manually, or automated, as discussed earlier (using, for example, Kickstart for Red Hat–based systems). After the installation is complete, you can move on to configure the more dynamic OS settings, as explained in the next section. OS Configuration for Hadoop Running the Hadoop processes requires some configuration of the OS itself. For example, it is known that the Hadoop DataNodes are dealing with file-level I/O, reading and writing Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) blocks.

RAID 10 for broker data disks in Kafka, Deployment considerations RAID-0 arrays, Guidelines RAID1 for HDFS metadata, Deployment recommendations SCSI SYNCHRONIZE CACHE command, not passed to disks, Disk cache raised-floor cooling, Cooling RAM (random access memory), Commodity Serversin computer architecture for Hadoop, RAM range partitioning, Apache Kudu Ranger, Required Databases, Other Servicesbacking up Apache Ranger, Apache Ranger centralized authorization control for Kafka, Kafka centralized authorization with, Centralized Security Management centralized management of YARN queue access controls, YARN HDFS ACLs, controlling, HDFS Key Management Server, Encrypting and decrypting files in encryption zones, KMS implementations Key Management Server (KMS), At-Rest Encryption using in HBase, HBase RDBMS (relational database management systems), Service Databases, Database Integration Options read system call, Important System Calls, The Linux Page Cache read-ahead caching, Read-ahead caching readseffects of disk and storage controller caches on throughput, Disk cache HDFS client local to DataNode process or remote client, The Linux Page Cache measuring speed of distributed reads in HDFS, Distributed writes and reads measuring speed of single reads in HDFS, Single writes and reads performance, erasure coding vs. replication, Read performance short-circuit and zero-copy reads, Short-Circuit and Zero-Copy Reads realmd library, SSSD, Integrating with a Kerberos KDC realms (Kerberos), Principalssuperuser privileges shared across clusters in, Restricting superusers rebuildsfull, Restore partial, Restore records, Kafka recovery, Backup and Disaster Recovery(see also backups and disaster recovery) erasure coding vs. replication, Read performance recovery point objective (RPO), Alternative solutions, Policies and Objectives recovery time objective (RTO), Alternative solutions, Database Integration Options, Policies and Objectives Red Hatinformation on OpenShift container security, Isolation installing and starting NTP service daemon, OS Configuration for Hadoop Kickstart, Operating Systems OpenShift distribution, OpenShift OpenStack distribution, OpenStack, Summary package management, Installation Process Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), OS ChoiceseCryptfs support removed in RHEL 7, Volume Encryption with Cloudera Navigator Encrypt and Key Trustee Server obtaining sysbench, Validation approaches Satellite, Operating Systems systemd-based Linux, installing and starting caching daemon, OS Configuration for Hadoop Red Hat Identity Management (IdM), Integration Providersproviding KDC and user/group lookup via LDAP, Integration Providers reduce stage (MapReduce), Hadoop MapReduce Redundant Array of Independent Disks (see RAID) refresh tokens, ADLS regionsin AWS, AWS in Azure, Microsoft Azure in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Google Cloud Platform in public cloud solutions, Compute availability RegionServers (HBase), HBase relational database management systems (RDBMS), Service Databases, Database Integration Options reliability, Consensusenhancing via replication in distributed systems, Replication jumbo frames and, Layer 2 Recommendations statestore and, Statestore remote block storage, SANsCeph support for, Remote block storage EBS in AWS, AWS storage options guidance on from Hadoop vendors, SANs in OpenStack Cinder, Life Cycle and Storage in public cloud solutions, Key Things to Know remote direct memory access (RMDA), Layer 1 Recommendations remote procedure calls (RPCs), Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs)-Latency and cluster services, Programmatic Accessimplementations and architectures, Implementations and architectures latency, Latencyand cluster services, Latency and cluster services platform services and their RPCs, Implementations and architectures process control, Process control remotely attached storage, Storage Virtualization replacements and repair in datacenters, Replacements and Repairoperational procedures, Operational Procedures replicas, HDFSin Kafka, Kafka in Solr, Solrplacement of, Deployment considerations replication, Data Replication, Replication, Replication, Data Replication-Summaryand database high-availability, Replication and workload isolation, Replication and Workload Isolation data replication between geographic sites, Edge-connected networks erasure coding vs., Replication or Erasure Coding?


pages: 93 words: 20,957

Career Essentials: The Cover Letter by Dale Mayer

business process, Kickstarter

Take it easy and it will happen faster. This free writing will help to focus your brain. When the phrases start flowing, write everything down until they stop. Then sit back and see what ideas you have generated. There is usually something in this that you can then use to get started on your cover letter. Another way to kick-start the process is to ask yourself various questions. What kind of person would you want to hire? What qualities do you have that you’d like him to know about? What is your greatest accomplishment? What skills are you the most proud of having acquired? What can you do for the company that another person can’t?


pages: 72 words: 21,361

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson

Abraham Maslow, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, business cycle, business process, call centre, combinatorial explosion, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, minimum wage unemployment, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ray Kurzweil, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, self-driving car, shareholder value, Skype, the long tail, too big to fail, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Marketplace make it easy for people with ideas for mobile applications to create and distribute them. Threadless lets people create and sell designs for t-shirts. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk makes it easy to find cheap labor to do a breathtaking array of simple, well-defined tasks. Kickstarter flips this model on its head and helps designers and creative artists find sponsors for their projects. Heartland Robotics provides cheap robots-in-a-box that make it possible for small business people to quickly set up their own highly automated factory, dramatically reducing the costs and increasing the flexibility of manufacturing.


pages: 71 words: 20,766

Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time by Becky Smethurst

Apollo 13, Cepheid variable, dark matter, Galaxy Zoo, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Stephen Hawking

As black holes accrete more material, the hotter that material gets and the greater the pressure pushing material away from the black hole. So, when it starts accreting at the maximum rate, the black hole effectively shoots itself in the foot. What you end up with is sporadic accretion: a period of maximum accretion followed by a quiet period where the gas around the black hole cools down enough to kick-start accretion again. Alternatively, a black hole could grow by merging with other black holes. Remember, we’ve detected gravitational waves from mergers of black holes in our own Milky Way, so we know this is definitely possible. We can calculate how many mergers are needed by assuming that the black hole always merges with another black hole of the same mass.


pages: 398 words: 86,023

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, HyperCard, index card, Jane Jacobs, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, jimmy wales, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, optical character recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons, Y2K, Yochai Benkler

He would provide the lifeline to Nupedia. Chapter 4_ WIKI INTRODUCED “Every artist was first an amateur.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson “History is too serious to be left to historians.” —Ian Macleod After both Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales found out about WikiWikiWeb software and its use for collaboration, both were keen on it helping kick-start Nupedia’s lackluster pace. Nupedia was simply not working, because people were not collaborating efficiently and articles were not being generated fast enough. The wiki software might just get existing Nupedians to work better, while also allowing more participants from the outside world. On January 10, 2001, Wales installed the same wiki software that Ben Kovitz described at the time—a “script” called UseModWiki that ran on a Web server.

Wikipedia’s reliance on having a critical mass of users to create the swarm effect makes it difficult to imagine substantial efforts for languages of fewer than a million speakers. Not only are the numbers small, but editors need access to the technology of the Internet, as Wikipedia is only edited practically online while connected live in cyberspace. There is nothing lonelier than being the only person on a wiki. Nevertheless, one of those kick-start seed communities in Africa was started by Kasper Souren, working for the NGO Geekcorps to spread Internet literacy to developing nations. Souren, from the Netherlands, while on mission in Mali, helped establish Wikipedia in the Bambara language, only spoken by 6 million people in the country. Souren wrote in his report to an open source conference about his experiences: The Wikipedias in Bambara, Peul and Wolof were started in the beginning of 2005.


pages: 301 words: 85,263

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

Once again, agriculture collapsed, this time on both sides of the Atlantic, and the regrowth of forests coupled with the reduction in wood burning resulted in an atmospheric decline in carbon dioxide of seven to ten parts per million between 1570 and 1620.27 It has never fallen in such a way since. It is perhaps this event that should be considered the beginning of the anthropocene, rather than some marvellous human invention belatedly recognised as suicidal. Not the invention of the coal-fired steam engine that kick-started the industrial age in the eighteenth century; not the fixation of nitrogen beginning with the invention of the Haber-Bosch process; not the release of billions of particles of radioactive contamination from the detonation of hundreds of nuclear bombs: the anthropocene starts with mass genocide, with planetary violence on such a scale that it registers in ice cores and the pollination of crops.

Trump’s willingness to repeat what he read on the internet, or was fed by advisors with close links to right-wing conspiracy networks, surprised even Jones: ‘It is surreal to talk about issues here on air, and then word-for-word hear Trump say it two days later,’ he said.34 The fringes of the internet had returned to the centre. In ‘Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025’, the US Air Force report that kick-started the chemtrails conspiracy, the writers noted that while most weather-modification efforts rely on the existence of certain preexisting conditions, it may be possible to produce some weather effects artificially, regardless of preexisting conditions. For instance, virtual weather could be created by influencing the weather information received by an end user.


pages: 294 words: 87,429

In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's by Joseph Jebelli

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, CRISPR, double helix, Easter island, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, global pandemic, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, phenotype, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, stem cell, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traumatic brain injury

The results of almost every study reported no effects on memory and no improvement on any tests of cognition. While a few groups declared some benefit, the data backing up such claims was inadequate. Whatever the reason, neurons had given up making acetylcholine, and giving them copious amounts of choline in the hope they would kick-start the mechanism back into action wasn’t enough. But all was not lost. ‘Truth in science,’ the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz said, ‘can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.’ What if, some scientists asked, instead of trying to make new neurotransmitter from scratch, we simply kept the acetylcholine that was already present in the brain around for longer?

The problem with ES cells, he soon realised, was that the patient’s immune system would recognise them as foreign and mount a deadly biological defence to remove them from the body. In addition, ES cells were rapidly provoking fierce controversy due to the moral dilemma of destroying human embryos to harvest them. But the more tangible problem for Yamanaka was that he desperately needed other scientists to help kick-start his lab. Every April, 100 students at the Nara had to select one of its twenty research labs to work for–which often left some labs with none. Students were drawn to the old, established professors, who published career-defining papers in prestigious journals like Nature and Science. At thirty-six years old, with no such papers, how, Yamanaka wondered, could he attract them?


pages: 309 words: 81,975

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The public benefit corporation promises the best of both worlds: purpose and profit, scale and impact. As of this writing, thirty-four U.S. states have already passed legislation enabling this form of incorporation, and more are following suit. Some of the most progressive organizations around have already taken the leap and become public benefit corporations, including Method, Kickstarter, Plum Organics, Patagonia, and Danone North America. Good company. While public benefit corporations represent a legal innovation, Certified B Corporations represent an operational one. B Lab, the nonprofit that developed and promotes the model legislation for public benefit corporations, is also the creator of a set of standards for social impact that make it more tangible and measurable.

Evolutionary Organizations AES Askinosie Chocolate Automattic Basecamp Black Lives Matter Blinkist Bridgewater Buffer Burning Man Buurtzorg BvdV charity: water Crisp David Allen Company dm-drogerie markt elbdudler Endenburg Elektrotechniek Enspiral Equinor Evangelical School Berlin Centre Everlane FAVI Gini GitLab Gumroad Haier Handelsbanken Haufe-umantis Heiligenfeld Hengeler Mueller Herman Miller HolacracyOne Ian Martin Group / Fitzii Incentro John Lewis Joint Special Operations Command Kickstarter Lumiar Schools Medium Menlo Innovations Mondragon Morning Star Nearsoft Netflix Nucor Orpheus Chamber Orchestra Patagonia Phelps Agency Pixar Premium-Cola Promon Group Red Hat School in the Cloud Schuberg Philis Semco Group Spotify stok Sun Hydraulics Treehouse USS Santa Fe Valve Whole Foods W.


pages: 353 words: 81,436

Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, basic income, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, currency risk, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, profit maximization, risk tolerance, shareholder value, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

Even where this did not involve actual relocation, it exposed the nation-states of democratic capitalism to more intense fiscal competition with one another and pushed their governments to lower the top rates of corporate taxation.33 True, the withdrawal of various exemptions was supposed to ‘broaden’ the national tax base and to make the overall outcome revenue-neutral, but the fact remains that it was no longer possible to contemplate raising taxes. Besides, the pervasive neoliberal insistence on ‘incentives’ to kick-start economic growth entailed higher pay and lower tax rates at the top, along with cuts in wages and benefits at the bottom of the income ladder. In this respect too, the ‘varieties’ of capitalism differed only in degree: the combination of tax reforms and labour-market reform (Hartz IV!) under Schröder’s Red-Green government in Germany34 was matched by Clinton’s abolition of ‘welfare as we know it’ and Bush’s notorious tax cuts after 2001.35 The American case offers convincing evidence that the origins of the public financial crisis have at least as much to do with revenue as with expenditure.

Kennedy. 6 See the left-wing thecurrentmoment blog on the occasion of Hollande’s election as president on 7 May 2012: ‘The socialist campaign in France was focused on Sarkozy’s record as president. Its own economic programme was far weaker. The main thrust was to halt reform at the domestic level, bringing things back to the status quo ante, and to kickstart growth at the European level by using the creditworthiness of Germany to fund a new round of government borrowing … New governments in Europe, including the French Socialists, are relying on yet more borrowing to promote growth. This is not the end of austerity in Europe so much as a continuation of the underlying trends that brought about the crisis in the first place.’


pages: 262 words: 83,548

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The sooner central bankers and finance ministers realize that, the better off we’ll be. Massive budget deficits and rock-bottom interest rates are the wrong prescription for the realities of the energy-constrained world we now live in. The US stimulus package in 2009 approved more than $700 billion in spending that was designed to kick-start a recovery. That money has put people to work and will help improve the country’s infrastructure, but eventually it must be repaid. In the final analysis, the spending amounts to a very expensive short-term patch. Such policy measures, which are being enacted in the eurozone as well as the United States, are burdening national economies with a crushing amount of debt.

Any apparent financial recoveries are a mirage. When the smoke clears, oil prices will still be dictating the economic terms. Unfortunately, the huge deficits we’ve run up since the last recession are very real bills that will need to be paid. Central banks are running printing presses almost nonstop to kick-start economic growth. In the United States, the Fed calls this tactic “quantitative easing”—a fancy way of saying the Fed is finding ways to pour as much new money into the system as it can. Typically, the Fed sticks to using its control over short-term interest rates to help strengthen the economy.


pages: 291 words: 90,771

Upscale: What It Takes to Scale a Startup. By the People Who've Done It. by James Silver

Airbnb, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, call centre, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, DevOps, family office, flag carrier, fulfillment center, future of work, Google Hangouts, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, pattern recognition, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

As soon as I hit “Publish”, things just kind of changed forever for me.’ The key change for Routledge was a reappraisal of his personal attitude to mental health - he began to learn that openness about feelings and being honest about himself could start to ease the burden he’d been carrying in secret. ‘That post also kick-started a load of conversations with friends, family and people around me, and even people I’d never met before. I was just really connecting with them and being really honest and having these meaningful chats. I was pretty much training this muscle of authenticity. What I mean by that is it’s harder to be yourself than it is to conform, and I’d spent a long time trying to conform and trying to be someone that I thought I should be.

For Series A-stage businesses, having too many subcommittees can become a distraction. Simon Calver is best known for his seven-year tenure as CEO at LOVEFiLM, one of the early successes of the UK venture industry - leading the eventual exit to Amazon in 2011. He went on to become CEO of Mothercare, kick-starting the turnaround plan and accelerating international expansion in over 30 countries. Before this he worked at multinationals such as Unilever, led PepsiCo in the UK, and was General Manager at Dell. He was previously chairman of Moo.com and Chemist Direct and is currently a founding partner of BGF Ventures, where he is on the boards of various UK technology companies.


pages: 442 words: 85,640

This Book Could Fix Your Life: The Science of Self Help by New Scientist, Helen Thomson

Abraham Wald, Black Lives Matter, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Flynn Effect, George Floyd, global pandemic, hedonic treadmill, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lock screen, lockdown, meta-analysis, microbiome, nocebo, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, social distancing, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, TED Talk, TikTok, ultra-processed food, Walter Mischel

For instance, an analysis of 28,000 nuclear shipyard workers who had been exposed to low doses of radiation, an environmental stressor, found that their mortality rate was 24 per cent lower than workers who were not exposed to radiation. Similar findings are found in radiologists compared with other doctors. Stressors like radiation kick-start the body’s natural repair mechanisms. When cells are stressed, from heat or toxins or inflammation, protective proteins shield others from attack. Stress also triggers the production of a protein called sirtuin 1, which triggers the creation of antioxidants – nutrients that protect the brain from something called oxidative stress, which is a build-up of material that can damage brain cells.5 In the face of light stress, these repair systems overcompensate, repairing unrelated damage and rejuvenating your cells.

We know a bit more than that of course, but our interest in sleep as a biological concept only really began in the 1950s, when PhD student Eugene Aserinsky stared at a sleeping patient and noticed their frantic, jerky eye movements. He’d been expecting far smaller movements, given that, back then, sleep was thought to be a passive, uninteresting state of unconsciousness. His discovery kick-started the area of sleep science – a surprisingly difficult and misunderstood discipline, considering that sleep has such a profound effect on our physical and mental health. Aserinsky’s observations were of what we now call REM, or rapid eye movement, sleep. This is when we experience our most emotionally charged and vivid dreams.


pages: 306 words: 84,649

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

We imagined the clock tower looming over us, the booming sound of its great bell, and the shouts and bustle of traders entering and leaving the exchange, their fortunes made a little greater or less from their day’s trading. But we had an additional reason for visiting. We had heard rumors that the original clock from 1611—the clock that kick-started modern capitalism and kept the world’s first stock exchange on time for the first half century of its existence—might have survived. In 1668, when the building was extended, a new clock had been installed at the exchange, and the old mechanism was sent a mile eastward to be installed in the city’s new Oosterkerk, or Eastern Church, which was just about to be built and which opened three years later.

But for this new world of mass production to grow and flourish, a new breed of heavy, highly precise specialist machine tools would be needed. The development of American machine tools in the 1860s and 1870s, suitable for widespread use in manufacturing high-precision and interchangeable parts, followed a similar pattern to the British developments exactly a century earlier which brought the factory system into existence and kick-started an industrial revolution. It also followed the pattern of developments in Connecticut fifty years after that, when Eli Terry initiated mass production. Who was already steeped in precision, fine measurement and accuracy? In order to make the machines that made machines, all eyes turned once more to the clockmaking industry.


pages: 247 words: 86,844

Perfect Sound Whatever by James. Acaster

4chan, Airbnb, butterfly effect, Donald Trump, Etonian, gentrification, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Rubik’s Cube, side project

In 1999 he launched a solo project under the name Fog using similar instruments, released three records in the early 2000s and then, with the addition of Mark Erikson and Tim Glen, turned Fog into a full band with the release of 2007’s impeccable Ditherer. And then they split up. In the following years Andrew started painting houses and became a father, then in 2014, out of the blue, he launched a Kickstarter to fund a potential new Fog album. The response was huge, and in 2016 he released For Good, a piano-led solo record in which Andrew set out to recapture the sensitivity and grit of his early work but with ‘a more impactful and better executed electro-acoustic palette’. For the first time in his career he had no label, no deadline and no expectation for the record from anyone other than himself, and this meant he was now able to take his time in the studio.

The group lasted five years but Carr learnt a great deal from the experience: growing as an artist, exploring different genres and developing her skill set – she emerged from the group a fully formed, accomplished musician with her own voice at just 17 years old. After WFI disbanded, Deja (now living in Northampton, Massachusetts) assumed the moniker Mal Devisa and embarked on her first solo project. After a couple of independent releases on Bandcamp she’d accrued enough fans to finance her next album on Kickstarter, quickly rewarding donors with the sort of compelling listen that doesn’t come around very often. Many of her new tracks were stripped down to bass chords and vocals, with the occasional kick drum thrown in to anchor everything, and Carr’s voice conveying so much wisdom it’s almost impossible to believe she’s just 19 years old.


pages: 422 words: 86,414

Hands-On RESTful API Design Patterns and Best Practices by Harihara Subramanian

blockchain, business logic, business process, cloud computing, continuous integration, create, read, update, delete, cyber-physical system, data science, database schema, DevOps, disruptive innovation, domain-specific language, fault tolerance, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kubernetes, loose coupling, Lyft, machine readable, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, Salesforce, self-driving car, semantic web, single page application, smart cities, smart contracts, software as a service, SQL injection, supply-chain management, web application, WebSocket

Also, this chapter discusses topics such as the REST paradigm for application modernization and integration, RESTful services for digital transformation and intelligence, and the best practices for REST-based microservices. Chapter 10, Frameworks, Standard Languages, and Toolkits, introduces you to a few prominent frameworks that can come in handy when deciding on the right framework for your API development needs. It discusses a few prominent frameworks for app developers who want to kick-start their RESTful APIs and microservices with their acquainted programming languages. This chapter is an attempt to provide you with information on a few programming language-friendly frameworks so that you can pick the most suitable framework for your RESTful API development needs. Also, this chapter has a reference table for various frameworks and their supported languages, along with their prominent features.

It's evident that there are several excellent frameworks you can use to jump-start your RESTful API development using your programming language of choice. But one chapter, and only a few pages of information, doesn't begin to cover the greatness of these frameworks and what they bring to the table. We hope this chapter gave you a fair idea of the popular frameworks so that you can kick-start not only your prototyping but also production-grade RESTful applications. In the next chapter, we'll explore best practices for migrating legacy applications to capable microservices. Further reading Building RESTful Python Web Services by Gastón C. Hillar, https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/building-restful-python-web-services October 2016 Building RESTful Web services with Go by Naren Yellavula, https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/building-restful-web-services-go Legacy Modernization to Microservices-Centric Apps Legacy applications are typically monolithic, massive, and inflexible, comprising millions of lines of code.


pages: 83 words: 23,805

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There by Ted Books

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, big-box store, carbon footprint, clean tech, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, demand response, food desert, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Induced demand, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, McMansion, megacity, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, Zipcar

Tomasulo arrived at a City Council meeting with 1,300 signatures to reinstate the signs, which were soon back in place for an authorized three-month trial. Tomasulo never intended the project to be permanent; he simply wanted to shift the conversation. A year after their debut, a few signs had been stolen, others were vandalized or damaged, and some remained in place. But the impact continued to surface. Tomasulo created a Kickstarter campaign to fund Walk [Your City] (walkyourcity.org), an open-source platform that allows anyone to create signs for their own cities. Projects have popped up in Kentucky, Dallas, Miami, New Orleans, and even in New York City for Hurricane Sandy disaster relief. Tomasulo’s campaign has garnered the attention of everyone from the BBC to private developers looking to liven up their sites to major health care providers that see wayfinding as a key step to reducing obesity and creating healthier lifestyles.


pages: 198 words: 20,852

Bootstrap by Jake Spurlock

commoditize, Kickstarter, pull request

It all depends on what you want to learn and why. If your primary interest is to get started building Bootstrap websites, the online documentation will likely suit you perfectly. The authors, Jacob Thornton and Mark Otto, have been meticulous in providing examples of the codebase, HTML code samples, and more to kickstart your project. It is top notch, and I’ve used it to gather the structure for this book. If you want to contribute to the work of the open source project, you can submit pull requests or use the issue tracker on the GitHub project for updates, downloads, documentation, and more. Are You Sure You Want Bootstrap?


pages: 570 words: 158,139

Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism by Elizabeth Becker

airport security, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, BRICs, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, corporate governance, Costa Concordia, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, global village, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Masdar, Murano, Venice glass, open borders, out of africa, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, statistical model, sustainable-tourism, the market place, union organizing, urban renewal, wage slave, young professional, éminence grise

Costa Rica has turned its wilderness into a venue for highly profitable ecotourism. As soon as Sri Lanka, and now Burma, began seeing an end to conflict, they opened the door to a rush of tourists. After the Arab Spring uprising, Egypt sent out a plea to cruise companies and tour operators to return and kick-start the economy, where one in eight jobs depend on visitors. Winning status for a temple or old city neighborhood as a World Heritage Site from UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, is a guaranteed tourist draw. The U.N. tourism organization now places poverty reduction as one of its top objectives, along with the high-minded ideals of improving international understanding, peace and prosperity.

The plan did fulfill the American goal of getting France back on its feet and firmly within the western camp, as well as establishing a new pattern of trade with the United States. The biggest impact, though, was on France, which exceeded its goal of wooing 3 million tourists to the country in 1952. American government aid had kick-started the modern tourism industry in France with those hotel rooms, tourist airfares and inculcation of the idea of Paris as the ideal city for glamour. From then on, the French government kept its hand in all aspects of tourism. This American-subsidized tourism fit in nicely with the new order being established by some of France’s most conservative politicians.

The administration wanted to follow the example of Spain, which had profited from heavy promotion of the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, lifting tourism to that country. But the United States was the only country of any significance without a nationally coordinated tourist program or a top-echelon tourism agency. The White House conference was geared to kick-start the industry through government help. President Clinton opened the event with a thirty-minute address, first telling his audience that it was “about time” that their industry was honored with a White House event. The crowd cheered and gave the president a standing ovation. Then Clinton spoke of the particular moment in history as a “very important time.”


pages: 79 words: 24,875

Are Trams Socialist?: Why Britain Has No Transport Policy by Christian Wolmar

active transport: walking or cycling, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, BRICs, congestion charging, Crossrail, Diane Coyle, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Network effects, railway mania, trade route, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, wikimedia commons, Zipcar

In rushed an angry crowd led by a local farmer… Suddenly, through the doors of Shipley Town Hall flooded a tide of people who had gained the self-confidence to challenge the unchallengeable. No longer were they to be fobbed off by technicalities, or defeated by rules that loaded the dice in the ministry’s favour.¹⁴ The inquiry was abandoned and the road never built. The road lobby, however, had not gone away, and there were repeated attempts to kick-start a major programme of road building. In London a series of four assessment studies were published in the late 1980s looking at ways of bringing dual carriageways and motorways further into the centre, but fervent opposition and awareness of the high cost meant they came to nothing. With the exception of the M11 Link and a few minor schemes, building new roads in London was now untenable.


Stretch by Roger Frampton

Kickstarter, TED Talk

Whether you have done your steps today or not we’ve all heard the question, ‘Have you done your steps today?’ and there are several reasons why. While recent research has traced the origin of the ‘10,000 steps per day’ goal to a Japanese marketing slogan for a step counter, the catchy marketing gimmick subsequently morphed into a fitness mantra which helped kick-start the ‘move more’ movement. Since then, scientific studies have supported the ‘move more’ theory, with some showing that participants managed to control their diabetes or cholesterol levels better when increasing their daily step count. There are numerous health benefits to be gained by moving often throughout the day, including lowering your blood pressure, stabilizing your blood sugar and reducing your risk of a heart attack.


pages: 346 words: 92,984

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health by David B. Agus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, autism spectrum disorder, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive dissonance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioff, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, nocebo, parabiotic, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

An apple, for example, has a different profile than an apricot or an aspirin. So imagine taking a handy little device and putting it up against an object and getting an immediate readout of all the chemicals in that item. That’s what you could do if you had a database of all the possible profiles. An Israeli company has done just that, funded by a Kickstarter campaign. Their low-cost handheld tool can study a pill, for example, compare the pill’s profile against a cloud database, and come back with “ibuprofen, brand Advil.” Besides eliminating fake drugs, it will bring peace of mind to patients by preventing pill mix-ups. This technology could also be used to point at a plate of food and characterize how much protein, fat, and carbohydrates are in a snack or meal.

., 84 emotions, touch and, 214 emulsifiers, microbiome and, 121–22 “end of history illusion,” 38–40, 39 End of Illness, The (Agus), 18 endoplasmic reticulum, 40 endorphins, 211 energy levels, 149 England, see Great Britain environment, see context epidemics: global spread of, 103 prediction of, 103–4 epigenetics, 20–21 esomeprazole (Nexium), 86 esophageal cancer, 217 estrogen, 64 ethics: genome editing and, 24–25 medical advances and, 10, 24 technology and, 25–26 Europe, 77 European Journal of Immunology, 34 exercise, 21, 114, 140, 185–201 chemotherapy and, 191, 192 honesty about, 133–34 ideal amount of, 196–200 intensity of, 197–98 life expectancy and, 189–90 mortality rates and, 148 Exeter, University of, 157 “Experimental Prolongation of the Life Span” (McCay, Lunsford, and Pope), 2 experimental treatments, quicker access to, 56 Facebook, 27 fasting lipid profile, 150 feebleness, aging and, 43 fertility, aging and, 43 Field, Tiffany, 214 financial industry, information technology and, 89 Finland, 220 fish oil, 182–83 Florida, 103 flu vaccine: misinformation about, 157–58 public distrust of, 160 FODMAPs (fermentable oligo-di-monosaccharides and polyols), 164 Fodor, George, 183 food, safety of, 11 Food and Drug Administration, US (FDA), 2, 18, 51, 55, 56, 86, 111, 112, 127–28, 146, 182, 201 Accelerated Approval provisions of, 128 Foundation Medicine, 50 Framingham Heart Study, 47, 118 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 169 free radicals, 208 fruit flies, eating pattern studies with, 138–40 fungi, 119 gait, 45 galvanic skin response (GSR), 230–31 gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), 86 Gates, Bill, 2 Genentech, 56 genes, genome, 45, 83–84 aging and, 20, 41 bacterial, 107, 119 context and, 14, 20–21, 118 DNA mismatch repair and, 32 expression of, 20–21, 125, 139 mitochondrial, see mitochondrial DNA sequencing of, 20, 23, 49–52, 112 SNPs in, 113–14 as switches, 41 viruses and, 119–20 genes, genome, editing of, 24–25, 45 ethics of, 102–5 genetically modified foods (GMOs), 18 genetic markers, 22, 113–14, 127 genetic mutations: aging and, 41 cancer and, 14, 21–22, 50 disease risk and, 9, 12 genetic screening, 103, 117, 137 flawed results in, 8–10 of newborns, 11–12 Georgia State University, 121 Gewirtz, Andrew, 121 Gibson, Peter, 164 Gilbert, Daniel, 38, 39, 40 Gillray, James, 161 Gladwell, Malcolm, 225, 227, 228 Gleevec (imatinib), 55 glial cells, 209 glioblastoma, 30 “Global Recommendations on Physical Activity for Health” (WHO), 187 gluten, debate over, 163–65 Goldstein, Irwin, 211 Google, 87, 88, 101 Google Flu Trends, 101 Grameen Bank, 232, 233–34, 235 Grameen Danone, 235 Graunt, John, 100 Great Britain, 96, 97, 100, 110, 155 Black Death in, 95–101, 98, 99, 100 Greatist.com, 200 Greenland, 182 Grove, Andy, 7, 7 growth factors, 59 gun violence, 91 gut: inflammation of, 120, 122 microbiome of, see microbiome H2 blockers, 86 habits and routines, 136, 137–41, 228, 237–38 see also diet; lifestyle choices Harlow, Harry, 213 Harvard Medical School, 84 Harvard School of Public Health, 142–43 Harvard University, 3, 23, 24, 37, 178, 186, 196, 212, 213, 216 hash tables, health care and, 87–88 Hawaii, 47 HDL cholesterol, 150 health: biological age and, 47 context and, 48, 76–78, 84, 89–90, 91–94, 101, 113, 114–15, 117, 124–25 family history of, 136–37 honesty about, 131–34 inflection point in, 8 lifestyle and, see lifestyle choices optimism and, 65–69 personal baselines for, 150 retirement and, 91–92 technology and, 37–70 health and fitness apps, 200 Health and Human Services Department, US, 103 health care: Affordable Care Act and, 69–70 hash tables and, 87–88 individual’s responsibility in, 12–13, 26, 70, 75, 78, 131–32 misinformation about, 14–15, 18, 19, 154, 157–58 politics and, 11–12 portable electronic devices and, 79, 90–91 Health Professionals Follow-up Study, 142–43, 217 health threats, prediction of, 103–4 heart: biological age of, 47–48 health of, 48 heart attacks, 76, 86, 182, 217, 218 heart disease, 59, 128, 150, 166, 175, 183, 186, 187, 215, 217, 221 context and, 22 diet and, 163 eating patterns and, 138–40 lifestyle choices and, 22 muscle mass and, 195 heart rates, 231 heart rate variability (HRV), 230 Heathrow Airport, 92 “hedonic reactions,” 38–40 heel sticks, 11–12 hemoglobin A1C test, 151 hepatitis B, 175 hepatitis C, 175 Herceptin (trastuzumab), 55 high blood pressure, 22, 188, 195 high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (CRP) test, 151 hippocampus, 214 Hippocrates, 71, 113, 122, 216 HIV/AIDS, 18, 24, 25, 59, 84, 127–28, 131, 159 Hoffmann, Felix, 215, 216 Holland, 41 Homeland Security Department, US, 103 homeostasis, 137–38, 140 Homo sapiens, evolution of, 107 honesty: about health, 131–34 nutritional studies and, 162 hormones, 219 hormone therapy, 201 Horton, Richard, 178 Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled (Hospital for Special Surgery), 28 house calls, 80 Houston Methodist, 86 “how do you feel” question, 231 hugs, 214 Human Genome Project, 113, 120 human growth hormone, 200 Human Molecular Genetics, 65 human papilloma virus (HPV), 161, 175 Hurricane Sandy, 84 Huxley, Aldous, viii, 6, 159, 238 Hydra magnipapillata, 42, 42 hyperglycemia, 122 hypertension, 125, 195, 203 IBM, 88–89 imatinib (Gleevec), 55 immune reactions, 5 immune system, 175, 190, 209, 211 aging and, 44 impact of hugs on, 214 immunotherapy, 28–33 polio virus and, 30, 31 incentives, 235–36 Indiana University Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing’s Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, 94–95 infant mortality, 87, 97 infants: genetic screening of, 11–12 premature, 87 infections, 175–76 infectious diseases, 129 antibiotic-resistant, 67–69, 68 data mining and, 100–101 inflammation, 34, 151, 174–77, 181, 187, 190, 195, 215–22 inflammatory bowel disease, 121 inflection points, 7–8, 7 influenza, 161 risks from, 157 vaccine for, see flu vaccine information, sorting good from bad, 19–20 information technology, financial industry and, 89 inherited disorders, newborn genetic screening and, 12 insomnia, 122 Institute for Sexual Medicine, 211 insulin, 56, 190 insulin sensitivity, 5, 87, 120, 122, 151, 195 insurance companies, off-label drugs and, 55 Intel, 7 International Agency for Research on Cancer, 170 International Prevention Research Institute, 180 intuition, 224–29 Inuits, 182–83 in vitro fertilization (IVF), three-person, 109–12, 110 Ioannidis, John, 178 IRBs (institutional review boards), 52 iron deficiency, 231 irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), 164 Islam, 234 Italy, 183 ivacaftor (Kalydeco), 115–16 JAMA Internal Medicine, 142, 143, 192, 196 Jenner, Edward, 160, 161 Jobs, Steve, 2, 23–24, 26, 49 Johns Hopkins Hospital, 71, 72, 128 Hurd Hall at, 74 Osler Medical Housestaff Training Program at, 73–75, 74 Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, 32 Johns Hopkins University, 23, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 215 Jolie, Angelina, 21 Jones, Owen, 43 Journal of Sexual Medicine, 211 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 72, 114–15, 173, 201, 220, 221 Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, 154 Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 169 Journal of Urology, 168 journals, medical, misinformation in, 154, 179 J. Paul Getty Museum, 225–27, 226 Kahan, Dan, 159 Kalydeco (ivacaftor), 115–16 Kennedy, Eugene, 107 Kentucky, 47 Kenya, 163 Kickstarter, 66 kouros, 225–27, 226 Kutscher, Scott, 204 lactic acidosis, 104 Lactobacillus bacteria, 33–34 Lancet, The, 155, 178, 181, 186, 216 Lander, Eric, 24–25 lansoprazole (Prevacid), 86 Latin America, 77 LDL cholesterol, 150, 195 lean paradox, 193–94 Lechuguilla Cave, 68 lecithin, 121, 122 LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), 193 Lehninger, Albert, 107 Leigh’s disease, 105, 108 “Let Food Be Thy Medicine” (World Economic Forum panel), 161–62, 166 life expectancy, 126 exercise and, 189–90 lifestyle choices and, 126–27 life span, red meat and, 142–44 lifestyle choices, 20, 37, 114 cancer and, 153 “end of history” illusion and, 39–40 heart disease and, 22 life expectancy and, 126–27 see also diet; habits and routines lifestyle medicine, 165 Li-Fraumeni syndrome, 58 Lily Lake, 103 Linden, David, 215 lipid phosphate phosphatase 1 (LPP1), 187 liver cancer, statin use and, 219 livestock, overuse of antibiotics in, 67, 69 Livingston, N.J., 111, 112 loan sharking, 233 London, 92 Black Death in, 97–101, 98, 99, 100 longevity, exercise and, 197–98 Lorenz, Edward, 236 Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), 119–20 Louisiana, 47, 192 lung cancer, 10, 50, 50, 51, 53–54, 65, 118, 176, 190 statin use and, 219 Lung Cancer Master Protocol for Squamous Cell Carcinoma (Lung-MAP), 118 Lunsford, Wanda Ruth, 1–2, 3, 4, 21, 27 lymphoma, 55 lymph system, 209 Lyon, 180 McCarthy, Matt, 202 McCay, Clive, 2 McGill University, Osler Library of Medicine at, 73 Maimonides, 163 Maine, 68 Major League Baseball, 202, 204–5 malaria, 77 malnutrition, 234–35 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 27, 160 Malthusian catastrophe, 27 Massachusetts, 47 Massagué Solé, Joan, 58–62 Massai people, 163 mastectomies, 21–22 MasterCard, 89 Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, 41 Mayo Clinic, 145 measles, 160 media, medical misinformation in, 15, 153–54 medical education: context and, 75 Osler’s revolutionizing of, 71–75 medical journals, misinformation in, 154, 179 medical research, 177–84 newborn genetic screening and, 11–12 rigorously controlled studies in, 155 Medicare, 92, 192 medications, 144–46 antiaging, 201 antidepressant, 145 consistent schedules for, 140 counterfeit, 10–11, 66 off-label use of, 55 over-the-counter, 145 in preventative medicine, 76–78 pricing of, 56–57, 115–17 quicker access to, 56 3-D printing and, 66–67 medicine: coarse graining in, 229–32, 230 personalized, see precision medicine science vs. art in, 26, 112, 118 Mediterranean diet, 141–42, 163 melatonin, 205 Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, 28, 60, 62, 116–17 Cancer Biology and Genetics Program at, 58 memory, 214 Mencken, H.


pages: 353 words: 91,520

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

Need your logo designed? Go to Elance. Need careful research about an article? Go to Elance. Elance is hardly unique. Millions of people are generating income through the online microeconomies of sites like Care.com, Freelance.com, eBay, oDesk, TaskRabbit, Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Teachers Pay Teachers, iTunes, Kickstarter, and on and on. These marketplaces represent the wave of the future, where anyone can: • reach lots of customers readily. • build an online reputation through customer feedback and examples of work. • succeed in a world where customers don’t care about education credentials or standardized test scores

He started at Tufts, and concluded that the way computer science was taught made no sense. He rebooted at the University of Chicago, studied physics, but concluded that the coursework was largely about memorizing formulas. Ito hasn’t done all that poorly in life. He was an early investor in several spectacular start-ups, including Flickr, Kickstarter, and Twitter. He currently sits on the boards of the Sony Corporation, the New York Times, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. And he directs one of the world’s most innovative research labs. Recently, Ito recruited a student volunteer to spend a week with sensors monitoring her brain activity.


pages: 363 words: 94,139

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

Before Jobs’s return, in May 1996, Apple had joined Oracle Corporation and thirty other hardware and software companies in the Networking Computing Alliance, which set the standard for cheap, diskless computers based on a common networking platform. Jobs’s billionaire best friend, Larry Ellison, was especially bullish on NCs as the future of the computer industry. And as a newly installed member of Apple’s board, Ellison told the press that Apple was building an NC. He’d recently launched a start-up, Network Computing Inc., to kick-start the sector. Influenced by Ellison’s thinking, but also eager to compete with him, Jobs also talked up the NC idea. “We’re going to beat Ellison at his own game,” he told his Apple colleagues with relish.18 Just as he’d done with the first Macintosh, Jobs began by laying out certain specifications: The Mac NC should be an all-in-one product, ready to use right out of the box, in a distinctive design that made a brand statement.

Like the iMac before it, the iPod mini would come in a range of colors. It was a big hit; the fastest-selling iPod up to that time, especially with women. It was the first iPod that people started wearing on their bodies, outside their pockets, with a strap or a clip. Some treated it like an accessory, a piece of fashion jewelry. The mini also kick-started the trend of having a small, dedicated iPod just for the gym or running. In just four years, Apple took the iPod from the 6.4 oz. original to the 4.8 oz. nano. In the process, storage was increased sixfold, a color screen and video playback were added and battery life was extended to four hours.


pages: 315 words: 92,151

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future by Brian Clegg

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test

Some publicity seekers even claimed to have produced human clones, though strangely they have never been able to produce the very simple proof of the truth of their claims. This brings to mind the borderline science fiction of the 1970s movie from an Ira Levin novel, The Boys from Brazil. The borderline nature was that the science was just a kick-start for an action movie, but there are certainly some powerful science fiction themes in the notion of whether or not it would be ethical to make a human clone, especially when, as in the film, the subject is Adolf Hitler, raised in the hope of generating a replacement of the Nazi leader and bringing back the Third Reich.

The first movie only briefly visits 2015, but the sequel is primarily focused on the future, where we are given an object lesson in the pros and cons of science fiction as future gazing. The most famous future technology of the second and third movies is probably the hoverboard, a floating skateboard. The version Marty uses is unlikely to become a reality, despite a real hoverboard appearing on the Kickstarter Web site in October 2014. The good news is that this “Hendo” board, designed by California start-up Arx Pax does work—but by using magnetic levitation (see here), which means it can only function when above a surface made of nonferrous metal, like copper or aluminum. So until we get metal sidewalks, we won’t see hoverboarding kids on the streets.


pages: 310 words: 90,817

Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown by Detlev S. Schlichter

bank run, banks create money, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, currency peg, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, inflation targeting, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, open economy, Ponzi scheme, price discovery process, price mechanism, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, savings glut, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K

Fewer readily available consumer goods arrive on the market. At this point, the fact that credit expansion was funded by money printing rather than by true saving comes into play and begins to develop forces that will work in the opposite direction of the ones at work so far. If the whole process had been kick-started by an act of voluntary saving on the part of consumers, the marginal drop in supply of consumer goods would not be a problem. Increased saving would have meant a lessened demand for consumption goods but this was not the case in this scenario. A shrinking supply of consumer goods coupled with an unchanged urge to consume can mean only that an upward pressure on consumer goods prices will now develop.

An expansion of money lowers interest rates artificially and thereby encourages a level of investment activity that goes beyond what would be justified by voluntary saving. The resulting shifts in resource use and the extension of the capital stock are therefore unsustainable. The resulting boom is misguided and will end in a correction. Again, error is at work. The spurt of growth that is kick-started by the injection of money is based on an illusion. Economic actors are tricked into believing that a larger amount of resources has been freed up from their previous employment in close proximity to immediate consumption and has been made available for employment farther away from immediate consumption, thus allowing a more extended productive sector or the production of more longer-lasting consumption goods, like houses.


pages: 279 words: 91,148

Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent, and the Rise of the Hip Hop Hustler by Ethan Brown

barriers to entry, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, forensic accounting, Kickstarter, Live Aid, mandatory minimum

Not only had their bosses scored their first multiplatinum success, they’d also secured them deals with Def Jam. Ja celebrated the newfound status of the Lorenzos and southeast Queens in a freestyle piece for a Def Jam live album called Survival of the Illest, which featured DMX, Jam Master Jay, stalwarts Onyx, and the label’s supergroup Def Squad. A memorable freestyle can kick-start a young rapper’s career; it had happened with Nas with his freestyle on “Live at the Barbeque,” from a Queens group called Main Source, and Ja looked to make a huge impression. He also sought to solidify the Lorenzo brothers’ connection with ’Preme even though there was still lingering discomfort from Chris Lorenzo about the former Supreme Team CEO.

[He was] associating himself with gangsters.… I guess he’s a gangster now.” The New Insurgency The indictment of The Inc. was in many ways the death blow in 50’s long battle against the Lorenzos and ’Preme. Not surprisingly a little more than one month after the arrest of the Lorenzos, 50 kick-started a brand-new insurgency this time against Jimmy “Henchmen” Rosemond. In the years following the Shakur shooting at the Quad Studios in late 1994, Rosemond became one of the most respected and feared producers in hip-hop thanks to his hugely popular, Miami-based music industry conference “How Can I Be Down?”


pages: 319 words: 90,965

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

Instead of script-reading undergraduates interrupting your dinner to beg for donations to the university general fund, USEED was helping individual students create specific experiential learning projects that alumni can choose to support, in the same way that people fund new comic books and food trucks through Kickstarter, or lend money to impoverished Kenyan farmers through Kiva. A company called Course Hero had amassed a seven-million-document archive of study materials from thousands of college courses by creating a way for undergraduates to upload and share materials online. Quizlet, which was created by a high school student in his bedroom, had millions of users creating and sharing flash cards and learning games—all for free.

Press stores, 163 James, Henry, 32 James, William, 32–33, 45, 47, 250 Jefferson, Thomas, 23, 193 Jews, 46, 53 Jobs, Steve, 126 Johns Hopkins University, 27, 29 Johnson, Lyndon, 55, 56, 61 Jones, Tommy Lee, 165 Jordan, David Starr, 26 Junior college, 55 (see also Community colleges) Kamlet, Mark, 72–73, 251 Kantian philosophy, 251 Kennedy, John F., 165 Kerr, Clark, 53–56 Khan, Salman, 148–49 Khan Academy, 149, 155 Kickstarter, 133 King, Danny, 216, 218 King’s College, 23 Kiva, 133 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, 153 Knapp, Steven, 43 Koller, Daphne, 153–58, 171 Kosslyn, Stephen, 136–37 Kyoto University, 204 Lancet, 222 Lander, Eric, 1–4, 38–39, 44, 177–78, 221 MIT freshman biology course taught by, 11 (see also Introduction to Biology—The Secret of Life [7.00x]) Land-grant universities, 25–27, 35, 51, 53, 55, 95, 108, 122–23, 168 Learn Capital, 130, 156–57 Leckart, Steven, 149 Legally Blonde (film), 166 Levin, Richard C., 157 Lewin, Walter, 190–91 Liberal arts, 16, 27–31, 237, 241, 244–45 in accreditation standards, 50 core curriculum for, 49 at elite universities, 179 online courses in, 158, 244 PhDs and, 35 rankings and, 59 teaching mission in, 253 training, research, and, 29, 33, 261n (see also Hybrid universities) Lincoln, Abraham, 25 LinkedIn, 66, 217 Litton Industries, 75 Livy, 25 London, University of, 23 Lue, Robert, 178–81, 211, 231 Lyft ride-sharing service, 122 MacArthur, General Douglas, 51, 90 MacArthur “Genius” awards, 2 MacBooks, 132, 144 Madison, James, 23 Manitoba, University of, 150 Maples, Mike, Jr., 128–30, 132 Marine Corps, U.S., 140 Marx, Karl, 45 Massachusetts Bay Colony, Great and General Court of, 22 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 37–38, 59, 116, 132, 148, 153, 167–79, 245 admissions to, 39, 161, 212, 214–15, 245 Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex, 1–4, 143, 173–74 Bush at, 51–52, 79, 125, 168 computer science sequence offered online by, 231, 233 founding of, 29, 167 General Institute Requirements, 14, 190, 241 graduation rate at, 8 hacks as source of pride at, 168–69 joint online course effort of Harvard and, see edX MITx, 169, 173, 203 OpenCourseWare, 107–8, 150, 169, 185, 191 prestige of brand of, 163, 181 Saylor at, 176–90 Secret of Life (7.00x) online offering of, see Introduction to Biology—The Secret of Life (7.00x) tour of campus of, 168, 174 wormhole connecting Stanford and cafeteria at, 174–75, 179, 235 Massive open online courses (MOOCs), 150, 154, 156, 158, 159, 185, 204, 255 global demand for, 225 initial audience for, 214–15 providers of, see names of specific companies and universities Master Plans, 35, 60, 64–65 Master’s degrees, 117, 193, 195–96 Mayo Clinic, 242 Mazur, Eric, 137 “M-Badge” system, 208–9 McGill University, 204 Mellon Institute of Science, 75, 76, 229 Memex, 79, 80 Mendelian genetics, 3, 103–4 Miami-Dade Community College, 64 Microsoft, 128, 139, 145, 146, 188, 204 MicroStrategy, 187–91, 199 Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, 50 Minerva Project, 133–38, 141, 215, 235, 236, 243 Minnesota, University of, Rochester (UMR), 242–43 Missouri, University of, 208 Moore’s law, 176 Morrill, Justin Smith, 25–26 Morrill Land-Grant Act (1862), 25, 168 Mosaic software program, 126 Mozilla Foundation, 205–8, 218, 248 MS-DOS, 87 Myanganbayar, Battushig, 214, 215 NASDAQ, 177, 188 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 208 National Broadcasting Company (NBC), 96 National Bureau of Economic Research, 10 National Institutes of Health, 52 National Instruments, 216 National Manufacturing Institute, 208 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 208 National Science Foundation, 52 National Survey of Student Engagement, 243 Navy, U.S., 53, 123 Nebraska, University of, 26 Nelson, Ben, 133–35, 139, 181 Netflix, 131, 145 Netscape, 115, 126, 128, 129, 204–5 Newell, Albert, 79, 105 New Jersey, College of, 23 Newman, John Henry, 27–29, 47, 49, 244 Newman Report (1971), 56 Newton, Isaac, 190 New York, State University of, Binghamton, 183–84 New York City public schools, 1, 44 New York Times, 9, 44, 56–57, 107–8, 149, 170 New York University (NYU), 9, 64, 96, 250 Ng, Andrew, 153, 158 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 17 Nimitz, Admiral Chester W., 90 NLS/Augment, 125 Nobel Prize, 3, 45, 59, 78, 80, 176 Northeastern University, 64 Northern Arizona University, 229–30 Health and Learning Center, 230 Northern Iowa, University of, 55 Norvig, Peter, 149, 170, 227–28, 232 Notre Dame (Paris), cathedral school at, 18 Nurkiewicz, Tomasz, 218 Obama, Barack, 2 Oberlin College, 46 O’Brien, Conan, 166 Oklahoma, University of, 90 Omdurman Islamic University, 88 oNLine system, 125–26 Open Badges, 207 Open source materials and software, 177, 205–6, 215, 223, 232 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 9, 224 Overeducated American, The (Freeman), 56 Oxford University, 19, 21, 23, 24, 92, 135 Packard, David, 123 Parkinson’s disease, 70 Paris, University of, 18–19, 21, 137 Pauli, Wolfgang, 176 Pauling, Linus, 70 Pausch, Randy, 71–72 Peace Corps, 125 Pellar, Ronald (“Doctor Dante”), 208 Pell Grant Program, 56 Penguin Random House, 146 Pennsylvania, University of, 23, 24, 31 Wharton Business School, 155 Pennsylvania State University, 53 People magazine, 57 Pez dispensers, 146 Phaedrus (Socrates), 20, 98 PhDs, 7, 55, 117, 141, 193, 237, 250, 254 adjunct faculty replacing, 252 college rankings based on number of scholars with, 59 regional universities and community colleges and, 60, 64, 253 as requirement for teaching in hybrid universities, 31–33, 35, 50, 60, 224 Silicon Valley attitude toward, 66 Philadelphia, College of, 23 Philip of Macedon, 92 Phoenix, University of, 114 Piaget, Jean, 84, 227 Piazza, 132 Pittsburgh, University of, 73–76 Pixar, 146 Planck, Max, 45 Plato, 16, 17, 21, 31, 44, 250–51 Portman, Natalie, 165 Powell, Walter, 50, 117 Princeton University, 1–2, 23, 112, 134, 161, 245 Principia (Newton), 190 Protestantism, 24 Public universities, 7, 55, 177, 224, 253 Purdue University, 96, 208 Puritans, 22–24 Queens College, 23 Quizlet, 133 Rafter, 131–32 Raphael, 16, 17 Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, 87 Reagan, Ronald, 56 Regional universities, 55, 60, 64 Reid, Harry, 42 Renaissance, 19 Rhode Island, College of, 23 Rhodes Scholarships, 2 Rice University, 204 RNA, 3 Rockstar Games, 230 Roksa, Josipa, 9, 36, 85, 244 Romans, ancient, 16 Roosevelt, Theodore, 165 Ruby on Rails Web development framework, 144 Rutgers University, 23 Sample, Steven, 64 Samsung, 146 San Jose State University, 177 Sandel, Michael, 177 SAT scores, 63, 136–37, 171, 195, 213 Saylor, Michael, 186–93, 199, 201 Saylor.org, 191, 223, 231 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 45 School of Athens, The (Raphael), 16 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 45 Science: The Endless Frontier (Bush), 51 Scientific American, 92, 155 Scientific Research and Development, U.S.


pages: 307 words: 92,165

Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, additive manufacturing, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, Free Software Foundation, game design, global supply chain, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lifelogging, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off grid, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, TED Talk, the long tail, the market place

Nervous System shares their mathematical systems in an interactive software applet with customers, who can apply the system to design their own unique products. Josh Harker, an independent artist and designer, describes himself as a classically trained artist and sculptor who “uses bits, ones and zeros, to express himself in a human way, to make something new.” I stumbled upon Josh’s artwork on crowdfunding site Kickstarter where he raised a record amount of funds for a sculpture project called Crania Anatomica Filigre, a white, plastic ornately filigreed 3D printed skull. When we spoke on the phone, I learned that he grew up in the Mississippi River valley in Illinois. He described his bohemian childhood as one that “included post ‘60s off-grid communal living, Hell’s Angels babysitters, complete artistic immersion, and family tragedy.”

“Our lab and others have been experimenting with this idea. What if every home could turn its household plastic waste into usable plastic filament for 3D printing? Wow!” Maybe the first re-cycled plastic filament will soon be commercially available. A student at Vermont Technical College, Tyler McNaney, raised $10,000 on Kickstarter to build a device that grinds up and re-melts discarded 3D printed plastic objects into printing filament. Tyler named this recycling device the Filabot, described on its website as “user friendly, but … also environmentally friendly. Filabot will bring the real power of sustainability to 3D printing.”


pages: 297 words: 89,176

Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization by Paul Kindstedt

agricultural Revolution, classic study, cotton gin, Kickstarter, mass immigration, New Urbanism, trade route

Large-scale production of wool textiles continued in Mesopotamia long after the decline of Uruk, eventually encompassing millions of sheep and an estimated fifty to sixty thousand workers employed in massive state-sponsored textile manufacturing facilities (Algaze 2008). Wool textiles were the major economic driver of Sumerian civilization during the fourth and third millennia BC, and it would seem that Inanna unwittingly, or perhaps not so unwittingly, helped to kick-start this economy through her insatiable appetite for sheep’s-milk cheese and butter. The logistical challenges associated with keeping Inanna adequately provisioned with offerings of cheese, butter, and other agricultural products evidently played an important role in the development of writing.

Hence, the combination of Harding’s striking advancements in Cheddar technology and the ascendancy of Cheddar as the leading cheese variety on the London market stimulated sweeping changes in American cheese making that would position Cheddar cheese to become the world’s most widely produced variety. The arrival of the cheese factory also came at a crucial time in American history that helped to kick-start its phenomenal success. The factory system had been in operation for ten years and was just beginning to gain steam when the Civil War broke out. The mass exodus of men from northern farms to fight for the Union army left women on the farms with the overwhelming burden of doing it all . . . raising the crops, herding the cows, milking the cows, making the cheese, selling the cheese, raising the children, cooking the meals, keeping the home. . . .


pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

A mosaic of kingdoms, empires, and tribes had populated the Silk Road for thousands of years.24 The Oxford University historian Peter Frankopan writes that Europeans shifted their share of the global economy and political power away from the East when they began massacring indigenous peoples of the New World, and looting the Americas’ wealth. Global trading and military power transferred from the land to the sea, and the creation of modern European navies helped kick-start the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century.25 While Europe mechanized its forces and built powerful, modern nation-states, China’s leaders were dismissive of modern technologies and weaponry. They clung to the idea that their emperor was the son of heaven with no equal, who had an uninterrupted heritage predating the lineages of neighboring powers like Japan and Korea.

It poured more than $21 billion into a variety of start-ups—anything from online gaming to ride sharing to gene sequencing.30 Finally, China’s disparate start-ups, growing in wealth and influence, had the potential to build a nationwide ecosystem that could bring together big data, facial recognition, and AI. Go, the board game beloved in China, kick-started China’s AI engine. For years, AI engineers had believed Go was so hopelessly complex—it has 361 pieces—that it would be impossible to write a software program that could win over a human. The number of possible positions on the board exceeded the number of atoms in the known universe, requiring incredible computing power and pattern recognition.31 Google, which had been investing in AI since its founding in 1998,32 bought the start-up DeepMind in early 2014.


A Second Chance by Jodi Taylor

Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, financial independence, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, out of africa, publish or perish, trade route

‘They’re often the best sort, Eddie. Tell me.’ ‘We open the door.’ What? Was he out of his mind? Had blood loss affected his brain? I stared at him. ‘The benefits being …?’ ‘Out there is nothing. In here is something. Matter exists. Time is passing. We open the door. Something collides with nothing. That collision may – may – kick-start the jump. It’s not a solution, Max. We almost certainly won’t survive. All I’m offering is uncertain death rather than certain death.’ I considered. ‘It’ll be a hell of bang.’ ‘It certainly will.’ ‘I’d have to override the safety protocols.’ ‘Can you? ‘I think so.’ ‘We’ll only need a tiny, minute fraction of a second.

You were visiting an educational establishment, for crying out loud, not the sack of Constantinople.’ ‘1204,’ I murmured, helpfully. ‘You melted your pod!’ ‘I’m fine, thank you.’ ‘We had to close Hawking for a day. Residual radiation.’ ‘And the professor. He’s fine, too, thank you for asking. He had a great time.’ ‘There was a fireball!’ ‘And I think we may have kick-started the invention of the reflecting telescope.’ ‘I’ve no idea where to start on Number Eight. The outer casing looks like grilled cheese!’ ‘So, quite a successful jump, I think.’ He drew a deep breath and made a huge effort at staying calm. ‘How are you?’ ‘I melted my pod? Cool!’ Communication – the cornerstone of St Mary’s success.


pages: 290 words: 90,057

Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy by Lawrence Ingrassia

air freight, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, computer vision, data science, fake news, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Hacker News, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork

“It was a big turning point,” recalls Justin Seidenfeld, the chief product officer and one of Udashkin’s first hires. * * * The direct-to-consumer revolution has spawned many success stories, enriching company founders. Kellogg’s paid $600 million for Rxbar, an all-natural “energy bar.” The online watch company MVMT (“movement,” get it?), financed with a Kickstarter fund-raising campaign, was purchased by Movado for $100 million, with the potential for another $100 million in payments to the founders, depending on sales growth. Procter & Gamble acquired Native deodorant for $100 million, and Amazon bought the digital doorbell start-up Ring for about $1 billion.

Gilt Groupe Gimenez, Francisco Ginko International Giorgio Armani Gleam Gleem globalization Glossier GlossierBrown Glow Light Goby Goggles4u Goldman Sachs gold star companies Goodman, Marla Google Google Checkout and Shopping Gordon, Stephen Gorecki, Ryan Gormsen, Christian GQ Grand Junction Great Jones Green, Draymond Green, Kirsten Grobart, Sam groceries Guess GV Hacker News hair coloring hair-loss products for men Hales, Derek Happy Belly Harrison, Brad Harry’s hate list Hawkins, David hearing aids HelloBeautiful Henkel Henri Bendel Hill, Ken Hims Hinomoto wheels home décor hOmeLabs Home Try-On Honda Honeywell Horwitz, Jesse HSBC Hubble Huffington Post Huggies Human Ocean Wing E-commerce Hybrid Designs hydrogel ice makers Idea Farm Ventures iHear Medical Inc. 5000 list India Indochino influencers, paid Innovel Instagram inStyle intent platform Interactive Advertising Bureau Interesting Engineering International Sleep Products Association intimate apparel Into the Gloss blog inventory iPhone IPOs iTunes Japan J. Crew Jet.com Jiaxing Zichi Trade Co. Jobs, Steve Johnson, Michael Johnson & Johnson Jones, Michael Kai Kalvaria, Selena Kangaroo Kaplan University Katz-Mayfield, Andy Kaziukenas, Juozas Kellogg’s Kerouac, Jack keyword bids Kickstarter Kim, John Brian kitchenware Kiva Systems Kleiner Perkins Kmart Korey, Steph Koulouris, George Krim, Philip Kumar, Adrian Lackenby, Steve Laczay, Tibor Lai, Patricia Lane Bryant Lark & Ro Laseter, Tim last-mile problem laundry detergent L Brands lead generation Le Conte, Thibault Leesa Lensabl LensCrafters Lerer, Ben Lerer Hippeau Levine, Mark Levi Strauss Levy, Brian lifestyle branding lifetime guarantee Lingley, Ann LinkedIn Lively Locus Robotics logistics Lola Lookalike Audience Lord & Taylor L’Oréal Louis Vuitton LTV (lifetime value) luggage rolling smart Lull Lumi Luxottica LVMH Lyft machinery, hair coloring production MacNeil, Thomas Macy’s Made In Madison Reed Mahoney, Patrick malls Mama Bear manufacturing Maridou, Evan Marino, John-Thomas “JT” marketing.


pages: 638 words: 156,653

Berlin by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, indoor plumbing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Skype, starchitect, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

Such confidence was a thorn in the side of the Holy Roman Emperor who, in 1411, put Friedrich von Hohenzollern, burgrave of Nuremberg, in charge of Brandenburg, ushering in five centuries of uninterrupted rule by the House of Hohenzollern. Return to beginning of chapter REFORMATION & THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR The Reformation, kick-started in 1517 by Martin Luther in nearby Wittenberg, was slow to arrive in Berlin. Eventually, though, the wave of reform reached Brandenburg, leaving Elector Joachim II (ruled 1535–71) no choice but to subscribe to Protestantism. On 1 November 1539, the court celebrated the first Lutheran-style service in the Nikolaikirche in Spandau.

The Soviets also occupied the zone surrounding Berlin, leaving West Berlin completely encircled by territories under Soviet control. Return to beginning of chapter THE BIG CHILL Friction between the Western Allies and the Soviets quickly emerged. For the Western Allies, a main priority was to help Germany get back on its feet by kick-starting the devastated economy. The Soviets, though, insisted on massive reparations and began brutalising and exploiting their own zone of occupation. Tens of thousands of able-bodied men and POWs ended up in labour camps deep in the Soviet Union. In the Allied zones, meanwhile, democracy was beginning to take root as Germany elected state parliaments in 1946–47.

Although equipped with modern conveniences such as private baths and lifts, these giant developments had little open space, green areas or leisure facilities. Return to beginning of chapter CRITICAL RECONSTRUCTION While mass housing mushroomed on the peripheries, the inner city suffered from decay and neglect, especially in the shadow of the Berlin Wall and nowhere more so than in Kreuzberg. To kick-start the district’s revitalisation, another Interbau was held in 1978. It would blend two architectural principles: ‘careful urban renewal’, which would focus on preserving, renovating and reusing existing buildings; and ‘critical reconstruction’, which meant filling vacant lots with new buildings that reflected the layout or design of surrounding structures.


pages: 605 words: 169,366

The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Sebastian Mallaby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, capital controls, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, export processing zone, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentleman farmer, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, microcredit, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, the new new thing, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Bank’s so-called structural-adjustment programs were failing to promote adjustment because that was often not their real purpose; they were really about getting fresh loans to Africa so that Africans could repay old ones. Time and again, the Bank would give these defensive loans a structural-adjustment coating by projecting that they would kick-start growth; time and again, these projections proved wrong, discrediting structural adjustment still further. When internal critics questioned the realism of these growth projections, they were told to be quiet. “Realism” required getting the Bank’s own loans serviced.46 And yet, however compelling the arguments for debt relief, they were heresy at the World Bank when Wolfensohn arrived there.

It is hard enough to measure poverty, and economists vary widely on its extent.6 It is even harder, and probably impossible, to measure the relative impact of dozens of interrelated strategies to relieve poverty across scores of countries. The impossibility of showing which interventions trump the rest is easily forgotten, because development advocates generate a steady stream of claims to the contrary: The key to kick-starting development is said to lie in microfinance, or population control, or greater rights for women, or various other worthwhile challenges. Perhaps the most impressive recent claim of this genre comes from Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist, who points out that the poor often lack legal title to their land.

And if national institutions are corrupt, won’t national politicians be tempted to extract bribes from supposedly uncorrupt enclaves? Rather like Hernando de Soto’s land tenure idea, enclaves might start you down the road toward development. But in the end you can’t duck the question of national governance, however daunting it might be. Because neither the kick-start theories nor the enclave arguments are fully convincing, Wolfensohn was right that the Bank should be comprehensive. He was wrong in other ways, however. He introduced his development framework clumsily, claiming too much originality and alienating the Bank’s board. He insisted that a comprehensive vision of development had to include some subjects that in truth were marginal, such as cultural heritage, and some subjects that were bitterly divisive on the board, such as religion.


pages: 128 words: 28,129

Exercise Every Day: 32 Tactics for Building the Exercise Habit (Even If You Hate Working Out) by S.J. Scott

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, fear of failure, Inbox Zero, Kickstarter, Mr. Money Mustache, obamacare, Skype

Heck, even people in solitary confinement find “space” to exercise in a 6x6 box with nothing but a cot, so there should be no problem finding a place to exercise in your home or backyard. HOW TO IMPLEMENT Like I said, there is a variety of home workout programs. Some are a fun way to spend 30 minutes, while others resemble a grueling boot-camp environment. The following are a few resources to help you get started. Extreme Solutions If you really want to kick-start your fitness routine with some serious intensity, workout routines like P90X, high-intensity interval training (HIIT), and Insanity may be what you’re looking for. All three are centered on similar principles: high intensity yields more results. The benefits of high-intensity training include: • Boosted Metabolism • Muscle gain • Increased stamina P90X is unique from HIIT and Insanity because it has a yoga component, which some don’t view as high-intensity training (though it is challenging and beneficial).


pages: 134 words: 29,488

Python Requests Essentials by Rakesh Vidya Chandra, Bala Subrahmanyam Varanasi

business logic, create, read, update, delete, en.wikipedia.org, Kickstarter, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, natural language processing, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, supply-chain management, web application

• The Session object is another goodie which saves the user's session. It stores the requests of the user so that the application can remember the different requests from the user. • Flask uses the Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) protocol while dealing with requests from clients and it is 100 % WSGI compliant. Getting started with Flask We can kick-start our application development with a simple example, which gives you an idea of how we program in Python with a flask framework. In order to write this program, we need to perform the following steps: 1. Create a WSGI application instance, as every application in Flask needs one to handle requests from the client. 2.


pages: 410 words: 101,260

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

Coombs and James Bowen, “Additivity of Risk in Portfolios,” Perception & Psychophysics 10 (1971): 43–46, and “Test of the Between Property of Expected Utility,” Journal of Mathematical Psychology 13 (323–37). Baseball owner Branch Rickey: Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). T. S. Eliot’s landmark work: Paul Collins, “Ezra Pound’s Kickstarter Plan for T. S. Eliot,” Mental Floss, December 8, 2013, http://mentalfloss.com/article/54098/ezra-pounds-kickstarter-plan-ts-eliot. Polaroid founder Edwin Land: Victor K. McElheny, Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Pierre Omidyar: Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay (New York: Little, Brown, 2008).


pages: 334 words: 98,950

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

In June 1947, the US abandoned its previous policy of deliberately weakening the German economy and launched the Marshall Plan, which channelled a large amount of money into European post-war reconstruction.* Even though the sum involved in this was not huge, the Marshall Plan played an important role in kickstarting the war-torn European economies by financing essential import bills and financing the re-building of infrastructure. It was a political signal that the US saw it in its interest that other nations, even its former enemies, prosper. The US also led other rich countries in helping, or at least allowing, poor countries develop their economies through nationalistic policies.

These included shipbuilding, steel, mining, textiles (cotton, wool and silk) and armaments.17 The Japanese government privatized these enterprises soon after they were established, but some of them remained heavily subsidized even after privatization – especially the shipbuilding firms. The Korean steel maker POSCO is a more modern and more dramatic case of an SOE set up due to capital market failure. The general lesson is clear: public enterprises have often been set up in order to kick-start capitalism, not to supersede it, as it is commonly believed. State-owned enterprises can also be ideal where there exists ‘natural monopoly’. This refers to the situation where technological conditions dictate that having only one supplier is the most efficient way to serve the market. Electricity, water, gas, railways and (landline) telephones are examples of natural monopoly.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

“It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer,” Bill Gates has said. * * * — Perhaps the most unlikely featured speaker at Summit at Sea was Edward Snowden, American whistleblower, scourge of the National Security Agency. He was in Russia, coming to the ship via video. His interviewer was Chris Sacca, a wildly successful VC (Instagram, Kickstarter, Twitter, Uber). One of the founders of Summit walked onstage and said, “We need truth-tellers and thought leaders like Chris Sacca.” Two truth-tellers for the price of one. Sacca, taking the stage, praised Summit for becoming what he called “a platform for entrepreneurship, for justice.”

The trio batted around ideas for addressing this problem, and at last alighted on the vision of creating a parallel capitalist infrastructure, next to the traditional one, in which companies could be more responsible and conscious, and nonetheless raise money from capital markets and comply with the law. Thus was born the B Corporation, or benefit corporation, as it is also known. The three men started a nonprofit called B Lab, which gives better-behaved businesses a certification based on a rigorous analysis of their social and environmental practices. Kickstarter, King Arthur Flour, Ben & Jerry’s, and the Brazilian cosmetics company Natura are all B corps. Kassoy and his cofounders wanted to make the world a better place, and they found a way of doing so in line with MarketWorld values. They made it easier for companies that were willing to do good, while all but ignoring the companies that wanted to do harm.


pages: 301 words: 100,597

My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture by Guy Branum

bitcoin, different worldview, G4S, Google Glasses, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, pets.com, plutocrats, Rosa Parks, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, tech billionaire, telemarketer

You would have to choose to learn about Canada, and no one does that. Let us begin at the beginning of white people. You’re probably like, “But Guy, the REAL story is the native peoples of Canada; their narrative is forgotten.” To that I would like to say, “Please, get to work unforgetting them. I will donate to any Kickstarter you kick-start.” But you see, you had no interest in exploring the stories of First Nations Canada until you wanted to tell me I was telling a story of Canada wrong. This is the resilient power of Canadian boringness to keep us from discussing them. You will try to train on a more progressive, more relevant story and, in the end, keep knowing nothing about Canada.


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

The startups behind this ICO trend are touting a host of new decentralized applications that could disrupt everything from online advertising to medical research. Integral to those services are special tokens that are pre-sold to the public as a way to both raise money and build a network of users—kind of like Kickstarter, but in which contributors have the potential to make quick money in secondary trading markets. At the time of writing, the highest amount raised by one of these pre-sale ICOs was $257 million by Protocol Labs, which sold a token called Filecoin that’s designed to incentivize people to provide hard-drive space for a new decentralized Web.

Inter-American Development Bank Interledger Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Internet of Things (IoT) Internet of Value Internet 3.0 Interplanetary File System (IPFS) IOTA IPFS. See Interplanetary File System (IPFS) Islamic State Israel Ito, Joichi Ivancheglo, Sergey J.P. Morgan Jagers, Chris Japan Jasanoff, Sheila JavaScript Jordan Juniper Research K320 (digital currency) Kalanick, Travis Kickstarter. See also crowdfunding know-your-customer (KYC) know-your-machine Larimer, Daniel ledger-keeping and Bitcoin double-entry bookkeeping history of triple-entry bookkeeping value of Lehman Brothers Lemieux, Victoria L. Leondrino Exchange Lessig, Lawrence Levine, Matt Lewis, Michael Lightning Network Linux Foundation Litecoin Llanos, Juan Lloyd’s of London LO3 Energy Lovejoy, James Loyyal Lubin, Joseph Ludwin, Adam Lyft Lykke Madoff, Bernie Maidsafe Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 Marshall, George C.


pages: 332 words: 100,601

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

Given the fact that the commercial prospects of a new programming language at the point of conception are almost nil in today’s world unless it is backed by a large company such as Google, Apple or Microsoft, it was unlikely that any investor would choose to invest in such a project. However, open-source contributions and government funding kick-started the project and have led to its maturity, to a point where universities around the world now teach Julia in classrooms, and companies use it extensively. While government funding has been a key component of technological innovation, some of the resulting discoveries have ended up posing an unexpected challenge to government itself.

‘Finance ministry wants taxman not to harass taxpayers’. Times of India. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/Finance-ministry-wants-taxman-not-to-harass-taxpayers/articleshow/38346860.cms 7. Mahalingam, T.V. 6 July 2014. ‘Budget 2014: What India’s five manufacturing hubs expect from Modi government to kick-start growth’. Economic Times. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-07-06/news/51107986_1_manufacturing-sector-world-manufacturing-hubs 8. ‘The World Bank Indicators’. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.TAX.TOTL.GD.ZS. 9. July 2004. ‘Report of the Task Force on Implementation of the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act, 2003’.


pages: 347 words: 99,317

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

In June 1947, the US abandoned its previous policy of deliberately weakening the German economy and launched the Marshall Plan, which channelled a large amount of money into European post-war reconstruction.vi Even though the sum involved in this was not huge, the Marshall Plan played an important role in kickstarting the war-torn European economies by financing essential import bills and financing the re-building of infrastructure. More importantly, it was a political signal that the US saw it in its interest that other nations, even its former enemies, prosper. The US also led other rich countries in helping, or at least allowing, poor countries develop their economies through nationalistic policies.

These included shipbuilding, steel, mining, textiles (cotton, wool and silk) and armaments.17 The Japanese government privatized these enterprises soon after they were established, but some of them remained heavily subsidized even after privatization – especially the shipbuilding firms. The Korean steel maker POSCO is a more modern and more dramatic case of an SOE set up due to capital market failure. The general lesson is clear: public enterprises have often been set up in order to kick-start capitalism, not to supersede it, as it is commonly believed. State-owned enterprises can also be ideal where there exists ‘natural monopoly’. This refers to the situation where technological conditions dictate that having only one supplier is the most efficient way to serve the market. Electricity, water, gas, railways and (landline) telephones are examples of natural monopoly.


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

A CubeSat is a bit bigger than a Rubik’s Cube—10 centimeters on a side and weighing less than 1.3 kilograms. Most CubeSat launches have come from academia, but companies such as Boeing have built CubeSats, and amateur satellite builders have gotten their projects off the ground using crowdfunding campaigns on websites such as Kickstarter. NASA’s NanoSail-D was designed to use three CubeSats to de- ploy triangular sails totaling 10 square meters. Unfortunately, it too was scuppered by the launch vehicle when its Falcon rocket malfunctioned in 2008. But NASA persisted, and a twin was successfully launched in 2011 (Figure 43). NanoSail-D was never intended to be more than a test of solar-sail deployment, and it burned up after 240 days in low Earth orbit.

., US Space and Rocket Center in, 48 Huygens, Christiaan, 163 Huygens probe, 53 hybrid cars, 96 hydrogen, 110, 156, 159, 161, 187, 219, 222 hydrogen bomb, 36 hydrosphere, 173 hyperloop aviation concept, 95 hypothermia, 251 hypothetical scenarios, 15–16 IBM, 213 Icarus Interstellar, 224 ice: on Europa, 125 on Mars, 163–65, 227 on Moon, 159–60 ice ages, 7–8 ice-penetrating robot, 98 IKAROS spacecraft, 184 imagination, 10, 14, 20 exploration and, 261–63 immortality, 259 implants, 206–7 inbreeding, 201–3 India, 159, 161 inflatable modules, 101–2 inflation theory, 255–57, 255 information, processing and storage of, 257–60 infrared telescopes, 190 Inspiration Mars, 170–71 Institute for Advanced Concepts, 280 insurance, for space travel, 106–7 International Academy of Astronautics, 152 International Geophysical Year (1957–1958), 37 International Institute of Air and Space Law, 199 International MicroSpace, 90 International Scientific Lunar Observatory, 157 International Space Station, 55, 64–65, 64, 71, 75, 91, 96, 100, 102, 142, 143, 144, 151, 153, 154, 159, 178–79, 179, 185, 272, 275 living conditions on, 116–17 as staging point, 148 supply runs to, 100–101, 104 International Space University, 90 International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), 105–6, 144 Internet: Congressional legislation on, 78, 144 development of, 76–77, 77, 94, 95, 271 erroneous predictions about, 213–14 limitations of, 66–67 robotics and, 206 space travel compared to, 76–80, 77, 80 Internet Service Providers (ISPs), 78 interstellar travel, 215–18 energy technology for, 219–24 four approaches to, 251–52 scale model for, 219 Intrepid rovers, 165 Inuit people, 120 Io, 53, 177 property rights on, 145 “iron curtain,” 35 Iron Man, 95 isolation, psychological impact of, 169–70 Jacob’s Ladder, 149 Jade Rabbit (“Yutu”), 139, 143, 161 Japan, 161, 273 Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), 184 Jefferson, Thomas, 224 Jemison, Mae, 224 jet engines, 69–70 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 141 Johnson, Lyndon, 38, 42, 45, 158, 269 Johnson Space Center, 76, 104, 179, 206, 229, 269 see also Mission Control Jones, Stephanie Tubbs, 74 Joules per kilogram (MJ/kg), 219–20, 222 Journalist in Space program, 74 “junk” DNA, 10, 266 Juno probe, 228 Jupiter, 126, 127, 177, 217, 270 distance from Earth to, 50 moons of, 97, 125, 125 probes to, 51–52, 228 as uninhabitable, 125 Justin (robot), 178 Kaku, Michio, 253 Karash, Yuri, 65 Kardashev, Nikolai, 253 Kardashev scale, 253, 254, 258 Kármán line, 70, 70, 101 Kennedy, John F., 41–43, 45 Kepler, Johannes, 183 Kepler’s law, 127 Kepler spacecraft and telescope, 128, 128, 129–31, 218, 278 Khrushchev, Nikita, 42, 47 Kickstarter, 184 Killian, James, 38 Kline, Nathan, 205 Knight, Pete, 71 Komarov, Vladimir, 43, 108 Korean War, 141 Korolev, Sergei, 35, 37 Kraft, Norbert, 200 Krikalev, Sergei, 115 Kunza language, 119 Kurzweil, Ray, 94, 207, 259 Laika (dog), 47, 65, 269 Laliberté, Guy, 75 landings, challenges of, 51, 84–85, 170 Lang, Fritz, 28, 268 language: of cryptography, 291 emergence of, 15, 16 of Orcas, 190 in reasoning, 13 Lansdorp, Bas, 170–71, 198–99, 282 lasers, 223, 224, 225–26, 239 pulsed, 190, 243 last common ancestor, 6, 123, 265 Late Heavy Bombardment, 172 latency, 178 lava tubes, 160 legislation, on space, 39, 78, 90, 144, 145–47, 198–200 Le Guin, Ursula K., 236–37 Leonov, Alexey, 55 L’Garde Inc., 284 Licancabur volcano, 119 Licklider, Joseph Carl Robnett “Lick,” 76–78 life: appearance and evolution on Earth of, 172 artificial, 258 detection of, 216–18 extension of, 26, 207–8, 250–51, 259 extraterrestrial, see aliens, extraterrestrial intelligent, 190, 235, 241, 243, 258 requirements of habitability for, 122–26, 125, 129, 131–33, 241, 256–57 lifetime factor (L), 234–335 lift, in flight, 68–70, 83 lift-to-drag ratio, 83 light: from binary stars, 126 as biomarker, 217 Doppler shift of, 127 momentum and energy from, 183 speed of, 178, 228–29, 250, 251 waves, 66 Lindbergh, Charles, 30, 81–82, 90–91, 268 “living off the land,” 166, 200 logic, 14, 18 Long March, 141 Long March rockets, 113, 142, 143 Long Now Foundation, 293 Los Alamos, N.


pages: 311 words: 99,699

Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kickstarter, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, McMansion, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Plato's cave, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, value at risk, yield curve

So many clients responded that the event was standing room only. By October 1999, the official volume of credit derivatives deals in the market was estimated at $229 billion, six times the level just two years earlier. J.P. Morgan alone accounted for almost half of the total. The bank had not just kick-started the business; it virtually was the market. The J.P. Morgan clients, investors, and rivals packed into the Cipriani ballroom that day were eager to find out what the young derivatives Turks were planning next. As the audience filed into the Cipriani, they were given a hefty, seventy-three-page tome decorated with a blurred picture of orange and white squares on a black background, not unlike a piece of artwork by Mark Rothko.

Some of that was due to the banks’ traditional businesses of equity market underwriting, share trading, and merger advice recovering from the internet crash, but a key component of the growth was the credit boom. Between 2003 and 2004, the total market capitalization of major global banks rose by $900 billion to $5.4 trillion, a record high. Amid this heady bonanza, however, one bank was notably not celebrating: JPMorgan Chase. By 2004, the bank that had kick-started the credit investment boom was, ironically, lagging badly behind the new pack of players, in large part because the J.P. Morgan management had opted out of the mortgage-based CDO and CDS business. Analysts were unimpressed with the bank’s results, and the stock price was languishing. An injection of new energy was urgently needed, and the bank was about to get quite a shock to the system


pages: 344 words: 96,020

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, DevOps, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, minimum viable product, multi-armed bandit, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, working poor, Y Combinator, young professional

Such a response to any marketing effort would constitute a huge success, and yet the viral coefficient of this referral program would be 5 × 10% = .5, a far cry from the 1.0 definition of true virality. But enough with the inside baseball about viral growth definitions. The takeaway isn’t that growth teams shouldn’t try to kick-start viral growth; rather, they need to be more practical in their assessment of viral potential. We encourage teams to experiment with creating viral engagement loops, and in fact to work on creating a number of them for any given product. But in doing so, teams should set and communicate realistic expectations, both within the team and with management.

Too many companies add referral programs into their products as afterthoughts (another reason why the product managers, designers, and engineers should be involved in growth team efforts, so they can take these considerations into account when building the initial product) and include them on webpages or screens that are rarely visited; unfortunately, this low visibility all but guarantees that there is never enough critical mass to kick-start the viral loop. Far better to integrate the prompt into the more highly trafficked areas, like the new user experience, or on the home screen. At ScoreBig, a live event ticketing platform Morgan worked for, the team saw a massive spike in friend invites sent out when they integrated the referral program into the new user experience, whereas before it had only been accessible from a small link tucked into the corner at the top of the website home page.


pages: 305 words: 101,743

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, financial independence, game design, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Norman Mailer, obamacare, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QR code, rent control, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, TikTok, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, wage slave, white picket fence

It came after the advent of reality TV and Facebook, which drew on the renewable natural resource of our narcissism to create a world where our selves, our relationships, and our personalities were not just monetizable but actively in need of monetization. It came after college tuition skyrocketed only to send graduates into low-wage contract work and world-historical economic inequality. It came, finally, after the 2008 financial crisis, the event that arguably kick-started the millennial-era understanding that the quickest way to win is to scam. The Crash In 1988, twenty-seven-year-old Michael Lewis quit his job at Salomon Brothers, the investment bank that sold the world’s first mortgage-backed security, and wrote a book called Liar’s Poker. It was a portrait of Wall Street in the years following federal deregulation, a time when the industry blossomed with savvy, cynical, lucky actors who stumbled into a world of extreme manipulation and profit.

The Facebook idiom now dominates our culture, with the most troubling structural changes of the era surfacing in isolated, deceptive specks of emotional virality. We see the dismantling of workplace protections in a celebratory blog post about a Lyft driver who continued to pick up passengers while she was in labor. We see the madness of privatized healthcare in the forced positivity of a stranger’s chemotherapy Kickstarter campaign. On Facebook, our basic humanity is reframed as an exploitable viral asset. Our social potential is compressed to our ability to command public attention, which is then made inextricable from economic survival. Instead of fair wages and benefits, we have our personalities and stories and relationships, and we’d better learn to package them well for the internet in case we ever get in an accident while uninsured.


pages: 362 words: 97,288

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

One option is to farm it out to industry. Companies like Via—which operate dozens of microtransit lines in New York, Austin, Chicago, and Washington, DC—already have rider-verification systems in place. It’s easy to imagine Via licensing its tools to participating organizations or local transit agencies that want to kick-start line-sharing efforts. The challenge would be making sure there’s a way to onboard disadvantaged people who don’t or won’t use a mobile device—and making sure everyone’s data is kept private and secure. The second challenge is coordinating those transfers, because driverless shuttles won’t always run on schedules, and many won’t stick to fixed routes.

See, for example, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Michael Storper, “Housing, Urban Growth and Inequalities: The Limits to Deregulation and Upzoning in Reducing Economic and Spatial Inequality,” Urban Studies (September 2019), https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019859458. 9Wrestling with Regulation The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city. —Lewis Mumford, 1964 Mayors may have the hardest job in the self-driving future. After the designers, developers, and engineers are long gone, they’ll have to pick up the pieces. Yet today, we focus mainly on the national reforms needed to kick-start AV innovation. The real challenge of regulating the impacts of AVs will fall on local governments—as it did in the motor age. The sweeping scope of opportunities and threats posed by self-driving technology is catching most cities by surprise. But many are now assessing what’s in store and their options near and far.


pages: 329 words: 101,233

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee

air gap, airport security, anesthesia awareness, animal electricity, biofilm, colonial rule, computer age, COVID-19, CRISPR, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, hype cycle, impulse control, informal economy, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, stem cell, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury

This research soon gave scientists a full index of all the ion channels—sodium channels, calcium channels, chloride channels, potassium channels. Never mind the transparent curtain—it was these proteins that decided which ion was allowed to go where, when. How did they make these complicated decisions? That puzzle was solved in 1991—the same year Neher and Sakmann got their Nobel for kick-starting this avalanche of research—by the biophysicist Roderick MacKinnon. Many complex metaphors have been used to describe the incredibly complicated system MacKinnon uncovered. But I like to think of ion channels as shape sorters—you know, the toy you give a baby so it can shove different-shaped pegs into a wooden box through matching holes.

Then Ai-Sun Tseng, who at the time was part of Levin’s lab, manipulated the membrane voltages with ion-channel tweaks, and now we were cooking with gas. She and Levin had been kicking around an idea—instead of micromanaging the process of regeneration, could it be possible to tweak the bioelectrics to kickstart the development processes that had built these appendages in the first place? Tseng started looking for ion channels that might be amenable to tweaking. She discovered one kind of sodium channel that was crucial to regeneration. Better yet, an ion-channel drug had already been developed that could act on these.


Pocket Stockholm Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, cashless society, Kickstarter, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sexual politics, urban decay, walkable city

Swedes drink more coffee than people in any other country except Finland (something to do with the weather?). The range of coffee drinks has vastly increased in recent years, as has the variety of places to enjoy them. Don’t forget to include a sweet – Stockholm's cafes do seriously good cakes and pastries. JULIE MAYFENG/SHUTTERSTOCK © yTop Tips AFor Stockholmers, coffee isn't just a breakfast kick-starter. The caffeine flows freely here at any tick of the clock: locals are just as likely to enjoy a cup of the black stuff at 10pm as they are a beer. Best Coffee Shops Sturekatten Cute labyrinthine coffee shop with antique furniture and delicious cakes. In Östermalm. All very dignified. Bianchi Cafe & Cycles Perfect espresso in a bicycle-themed Italian cafe in Norrmalm.


Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies by Nik Bhatia

Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, central bank independence, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, fiat currency, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk free rate, Satoshi Nakamoto, slashdot, smart contracts, time value of money, tulip mania, universal basic income

The Federal Reserve was bound by a legislated minimum gold-coverage which limited the amount of credit the Fed made available to the system. Gold’s disciplinary constraint received an outcry of blame for the economy’s inability to recover and led to dramatic and sweeping changes to the dollar pyramid during the 1930s. These events should be seen as the major catalyst that kickstarted gold’s departure from the world’s monetary landscape. No Gold for You President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933 which instructed all “gold coin, gold bullion, and certificates to be delivered to the government.” The order was effectively a forced sale of gold in exchange for Federal Reserve notes (cash) by all United States citizens and outrightly eliminated the people’s access to first-layer money.11 This brazen declaration made the possession of and trafficking in first-layer money illegal and punishable by up to ten years in prison, reminiscent of the Bank of Amsterdam’s mandate for all cashiers to surrender precious metal coins in exchange for BoA deposits upon its creation in 1609.


pages: 178 words: 34,442

More Plants Less Waste: Plant-Based Recipes + Zero Waste Life Hacks With Purpose by Max La Manna

carbon footprint, Kickstarter, Mason jar

Like all plants, bananas contain important nutrients and can be planted in your back garden to help support plant and soil health. Recycling the peels back into your gardens returns essential nutrients to the soil where they can benefit other plants. banana peels Chop your banana peels into 2.5cm segments. By chopping them, you kickstart the compost process and release some of the beneficial vitamins and minerals in the peels. Dig holes about 15–30cm deep and plant your banana peels around your garden, preferably near other plants or trees to provide the most beneficial results. MORE PLANTS LESS WASTE 21-DAY CHALLENGE We all need to start somewhere.


pages: 122 words: 36,274

Grow Green: Tips and Advice for Gardening With Intention by Jen Chillingsworth

carbon footprint, clean water, food miles, Indoor air pollution, Kickstarter, Mason jar

YOU WILL NEED » Seed potting compost » Bucket » Water » Trowel » Containers (for small seeds use a seed tray and for larger seeds use individual pots) » Seeds » Spray bottle filled with water » Plant labels Place the seed potting compost in the bucket. Add a little water and mix it into the compost with the trowel. Moistening the compost before sowing seeds helps the mix to retain water and kickstart germination. Fill your chosen container with moist seed compost. For small seeds, sow thinly and cover lightly with potting compost. For large seeds, drop two or three seeds in each container and cover lightly with potting compost. Lightly spray the surface with water and place on a sunny windowsill.


pages: 116 words: 34,937

The Life of a Song: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World’s Best-Loved Songs by David Cheal, Jan Dalley

1960s counterculture, Bernie Sanders, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Kickstarter, Live Aid, millennium bug, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, side project

In 2016 a tribute album (on Alligator Records) was released featuring artists such as Tom Waits, Derek Trucks and Maria McKee performing 11 of Johnson’s songs. The album, God Don’t Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson, was an eight-year labour of love for its producer, Jeffrey Gaskill, a long-time Johnson devotee. As well as setting up a Kickstarter campaign to fund the album, Gaskill went back to what remains of a house where Johnson lived in Marlin, Texas, and, with permission, salvaged three wooden boards that had fallen from the structure. These lengths of yellow pine were crafted by a luthier into ten ‘cigar-box’ (i.e. rectangular) guitars, which were sold to raise more funds.


pages: 125 words: 35,820

Cyprus - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture by Constantine Buhayer

banking crisis, British Empire, business climate, centre right, COVID-19, financial independence, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, lockdown, low cost airline, offshore financial centre, open economy, Skype, women in the workforce, young professional

Since the 1990s they have migrated as skilled professionals. As they settled, Greek Cypriots established local Greek Orthodox churches, then opened Greek Saturday schools for their children. Most parishes function as Cypriot villages that run their own earthly affairs. For the older women, many of whom kickstarted their diaspora families by working as seamstresses, the church is a second home in a changing world. The old country matters dearly. The Limassol-born British Cypriot magnate Theo Paphitis stated that “in the Diaspora, Cyprus has a second Cyprus abroad.” His friend, Famagusta-born Touker Suleiman, entrepreneur and fellow TV personality, is keenly attached to his Cypriot roots.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

This allows the system to adapt in accordance with the degree with which a user’s SWS is impaired.”10 Soon, you’ll be able to put on headphones to go to sleep and enter an SWS state that will improve your brain, ability to learn, memory and ability to get to and/or maintain a healthy weight. By using this method, you may also need less sleep each night. Imagine what you could do with 2 or 3 hours of less sleep each night, but still wake up in better shape than you do today? Quantified Calorie Intake A new device launched recently on a Kickstarter campaign gives you the ability to scan food in front of you and get an estimate of the number of calories you are about to consume. The portable scanner harnesses the power of physics and chemistry to figure out everything from the sugar content of a given apple to whether or not that drink you left on the bar has been drugged.

However, by 2030 with robotics, drone delivery and the like, you will have the ability to have your groceries and shopping delivered automatically from a smart kitchen initiated order. It’s also likely that we’ll continue to automate cooking in the kitchen. While a Star Trek-style replicator is decades away, a 3D printer that prints a burger or a pizza will be viable by 2030, if not earlier. Natural Machines launched a kickstarter campaign in 2014 for its 3D “Foodini” printer, which will be capable of printing various foods like pasta, cookies, crackers, bread, snacks, etc. A robotic chef (shown below) like the one Morley Robotics is working on is also a distinct possibility within the next 10 to 15 years. Figure 8.9: A robotic chef (Credit: Morley Robotics) The smart bathroom is sure to incorporate not only smarts into the bathroom mirror, but smarts into other appliances.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

Uber, the mobile app that connects passengers with drivers for hire, has turned the taxi market on its ear. But what happens when that market is challenged by robots? Uber has already built a robotics research lab stuffed with scientists to “kickstart autonomous taxi fleet development” so they can go driverless. At last count, there were 162,037 active drivers in the Uber fleet who would be kickstarted into obsolescence. In the United States and many other countries, taxi drivers are often immigrants or others hustling their way up the socioeconomic ladder. It’s also a job with tremendous amounts of human interaction.


pages: 267 words: 106,340

Europe old and new: transnationalism, belonging, xenophobia by Ray Taras

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, collective bargaining, Danilo Kiš, energy security, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, North Sea oil, open economy, postnationalism / post nation state, Potemkin village, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, World Values Survey

Commonplace Terms Used to Describe Europe “The discourse of Europeanization is dominated by superficial metaphors suggesting a teleological project legitimated by grand EU narratives, such as ‘widening’ and ‘deepening’ or ‘ever closer union’; vague, if not inaccurate, sociological terms, such as ‘integration’ and ‘inclusion,’ and morphological metaphors such as ‘multi-leveled’ governance.” Source: Gerard Delanty and Chris Rumford, Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization (London: Routledge, 2005), 3. No systematic theory about Europeanization has been developed. No doubt Europeanization was kick-started by a set of practical imperatives that initially spurred cooperation among western European states. Cooperation among economically advanced countries was regarded as a process to end all wars—a self-evident proposition but by no means a historically inevitable development. Few historians would contest that the Yalta and Potsdam treaties of 1945, concluded by wartime allies Britain, the United States, and the USSR, had countenanced a Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe.

In 2005, national elections in Poland brought a conservative Catholic, Lech Kaczyński, to the presidency. Simultaneously, his twin brother Jarosław was leader of the party that won the most seats in the legislature and shortly afterwards he became prime minister. For the next two years, the Kaczyńskis turned Poland into Europe’s lightning rod on any number of issues. They kickstarted their controversial administration by abolishing the post of minister for women’s interests, making Poland a rare European country not having this portfolio. Gay pride marches were banned, not just in Warsaw but also in various Polish cities. The exceptionalism of Poland was not confined to sociocultural issues— or to the Kaczyńskis’ interlude.


pages: 311 words: 17,232

Living in a Material World: The Commodity Connection by Kevin Morrison

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, energy security, European colonialism, flex fuel, food miles, Ford Model T, Great Grain Robbery, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price mechanism, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, young professional

Concerns about global warming went from being an environmental niche to a mainstream issue, further enhancing the perception of ethanol as a clean energy. Ethanol had become even more political: Bush beat the energy independence drum as hard as he could with the support of a patriotic America, reeling from the tragic terrorist attacks in 2001, and together they kick-started the biggest ethanol expansion in US history. Its knock-on effects for agriculture were global. President Bush (ordinarily a teetotaller) appeared intoxicated with the alcohol at his State of the Union address in January 2007. He called for a mandate of 35 billion gallons by 2017; a target that raised eyebrows and caused even some of the most ardent supporters of biofuels to doubt whether this could be achieved.

Water from desalination is about five times the cost per cubic metre of water from groundwater. Given the amount of water required, this implies that the cost of production will rise, underpinning higher copper prices – prices do not fall below the cost of production for long. The need for water has also pushed up the value of permits to extract water from aquifers and kickstarted a water exploration industry – water exploration companies play a similar role to the small mineral exploration companies. Added to this, Chile is not endowed with bountiful energy resources; it imports about two-thirds of its energy requirements, compared with less than half in 1990. The importation of fuels for power generation is therefore particularly important for the copper industry (Poniachik, 2006).


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

One early Virginia planter swore that ‘he would no more be caught going into a bank than into a house of ill fame’.16 A key political battle in the early history of the Republic was that between Thomas Jefferson, the third President, and Alexander Hamilton, the Secretary of the Treasury and founder of the Federalist party. Hamilton wanted to establish a sound banking system as a way of expanding trade within the former colonies; he opted to repay soldiers’ IOUs at par, even though many had been acquired by speculators. Hamilton kick-started the process of turning the US dollar into the world’s most acceptable credit. ‘There is scarcely any point in the economy of national affairs of greater moment than the uniform presentation of the monetary unit,’ he declared. ‘On this, the security and steady value of property essentially depend.’17 But the development of the US monetary system was far from smooth.

The arrival of steamships in the mid-nineteenth century opened up the possibility of exporting wheat from the US and meat from Argentina to the hungry European markets. The result was an agricultural depression in Britain. But by shifting workers from relatively unproductive farming into manufacturing, it gave a kick-start to European growth. In the words of Keynes, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth . . . he could at the same time and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprise of any quarter of the world . . . he could secure forthwith, if he wished, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality.4 This system tied countries closely together in economic terms.


pages: 444 words: 111,837

Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe by Paul Sen

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, heat death of the universe, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing complete, Turing test

Then a hand reaches in and opens the door. Heat starts to flow. The hand disappears but the door remains open. A small proportion of the heat flow is turned into the mechanical work needed to keep it so. The mysterious hand is equivalent to the spark needed to initially ignite the coal. This energy needed to kick-start a reaction is usually termed the activation energy. But once the coal is burning, ample heat is generated for the process to continue. We don’t observe carbon dioxide being unburned for the same reason that we don’t observe heat flowing spontaneously from the cold to the warm room. Neither process would contravene the first law of thermodynamics—no energy would be destroyed or created—but they would reduce the entropy of the universe, which is forbidden by the second law.

That raises the question of what created the pattern of morphogen concentrations in the first place. Turing’s theory, by contrast, easily enables the formation of similar but nonidentical patterns across individual members of a species. Fruit fly larvae Remember, as with the formation of sand dunes, that a tiny initial difference is all that’s needed to kick-start pattern formation. This can be caused by the random wobbling of molecules that occurs all the time or indeed by a nonrandom trigger that’s coded in the genes. Turing’s equations predict that although the patterns created in this way will be remarkably similar, they will never be identical. That’s because the tiny “jiggles” that start the process are themselves never identical, and so the pattern they eventually produce is never identical either.


pages: 322 words: 106,663

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo by Rebecca Walker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, call centre, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, export processing zone, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, neurotypical, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator

* * * In November 2014, I was assigned to review Amanda Palmer’s book The Art of Asking for the website Refinery29. The memoir, among other things, details her many approaches to crowdfunding—from her roots performing as a living statue in a wedding dress, to sleeping on fans’ couches while touring, to ultimately launching the world’s most successful Kickstarter. I concluded my essayistic review by describing my own experiences with crowdfunding and the aftermath—a few unfortunate encounters with strangers and friends in the months after, where they criticized my social media posts whenever it appeared as if I had money. (New boots: were they designer?

Three years later, Marillion inspired “the father of crowdfunding,” Brian Camelio, to launch ArtistShare—the first crowdfunding platform for artists. The platform ended up mainly backing musical projects, including ten Grammy-winning albums. It wasn’t until 2009 that our modern-day crowdfunding giants, Indiegogo and Kickstarter, collectively launched around half a million projects. Yet even today, the disdain my trolls have for me as a writer is mild compared to the disdain they have for my crowdfund. One Reddit thread that pulled my name as a potential “fake chronically ill person” (they singled out many women with chronic illness, until chronically ill activists pushed them to delete it), featured irate posts about me “financially profiting off of illness.”


pages: 405 words: 105,395

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

In the West, an art historian might point to the end of the nineteenth century, when artists began to make art and literature inspired by human experience rather than the whims of rich patrons. Modernism was the result.1 For historians, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 is a handy bookmark for the start of what they call the Early Modern Era.2 A scientist could cite the publication in 1543 of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium as kick-starting the Scientific Revolution.3 For mathematicians, the transition from before to after is not so much a point as an arc, described by a series of innovations in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In Brittany, François Viète pioneered symbolic equations, where one can write, for example, ax2 + bx + c = 0 without having to specify exact values for a, b or c.* Thomas Fincke, a Dane, and others began to explore trigonometric relationships that made it easier to solve geometric problems.4 In Flanders, Simon Stevin promoted decimal fractions—that is, using the same notation after the decimal point as in front of it, rather than the traditional (and perplexing) system of switching to sexagesimal fractions.5 Ludolph van Ceulen, a German emigrant to Holland, started with a regular pentadecagon (a fifteen-sided shape) and laboriously subdivided it thirty-seven times to come up with a thirty-five-digit approximation for π.6 All these and more contributed to a sense that something was afoot in the world of mathematics.

In accordance with traditional Japanese business etiquette, Sasaki followed the majority view.34 Yet Sasaki could not shake the feeling that Murakami had been right. Why build chips tied forever to their initial circuit designs when one could reprogram and rearrange a collection of general-purpose building blocks into whatever configuration one needed? Accordingly, he says, he “gave” Murakami’s chipset concept to Busicom and Intel to kick-start their new business relationship. Not only that, but he also claimed to have funneled around ¥40 million, or around $111,000, of Sharp’s money to Busicom to fund the development of the new chips.35 Did Tadashi Tanba come up with the idea of a general-purpose chipset? Or Masatoshi Shima? Or the unjustly ignored Ms.


Cuba Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, company town, cuban missile crisis, G4S, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Kickstarter, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, urban planning

Granma Province Granma Province Highlights Bayamo Around Bayamo Gran Parque Nacional Sierra Maestra Manzanillo Niquero Alegria del Pio Parque Nacional Desembarco del Granma Pilón Marea del Portillo Granma Province 23 / pop 836,400 Why Go? Few parts of the world get named after yachts, which helps explain why in Granma (christened for the boat in which Fidel Castro and his bedraggled revolutionaries clambered ashore to kickstart the overthrowing of the Batista regime in earnest in 1956) Cuba’s viva la Revolución spirit burns most fiercely. This land is where José Martí died and where Granma native Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed his slaves and formally declared Cuban independence for the first time in 1868. The alluringly isolated countryside helped the Revolutionary cause.

Three days later a third exhausted band of eight soldiers – including Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos – turned up, swelling the rebel army to an abject 15. ‘We can win this war,’ proclaimed an ebullient Fidel to his small band of not-so-merry men. ‘We have just begun the fight.’ Top of Chapter Bayamo pop 166,200 Predating both Havana and Santiago, and cast for time immemorial as the city that kick-started Cuban independence, Bayamo has every right to feel self-important. Yet somehow it doesn’t. The city’s affectionate name-tag, ciudad de los coches ( coches means horsecarts) is a far more telling appraisal of its ambience: an easygoing, slow-paced, trapped-in-time place that is less about industrial drive and more about, well, horses.

Santiago de Cuba Top Sights 1 Cuartel Moncada D3 2 Museo de la Lucha Clandestina B5 Sights 3 Bacardí Rum Factory B3 4 Casa del Caribe H3 5 Casa Museo de Frank y Josué País C3 6 Clock Tower A4 7Fidel Castro HouseB5 8Fountain of Martí and Abel SantamaríaD3 9Moncada MuseumD3 10 Museo de la Imagen G4 11Museo-Casa Natal de Antonio MaceoB3 12 Padre Pico steps B5 13 Palacio de Justicia D3 14 Palacio de Pioneros G3 15 Parque Alameda A4 16 Parque Histórico Abel Santamaría D3 Activities, Courses Tours 17 Ballet Folklórico Cutumba D5 18 Casa del Caribe H3 Sleeping 19 Caridad Leyna Martínez H4 20 Casa Colonial 'Maruchi' C3 21 Casa Lola B3 22 Casa Marcos E3 23 Hotel las Américas F3 24 Meliá Santiago de Cuba F3 25 Villa Gaviota H3 Eating 26 El Barracón E4 27 Jardín de los Enramadas B4 28 La Arboleda D4 29 La Fortaleza G3 30 Madrileño G4 31 Municipal Market B4 32 Paladar Salón Tropical G5 33 Restaurante España D4 34 Restaurante Zunzún G3 Ristorante Italiano la Fontana (see 24) Drinking Nightlife Barrita de Ron Havana Club (see 3) 35 Club Nautico A4 Entertainment Ballet Folklórico Cutumba (see 17) 36 Casa de las Tradiciones B5 37 Departamento de Focos Culturales de la Dirección Municipal de Cuba C3 38Estadio de Béisbol Guillermón MoncadaF2 39 Foco Cultural el Tivolí B5 40 Foco Cultural Tumba Francesa C3 Santiago Café (see 24) 41 Teatro José María Heredia E1 42 Teatro Martí C3 43 Wamby Bolera F4 Shopping 44Centro de Negocios AlamedaA4 45 La Maison G4 Sights 1 Casco Histórico Parque Céspedes PARK OFFLINE MAP GOOGLE MAP If there’s an archetype for romantic Cuban street life, Parque Céspedes is it. A throbbing kaleidoscope of walking, talking, hustling, flirting, guitar-strumming humanity, this most ebullient of city squares, with the bronze bust of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes , the man who kick-started Cuban independence in 1868, at its heart, is a sight to behold any time of day or night. Old ladies gossip on shady park benches, a guy in a panama hat drags his dilapidated double bass over toward the Casa de la Trova, and sultry señoritas in skin-tight lycra flutter their eyelashes at the male tourists on the terrace of the Hotel Casa Granda.


pages: 161 words: 38,039

The Serious Guide to Joke Writing: How to Say Something Funny About Anything by Sally Holloway

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, congestion charging, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking

Andrea Samuelson for endless support and ‘power chats’. Sue Middleton for being so supportive always. Dan Evans, whose comments on my manuscript were so insightful that this book is better for him having read it. Joe Gregory for redrawing my cartoons so wonderfully. Steve Amos and SATC for kick-starting my comedy courses in Hastings. Finally, I am very grateful to Tim Vine, Jason John Whitehead and Tiernan Dooyab for letting me use their beautifully crafted jokes as examples in this book. Introduction The Difference Between Being Funny With Your Mates And Writing Jokes For A Living ‘Who here is funny with their mates?’


pages: 122 words: 38,022

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

Pornographic images of her being raped by video game characters were created and one offended male gamer even created a video game in which players could punch Anita’s face until it was bloodied and bruised, and her eyes blackened and swollen. If you look up Anita today on YouTube you’ll find countless videos devoted to hating her and obsessively trying to destroy her reputation and career. This was largely based on the fact that she ran a Kickstarter campaign that made more money than initially planned precisely because of the harassment. All of this was done, remember, to prove that sexism was definitely not, as she had so outrageously claimed, an issue in the ‘gaming community’. Tactics such as DDoS and doxxing (exposing the person’s personal details to enable their mass harassment) used by 4chan and originating in Usenet culture became central to attacks by the anti-feminist gamers.


pages: 128 words: 38,847

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Big Tech, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, move fast and break things, new economy, open economy, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, price discrimination, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, The Chicago School

It has become clear that the IBM case decisively influenced the computing industry that is now a centerpiece of the American and world economy. First and most importantly, IBM dropped its practice of bundling (or tying) its software with hardware. That is broadly understood, even by IBM’s own people, to have kickstarted the birth of an independent software industry. Second, the IBM litigation also affected the development of the personal computer industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The IBM PC, developed while the lawsuit was still pending, was antitrust proof: IBM went with an extremely open design and declined to buy or exert excessive control over the firms who made the components, including Intel, Seagate, and Microsoft, among others.


pages: 268 words: 35,416

San Francisco Like a Local by DK Eyewitness

back-to-the-land, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bottomless brunch, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, Kickstarter, Lyft, messenger bag, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, tech bro, tech worker, uber lyft, young professional

Here, warehouses once busy with shipbuilding and repairs are now jammed with galleries and design collectives. This afternoon amble takes you through the best of Dogpatch’s arts scene within just a few short blocks. Route map n Double-tap image to read the labels 1. Begin at MINNESOTA STREET PROJECT 1275 Minnesota Street, Dogpatch; www.minnesotastreetproject.com ///mostly.drank.motor Kick-start your afternoon by spending a couple of hours browsing the 13 indie galleries inside this warehouse complex. 2. Chow down at JUST FOR YOU 732 22nd Street, Dogpatch; www.justforyoucafe.com ///caller.cover.vast Refuel with a fresh-squeezed lemonade and sandwich, made from homebaked bread, at this local favorite, which is lined with vintage travel and theater posters. 3.


pages: 382 words: 115,172

The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat by Tim Spector

biofilm, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, David Strachan, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Great Leap Forward, hygiene hypothesis, Kickstarter, life extension, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, satellite internet, Steve Jobs, twin studies

High-sugar-content drinks like Lucozade were heavily promoted (despite there being no proof) as aiding recovery from illness (and more recently from sports injuries), each bottle containing over 12 spoonfuls of therapeutic sugar. Breakfast cereals consisting nearly entirely of sugar (more sugar than puff, in fact) were also promoted as a great way for kids to kick-start the day. Apart from the minor irritation of causing tooth decay, it looked like cheap sugar was a great source of natural energy with no real downsides, if you were healthy, that is. So my new ‘healthy’ breakfast got me off to a flying start with 10 to 15 spoonfuls of totally fat-free sugar, equivalent to two cans of Coke or Pepsi.

The bad news was, after nearly a whole year my weight hadn’t shifted dramatically – although the good news was my guts for the first time in fifteen years seemed normal. I went to the loo only once a day, not ten times, which was fantastic.’ Although feeling healthier, Karen repeated her varied prebiotic twenty-item diet, but this time after a kick-start by clearing out her colon with laxatives. She lost another five kilograms, and I then suggested longer-term intermittent fasting as a way of changing her microbes and losing weight. After three months, she lost a further five kilos, so she is now ten kilos lighter and, more importantly, she feels a lot better.


Remix by John Courtenay Grimwood

clean water, delayed gratification, double helix, fear of failure, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, Kickstarter, linked data, space junk

Chapter Twenty-Three Heart of Glass What saved Fixx was a bio-augmentation he didn’t even remember having fitted. But had he ever bothered to read the subframes of his now long-cancelled contract he’d have realized the bioAug was standard. A fingernail-sized generator stapled to his left collarbone kick-started his heart. It did so by firing a single electric shock along a thin wire that led from the defibrillator down a vein and into the chambers of his heart. When the sensor buried in the heart muscle failed to detect sufficient movement from the first shock, the tiny generator fired up again and then shut down as the heart resumed its beat.

She was being murdered and there was nothing she could do to stop it happening. Nothing conscious. Nothing human. “He means it.” LizAlec never knew exactly what woke her, but whatever it was she jerked awake to gulp down a breath that sank like melt water into her burning lungs. She could feel her heart kick-start into a steady reassuring beat as its right ventricle pumped sluggish blood to her lungs, where the blood took up oxygen and returned heartwards, haemoglobin-red, to be pumped through her arteries, releasing the gathered oxygen. It was a beautiful, simple, inherently efficient system — and she was impressed.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Still, the model allows anyone with an Internet connection and a few spare dollars to support, say, the conversion of taxis in Bolivia to natural gas, student loans in Paraguay, or a garment business in Cambodia (to cite some recent examples from Kiva). Short-route philanthropy has yet to reach the volumes of money that large foundations or, for that matter, government agencies churn out, but it has become a new paradigm for giving. Individual fundraising for projects of all sorts is possible through services like Kickstarter, which enables would-be recipients to promote their project for a period and receive funds only if they raise the target amount of commitments during that time. A measure of the appeal of this approach is its adoption—and use as a marketing tool—by corporate philanthropy, as firms like American Express, Target, JPMorgan Chase, and Pepsico hold contests where Internet voters decide which among competing projects the company will support.

., 124 Johnson, Simon, 49 Joint IED Defeat Organization, 120 Jolie, Angelina, 8 Jordan, 147 JPMorgan Chase, 161–162, 191, 209, 219 Judaism, 199 Judiciaries, 77, 98, 99–100, 244 K Pop, 149 Kagan, Robert, 140 Kahn, Jeremy, 161 Kane, Paul, 95 Kaplan, Robert, 121, 122 Kaplan, Steven, 6 Karlsson, Per-Ola, 164 Karman, Tawakkol, 80 Kay, John, 166 Kaza, Greg 33 Kazakhstan, 131 Kenig, Ofer, 93 Kennedy, Joe, 154 Kennedy, John F., 45 Kennedy, Paul, 139 Kenny, Charles, 54–55 Kenya, 9, 100, 195 Kharas, Homi, 56, 210, 211 Kickstarter, 209 Kidnappings, 126 Kim Jong-Un, 154 Kim, Rose, 166 Kindleberger, Charles, 136 Kinsley, Michael, 214 Kiva, 209, 210 Kleenex, 169 Klein, Naomi, 49 Knee, Jonathan A. 213 Knights of Labor 201 Koch, David and Charles, 92 Kodak, 159, 162, 165, 169 Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, 189 Kony 2012 video, 134 Korbel, Joseph, 153 Kosovo, 189 Kraus, Clifford, 187 Kroc, Joan, 210 Krupp, 37 Kuala Lumpur, 12 Kupchan, Charles, 235 Kurlantzick, Joshua, 148 Kuwait, 65 Kwak, James, 49 Kyoto Protocol, 156 Labor, 9, 39, 47, 59, 60, 193, 194, 200–205.


pages: 514 words: 111,012

The Art of Monitoring by James Turnbull

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, business logic, cloud computing, continuous integration, correlation does not imply causation, Debian, DevOps, domain-specific language, failed state, functional programming, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, microservices, performance metric, pull request, Ruby on Rails, single source of truth, software as a service, source of truth, web application, WebSocket

He began in Linux systems administration in 1999, while earning a Bachelors in Computer Science, so knows just enough theory of computation to be dangerous in his field. He contributed a chapter on monitoring to the Google SRE Book. He lives with his family in Sydney, Australia. Editor Sid Orlando is a writer and editor (among other things), currently word-nerding out as Managing Editor at Kickstarter. Since starting work on more tech-focused projects, she may or may not be having recurring dreams about organizing her closet with dreamscape Docker containers. Author James is an author and open-source geek. His most recent books were The Docker Book about the open-source container virtualization technology and The LogStash Book about the popular open-source logging tool.

His most recent books were The Docker Book about the open-source container virtualization technology and The LogStash Book about the popular open-source logging tool. James also authored two books about Puppet (Pro Puppet and the earlier book about Puppet). He is the author of three other books, including Pro Linux System Administration, Pro Nagios 2.0, and Hardening Linux. For a real job, James is CTO at Kickstarter. He was formerly at Docker as VP of Services and Support, Venmo as VP of Engineering, and Puppet as VP of Technical Operations. He likes food, wine, books, photography, and cats. He is not overly keen on long walks on the beach or holding hands. Conventions in the book This is an inline code statement.


Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused To Let Go by Emily Cockayne

Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, card file, Charles Babbage, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Morris worm, New Journalism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, paper trading, planned obsolescence, South Sea Bubble

Two auctions, each of 80 tons of paper, ‘Writing, Brown, Strawboard, Surface Colour, Enamelled, Embossed, Tissue, Nonpareil, Morocco, Flints and other Paper’, some of which was ‘but slightly damaged’, must surely have been too irresistible for him to ignore.95 This was the perfect material with which to kick-start another business cheaply. For six years from 1880 Viëtor was included in trade directories under many headings: papermaker, pianoforte marker and ‘Pianoforte Small Work Manufacturer’, paper merchant and also ‘Manufacturer of pianos and Bois Durci ornaments’.96 It was while in these premises that Viëtor made the samples that impressed W.

Sir Thomas Chaloner, whose father had purchased Gisborough Priory in north Yorkshire after the Dissolution, rather conveniently believed that shale found locally was especially suited to making alum. In 1607 he obtained a monopoly for thirty-one years, arguing that the business would create jobs, not only in manufacture but also in shipping coals, urine and alum. Continental manufacturers were brought over to kick-start the business and train employees.71 Chaloner himself was eased out of control in 1609, when James I proclaimed alum a royal monopoly. Tons of barrelled urine were delivered to the works to be fermented to make lant (aged urine), to be used in industrial processes. Some urine came from the countryside, some from London.


pages: 364 words: 119,398

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, anti-bias training, autism spectrum disorder, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, deplatforming, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, off grid, Overton Window, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech bro, young professional

The author later suggests that there are ‘perhaps some similarities between MRAs and feminists’, and the article uncritically cites Jaye’s quote that ‘there are a lot of mirror opposites going on with these movements’. It ends with a plug for the documentary.23 But what the article completely fails to mention is that Jaye’s film was almost entirely funded by MRAs, after her Kickstarter campaign attracted massive support from Elam, AVFM and alt-right, anti-feminist provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, who boasted in the alt-right, anti-feminist media outlet Breitbart that thousands of MRAs had backed the film in a matter of hours, after its report about Jaye’s funding struggles was shared ‘thousands of times on social media’.24 Spoiler alert: Jaye takes the red pill, sees the light and denounces her wicked feminist ways.

Kposowa, ‘Divorce and suicide risk’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Volume 57, Issue 12 (2003) 21 Skepchick (21 February 2019), op. cit. 22 ‘Male Supremacy’, Southern Poverty Law Center 23 ‘How this feminist found herself sympathising with the men’s rights movement’, BBC, 8 March 2017 24 ‘Dear Cassie Jaye, Sorry For Manspreading Your “Red Pill” Kickstarter’, Breitbart, 29 October 2015 25 ‘An Anti-Feminist Party Is Standing In The General Election’, BuzzFeed, 14 January 2015 26 ‘ “There’s going to be civil war”: Inside men’s rights meeting’, news.com.au, 31 August 2018 27 ‘Jordan Peterson: It’s ideology vs. science in psychology’s war on boys and men’, National Post, 1 February 2019 5.


pages: 397 words: 113,304

Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone by Juli Berwald

clean water, complexity theory, crowdsourcing, Downton Abbey, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, Panamax, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sparse data, stem cell, Suez canal 1869, TED Talk, the scientific method, Wilhelm Olbers

Sure enough, when I opened my front door, I found a small cardboard box holding a container with nine pounds of water and a few grams of gelatinous pets. After my trip to San Francisco, when I met Alex Andon of Jellyfish Art, I had ordered my own jellyfish tank from the company’s hugely successful Kickstarter campaign. I was one of the supporters who helped raise almost $600,000 from preorders. It had taken more than a year, but I’d finally received my elegant Danish-style acrylic tank. I had added seawater and gravel, as instructed, and turned on the circulating motor. The white sound of water bubbling harmonized with the hums of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the whoosh of the air-conditioning in the dining room.

What made the jellyfish contract at all? How was it moving? Back in 1874, a young English biologist by the name of George John Romanes had been spending a lot of time watching the contractions of damaged jellyfish bells himself. However, he didn’t come to them through the purchase of a few moon jellies and a Kickstarter aquarium. When he was just two years old, George’s family inherited a large sum of money, propelling them from a modest Canadian lifestyle into one more similar to that of the Crawleys of Downton Abbey. His parents only sporadically sent George and his siblings to school, instead letting them discover what interested them in the museums, beaches, and fields of England and Europe.


pages: 396 words: 113,613

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

Social media gave artists the ability to reach their fans directly for the first time, opening up any number of new ways to generate revenue, like direct sales of albums, tickets, and merch. It also opened up access to capital, enabling artists to finance ambitious albums and videos outside the label system. Fans have now contributed more than a quarter billion dollars toward music projects on Kickstarter alone. The major labels still controlled radio airplay and physical distribution into stores, but that didn’t matter nearly so much once artists could break through without either. Once artists had genuine alternatives to the major label system, the chokepoint began to balloon out. Today’s labels are no longer the boogeymen of decades past—not because they saw the error of their ways, but because the shift in power dynamics brought about by the open internet forced them to change.

Despite paying higher rates, because Resonate’s costs are lower, and because listeners consume music more mindfully, the overall cost to listeners ends up being similar to a traditional monthly subscription.24 Resonate has found a successful niche, but there are plenty left for others to fill. Even with first listens priced at under a penny, some music listeners will find the “mental transaction costs” too much to bear and eschew new artists. Just as Kickstarter spawned a group of crowdfunding competitors with slightly different models suited to different causes, someone might come along and offer a Resonate competitor that gives listeners their first listen for free. Or even their first three listens. There’s no single right way to distribute and pay for music, or for musicians and audiences to find one another.


pages: 602 words: 207,965

Practical Ext JS Projects With Gears by Frank Zammetti

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, corporate raider, create, read, update, delete, database schema, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, full text search, Gordon Gekko, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, leftpad, loose coupling, Ronald Reagan, web application

The Markup The index.htm file is the customary place to kick off the application, and as in past projects there’s not a whole lot in it, as you can see for yourself: <html> <head> <title>Local Business Search</title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ext/resources/css/ext-all.css"> <script type="text/javascript" src="ext/adapter/ext/ext-base.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="ext/ext-all.js"></script> <script src="js/gears_init.js"></script> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/styles.css"> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/LocalBusinessSearch.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/StoresAndRecords.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/DAO.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/Viewport.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/Search.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/Favorites.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/Details.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/Header.js"></script> <script>Ext.onReady(LocalBusinessSearch.init);</script> </head> 323 324 Ch apt er 6 ■ W heN the YeL L OW p a G eS J U S t I S N ’ t C O O L e N O U G h : LO C a L B U S I N e S S S e a r C h <body> <div id="divSource" class="cssSource"></div> <div id="dialogPrint" class="x-hidden"> <div class="x-window-header">Local Business Search Ext</div> <div class="x-window-body" style="background-color:#ffffff;padding:10px;"> <br> Title:&nbsp;<span id="print_title"></span> <br><br> <img id="print_map"> <br><br> Longitude:&nbsp;<span id="print_longitude"></span><br> Latitude:&nbsp;<span id="print_latitude"></span><br> Distance:&nbsp;<span id="print_distance"></span><br> Phone:&nbsp;<span id="print_phone"></span><br> Rating:&nbsp;<span id="print_rating"></span><br> Address:&nbsp;<span id="print_address"></span><br> City:&nbsp;<span id="print_city"></span><br> State:&nbsp;<span id="print_state"></span><br> Business Web Site:&nbsp;<span id="print_businessurl"></span><br> </div> </div> </body> </html> We have the usual Ext JS imports, plus the Gears initialization JavaScript file. Following that is the import of the application style sheet and all the JavaScript files that make up the application itself. We again see Ext.onReady() being used to call the init() method of the LocalBusinessSearch object to kick-start the application. The actual markup begins with the <div> that we’ve by now become used to, the source of our Window animations. Following that is some plain-old HTML that, based on the style classes that are applied, we can surmise is used to form a Window at some point. As it happens, this is the only Window in the application, and it is the one you see when you want to print a business, both its details and the currently showing map.

Next up are the imports of the resources specific to this application: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/styles.css"> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/SQLWorkbench.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/StoresAndRecords.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/CreateTableWindow.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/DatabasesWindow.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/TableDetailsWindow.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/TablesWindow.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/QueryToolWindow.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/Help.js"></script> <script>Ext.onReady(SQLWorkbench.init);</script> </head> C ha p ter 7 ■ YOU r Da D h a D a W O r K B e N C h , N O W S O D O Y O U : S Q L W O r K B e N C h No surprises there either! Ext.onReady() kick-starts the application by calling the init() method of the SQLWorkbench class—we’ll get to that soon. ■Note In fact, SQLWorkbench is a namespace created on our behalf by a call to Ext.namespace(), as we’ve already seen. Since a namespace is nothing but a JavaScript function, which is how namespacing of code is generally achieved in JavaScript, it’s quite natural to refer to a namespace as a class or even an object.

We then call the handlePlayerDrop() method, passing it the index of the action card that was dropped on, which is a number from 0 to 5. We’ll look at this method later, but in short, it will determine if the drop was valid and do all the work necessary in that situation (or if it wasn’t a valid drop). The last two lines of the init() method initialize the computer opponent and then kickstart the title sequence, both of which are coming soon! preloading Images As I previously mentioned, preloading images is something you have to do when writing a web-based game. Preloading is an old web development optimization in general as people tend to be more forgiving of startup delays than they are of constant little delays while using an application.


Lonely Planet France by Lonely Planet Publications

banking crisis, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, double helix, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Basques love cakes, especially gâteau basque (layer cake filled with cream or cherry jam). Then there’s Bayonne chocolate… HOW TO EAT & DRINK LIKE A LOCAL It pays to know what and how much to eat, and when – adopting the local culinary pace is key to savouring every last exquisite moment of the French day. When to Eat » Petit déjeuner (breakfast) The French kick-start the day with a tartine (slice of baguette smeared with unsalted butter and jam) and un café (espresso), long milky café au lait or – especially kids – hot chocolate. In hotels you get a real cup but in French homes, coffee and hot chocolate are drunk from a cereal bowl – perfect bread-dunking terrain.

Louis XIV, also known as the Sun King, ascended the throne in 1643 at the age of five and ruled until 1715, virtually emptying the national coffers with his ambitious building and battling. His greatest legacy is the palace at Versailles. The excesses of Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, in part led to an uprising of Parisians on 14 July 1789 and the storming of the Bastille prison – kick-starting the French Revolution. Emperor Napoleon III ‘modernised’ Paris, installing wide boulevards, sculpted parks and a modern sewer system, but he also became involved in a costly and unsuccessful war with Prussia in 1870. When Parisians heard of their emperor’s capture, they demanded a republic. Despite its bloody beginnings, the Third Republic ushered in the glittering, highly creative belle époque (beautiful age), celebrated for its graceful art nouveau architecture and advances in the arts and sciences.

The Alsatians dine with French finesse and drink with German gusto, and every corner leads to mouth-watering surprises: shops doing a brisk trade in homemade foie gras, gingerbread and macarons; entire regions dedicated to cheese; mile upon glorious mile of country lanes given over to the life-sweetening pleasures of wine and chocolate. So take the lead of locals: go forth and indulge! Kick-start your gourmet adventure by visiting www.tourisme-alsace.com and www.gastronomie.vins.tourisme-alsace.com. Local tourist boards can help you fine-tune your visit, be it a stay on a working dairy farm, a chocolate-tasting road trip or a dégustation (tasting) of grand cru (the official designation for superior or highest grade French wines) wines.


You're a Horrible Person, but I Like You: The Believer Book of Advice by The Believer

blood diamond, Burning Man, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, nuclear winter, Saturday Night Live

Zach … Dear Zach: I have a job that leaves me passionless and empty. It stimulates neither mind nor soul. How can I successfully draw on my creative juices to do something meaningful? Best, Charles Address withheld Dear Charles: Are you an accountant at a cardboard box factory? Boredom is a killer. There are so many things you can do to kick-start a satisfying life. I will give you a few suggestions to get the juices flowing: 1) Start reading Teen People. 2) Rent a stretch Hummer to go see Noam Chomsky speak. 3) Model your life after the movie Sideways, but instead of wine make your passion Mountain Dew. 4) Ask a state trooper where the closest gay bar is. 5) Have a Super Bowl party with no television.


The Icon Handbook by Jon Hicks

augmented reality, Debian, Firefox, Google Chrome, Kickstarter, Skype, web application

For similar localisation problems, it’s worth avoiding depictions of body parts. Thumbs up may generally be a positive sign, but in Iran it’s considered an obscene gesture! Again, it depends on the context. It’s better to consider more universally understandable options first, and I find the best way to kickstart the thinking process for a new icon metaphor is drawing a mind map. There’s often more than one way of representing something, and a mind map is a way of exploring that. Starting with the icon name in the centre, write down anything that comes to mind, no matter how abstract or seemingly worthless at the time.


New Localism and Regeneration Management by Jon Coaffee

glass ceiling, Kickstarter, place-making, post-industrial society, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal

Too often those local officers who are innovative have had to choose between their loyalties to communities and to their employer authority. The National Audit Office[3] reported that nearly 50 per cent of all public bodies demonstrated cultures where managers and staff were risk-averse. Even programmes such as the health action zones given the task of driving mainstream change in health failed to really kick-start a serious change process inside the health service or in local government. The fact remains that there are confidence, prejudice and motivation problems in the public sector. And a lack of “know how” among manager about how to motivate staff to work with communities in order to find solutions instead of perpetuating the myth that disadvantaged communities create problems.


pages: 176 words: 43,283

Insight Guides Pocket Turkey (Travel Guide eBook) by Insight Guides

gentrification, Kickstarter, low cost airline, retail therapy

They are equipped with kitchens, tastefully furnished and set in beautiful gardens; a gardener tends to your private patch of greenery and the management stocks your fridge before you arrive. Ürgüp Esbelli Evi $$$ Dolay Sok. 8, 50400 Ürgüp, tel: 0384-341 3395, www.esbelli.com.tr. The cave-hotel that kick-started the restoration and conversion movement in Cappadocia is still among the very best, with ten enormous suites, a vaulted, Ottoman-style lounge perfect for having a drink with new friends, and an array of pretty gardens or courtyards. Owner Suha Ersoz prides himself on offering a home-from-home service to guests.


pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Margaret Minsky (Marvin’s daughter) worked at VPL in the mid-1980s for a while on a project we cooked up for erotic wearables. Very Pleasurable Lingerie, it was called. The idea was that the lingerie would emit musical chords when touched, and chord progressions when stroked. The chord progressions would resolve to the tonic only in, um, certain places. I believe I saw this idea rediscovered on Kickstarter or similar recently. Hope whoever is doing it now completes the project. Very worth it. There was also a vibrator terminating with a MIDI connection (the type of cable used to control music synthesizers) lying on a table in the reception room, apparently to perturb visitors. I’m not sure if it did anything, or who put it together.

VR and avatar and robots doing work of as source of value specialness of working with real Human Use of Human Beings, The (Wiener) Huxley, Aldous Hyneman, Jamie hypercubes hypertext hypnosis IBM Iconic Mathematics (Bricken) icons icosahedrons idealism II Cybernetic Frontiers (Brand) illusions improvisation Inception (film) India industrial applications infinity, perception of information biasing of “free” vs. traceable to origin Information Age inner life input Inside Out (film) interactive screen technology interactivity Internet Gore and extremism on flaws in design of interpreters inversion inversion of human body investigative journalists invisible hand iPhone Ito, Teiji Izadi, Shahram Jackson, Michael Jacobson, Linda Japan Jaws (film) jazz Jeopardy (TV show) jobs Jobs, Steve Johnson, Lyndon B. Joy, Bill juggling Kalman filter Kapor, Mitch karate Kay, Alan Kelly, Kevin Kemp, Jack Khan, Ali Akbar Kickstarter Kim, David Kim, Scott Kinect Kinect Hacks King, Stephen kitchen design Klein Bottle Knitting Factory Knuth, Don Kollin, Joel Kotik, Gordy Krueger, Myron Kuiper Belt Kurzweil, Ray Kyoto Prize LaBerge, Stephen Langer, Susanne language translation Lanier, Ellery (father) death of death of Lilly and dome and mysticism and PhD studies and science writing and teaching career and Lanier, first wife divorce from Lanier, Lena Lanier, Lilibell (daughter,) Lanier, Lilly (mother) death of laser procedure on retina lasers Lasko, Ann latency Lawnmower Man, The (film) Learning Company Leary, Timothy Lectiones Mathematicae LEEP Lennon, John Lennon, Sean Leonard, Brett Levitt, David Levy, Steven libertarians licensing light pen lightweight optics limerence links, one- vs. two-way Linn, Roger LISP Lissajous patterns “Little Albert” experiment lobster avatar Los Alamos Los Angeles LSD Lucas, George lucid dreaming Lumière brothers Macedonians machine learning “Machine Stops, The” (Forster) machine vision Macintosh computers operating system MacIntyre, Blair Macromedia Macromind magazine stands magic magical thinking magicians magic window magnetic fields malware Manchurian Candidate, The (film) Mandala mapping marijuana markets Mars Marxism mass media Mateevitsi, Victor mathematics video games and Mathews, Max Matrix films Matsushita Mattel MAX design tool MAX visual programming tool McDowall, Ian McFerrin, Bobby McGreevy, Mike McGrew, Dale McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan ramp McMillen, Keith MDMA (Ecstasy) measurement medicine.


pages: 464 words: 121,983

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

For example, it ran a Welfare to Work program on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions. On its website it claimed to represent “a unique opportunity to transform lives and communities across the UK; an opportunity not only to support people into secure and lasting employment, but to make enormous inroads into eradicating child poverty and kick-starting social mobility.” That was the spin, but the reality had more to do with punishment and coercion. The Conservative government established this G4S plan to assist the long-term unemployed, but activists in Sheffield explained to me how it had exacerbated poverty and disillusionment. Numbers of food banks and welfare recipients were soaring.

World Bank figures estimate that 97 percent of Afghanistan’s $15.7 billion GDP comes from foreign sources. 62The Afghan ambassador to Australia told the ABC in 2011 that his country had no choice but to exploit its mineral wealth, and that it wanted to approach Australian firms such as BHP and Rio Tinto to invest. Stan Correy, “Afghanistan Wants Help to Kick-Start Mining Boom,” ABC’s Background Briefing, December 19, 2011. 63“Afghanistan’s Mineral Deposits,” Money Morning, June 15, 2012. 64Maria Abi-Habib, “Iranians Build Up Afghan Clout,” Wall Street Journal, October 25, 2012. 65“Afghanistan Aid Boost Welcome, Checks Needed on Support for Mining Industry,” Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon, press release, July 9, 2012.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

Some years ago, designer Dan Provost used a 3-D printer to prototype two devices he designed in collaboration with his partner, Tom Gerhardt: the “Glif,” a tripod mount for cell phones, and the “Cosmonant,” a wide-grip stylus for touchscreens. Both gizmos were aimed at a niche market and were funded via a Kickstarter campaign. Useful and beautifully designed, they sold far beyond Provost’s expectations and eventually became the foundation for a design company focused on the “small batch” production of a variety of carefully crafted objects. Provost’s company, Studio Neat, is based in Austin, Texas, and its products are manufactured at Premier Source, a small firm based in Brookings, South Dakota.

Provost’s company, Studio Neat, is based in Austin, Texas, and its products are manufactured at Premier Source, a small firm based in Brookings, South Dakota. “Just because Apple makes their stuff in Shenzhen doesn’t mean we have to,” Provost told me. Provost said two friends discouraged him from even considering a foreign manufacturer. The friends, both designers, also launched a product on Kickstarter, a stainless-steel writing implement called “Pen Type A.” They then hired—and fired—two different Chinese manufacturers, neither of which met their quality standards. They moved on to a Vermont manufacturer who shared their vision. “Manufacturing is hard,” they wrote in a note to Provost. “There are no shortcuts.


pages: 469 words: 124,784

Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Apollo Moon Landings by Jay Barbree, Howard Benedict, Alan Shepard, Deke Slayton, Neil Armstrong

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, clockwatching, Gene Kranz, gravity well, invisible hand, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, place-making

“Who let a Russian in here?” she mocked him. “Nah. We’ll beat those guys.” “Keep thinking that way.” She hugged him tighter. “Thinking, hell. I’m going to push for an early trip. We had a great flight with the Redstone and Mercury capsule last month. They don’t need to fly that damn chimp. If we drop that flight, we’ll kick-start the program and in a couple months I’ll be in space.” In the weeks to come, the heavy layer of silence about the selections conspired against Shepard. A couple of astronauts went all out to overrule Gilruth’s decision. They wanted Glenn to lead the way, and they emphasized the wild antics for which Shepard was justly infamous.

He was hearing the Concert of Freedom Seven, a strange and unexpected company to remain with him as he hurtled through the soundlessness of space. “Welcome sounds,” he smiled. They meant things were working, doing, pushing, and repeating. They were the new age sounds of life. Weightlessness was still new, refreshing, exciting, but this was a romance kick-started by a great rocket. Shepard took to zero-g with fierce pleasure, bonding not only naturally but eagerly with this new world without weight. He felt Freedom Seven initiate its slow turnaround. Still more new sounds! Of course, the attitude control jets firing in vacuum. But within Freedom Seven’s contained atmosphere they exerted pressure, and that pressure came to him as thuds, dimmed bangs carrying wonderful satisfaction.


pages: 436 words: 124,373

Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds

back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, hive mind, information retrieval, Kickstarter, risk/return, stem cell, time dilation, trade route

Clavain had traveled with the corpse, marveling at the idea that this solid chunk of man-shaped ice -- tainted, admittedly, with a few vital impurities -- would soon be a breathing, thinking, human being with memories and feelings. To him it seemed astonishing that this was possible; that so much latent structure had been preserved across the decades. Even more astonishing was that the infusions of tiny machines that the Conjoiners were brewing would be able to stitch together damaged cells and kick-start them back to life. And out of that inert loom of frozen brain structure - - a thing that was at this moment nothing more than a fixed geometric entity, like a finely eroded piece of rock -- something as malleable as consciousness would emerge. But the Conjoiners were blase at the prospect, viewing Iverson the way expert picture-restorers might view a damaged old master.

Iverson lifted a hand from beneath the bedsheets, examining his palm and the pattern of veins and tendons on the rear. “This is the same body I went under with? You haven't stuck me in a robot or cloned me or hooked up my disembodied brain to a virtual-reality generator?” “None of those things, no. Just mopped up some cell damage, fixed a few things here and there and -- um -- kick-started you back to the land of the living.” Iverson nodded, but Clavain could tell he was far from convinced. Which was unsurprising: Clavain, after all, had already told a small lie. “So how long was I under?” “About a century, Andrew. We're an expedition from back home. We came by starship.” Iverson nodded again, as if this were mere, incidental detail.


pages: 363 words: 123,076

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution by Marc Weingarten

1960s counterculture, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Donner party, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Haight Ashbury, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, post-work, pre–internet, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Stewart Brand, upwardly mobile, working poor, yellow journalism

He used part of that money to rent an office on 625 Third Street in the warehouse district. He called the magazine Rolling Stone, which had a triple echo effect—it was the name of one of blues musician Muddy Waters’s greatest songs, a name that had been appropriated by Wenner’s favorite British band. His hero Bob Dylan had also kick-started his electric phase with a song called “Like a Rolling Stone.” Like Harold Hayes at Esquire and Clay Felker at New York, Wenner valued great writing more than political dogma; Rolling Stone was unapologetic about presenting itself as a “rock and roll newspaper” that framed its music coverage within the proper cultural context.

Gonzo posesses had parallels to my dad,” said Marco Acosta. “He wasn’t Samoan, of course, but in the Samoan culture, the men tend to be large, and Hunter was trying to invoke my dad’s dominant physical presence. There are many aspects of him that you don’t see, but Hunter’s goal was to be funny first and foremost.” Thompson wasted little time kick-starting his story into motion. From Fear and Loathing’s very first line, Thompson and Acosta are on the move, in search of … well, who knows what. We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded, maybe you should drive….”


pages: 257 words: 56,811

The Rough Guide to Toronto by Helen Lovekin, Phil Lee

airport security, British Empire, car-free, glass ceiling, global village, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, place-making, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Surprising as it seems today, when such architectural designs DOWNTOWN TORON TO | The Eaton Centre are fairly commonplace, Revell won all sorts of awards for this project, which was considered the last word in 1960s dynamism – though its weather-stained blocks now look rather dejected. In its creation, however, the square became a catalyst for change. Named after its sponsor, Nathan Phillips, Toronto’s first Jewish mayor, the space suddenly provided the kind of public gathering place the city so sorely lacked, kick-starting the process by which the private Toronto of the 1950s became the extrovert metropolis of today. Standing in the southwest corner of Nathan Phillips Square, a statue of Winston Churchill (1874–1965) recalls Toronto’s British connection. Inscribed upon the statue are five famous quotations, one of which is drawn from the speech Churchill delivered to the Canadian House of Commons on December 30, 1941 in the dark days of World War II: “[The losing French] generals advised France’s divided cabinet ‘In three weeks, the English will have their necks wrung like a chicken’.

Today, the Elgin specializes in dramatic and musical productions, as well as Gala screenings of the Toronto International Film Festival; the Winter Garden uses its more intimate setting to host special events. Harbourfront Theatre Centre 231 Queens Quay West T416/973-4000. LRT: Queens Quay. Hosts a wonderful variety of international dancers, musicians and theatrical productions. Hummingbird Centre 1 Front St E, at Yonge St T416/872-2262. Subway: Union Station. The Hummingbird kick-started the thenmoribund Toronto theatre scene when it opened its neo-Expressionist doors in 1960. At 3200 seats, it’s too large for intimate drama, so instead it’s the Downtown venue of choice for family-oriented productions. For the past four decades, it has also been home to the Canadian Opera Company and the National Ballet, though both tenants are moving in summer 2006 to the newly built Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.


pages: 382 words: 120,064

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

So banks started to freeze loan books, aggressively pursue those accounts that were having problems meeting their repayment schedules, and basically stopped all lending to those that needed it—small businesses and individuals. Small business activity and retail consumption are two critical levers in kick-starting an economy after a recession, thus bank policy on credit adversely affected the recovery cycle. In the meantime, as regulators got tougher on banks and investment firms, institutions sought to maximise fee and margin on lending products out of fear that regulation would restrict future options in this regard.

. $50,000 pre-approved Add Pre-approved Credit Options to left-hand navigation ATM Rich-media ad playing during idle time “You have been pre-approved” message for existing customers on close of transaction—call-back request option Promotion on coupon for selected segments: “It takes less time to get a loan approved than it took to get your cash . . .” SMS/MMS Personalised message or notification with web/app link; “Mr King, HSBC has pre-approved you for a personal loan—interested?” Social Media Facebook integration of a student loan application that uses Facebook profile data to kick-start KYC Advertising travel loans or travel insurance on Pinterest, Instagram or Facebook when an individual posts something about a travel destination they’d like to visit Mobile App New button/in-app banner—“Pre-approved Credit Line” For existing customers, just two fields—term, amount (preset drop-down list for options) Call back with approval and compliance procedure notice Branch Banner stands as per themes, TV and poster board promos?


pages: 473 words: 124,861

Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, dark matter, illegal immigration, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, mass immigration, meta-analysis, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, rewilding

Some of these bees, now rare in the UK, need large patches of open ground in which to burrow and, in the absence of wild-boar disturbance, resort to farm gateways where heavy traffic and bottlenecks of livestock have the same earth-churning effect. In winter, wrens, dunnocks and robins trailed in the wake of the pigs, picking for insects in the furrows. Ants began to use the clods of earth turned over by the pigs to kick-start anthills that have grown, in some places, over a foot in eight years – their colonies thriving in micro-climates of sun-warmed, aerated soil. The anthills, in turn, attract mistle thrushes and wheatears, and especially green woodpeckers, whose diet, particularly in winter, can consist of as much as 80 per cent grassland ants.

It is wonderful to imagine, in the great landscapes of the distant past, herds of aurochs and bison trailing in the wake of herds of tarpan. The effect of this European version of rewilding is clear: the right number of the right species of grazing animals introduced into even a relatively small, isolated area can have an exponential impact on biodiversity. They can provide that initial impetus to kick-start natural processes, like a plane pulling a glider into the air. Bison are, unfortunately, out of the running for Knepp – another of our original aspirations we have been forced to shelve for the time being. As ever, the concern is dog-walkers. Kraansvlak, with its simple, three-strand electric cattle fence, demonstrates how safe these animals are.


Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, biofilm, buy low sell high, carbon footprint, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, Easter island, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late capitalism, low earth orbit, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, NP-complete, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, TED Talk, the built environment, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, two and twenty

The McKennas were not the first to cultivate psilocybin mushrooms, but they were the first to publish a reliable method for growing large quantities of mushrooms without specialist laboratory equipment. The Grower’s Guide was a runaway success and went on to sell more than a hundred thousand copies in the five years following its release. It kick-started a new field of DIY mycology and influenced a young mycologist named Paul Stamets, the discoverer of four new species of psilocybin mushroom and author of a guidebook to psilocybin mushroom identification. Stamets was already working on new ways to cultivate a range of “gourmet and medicinal” mushrooms, and in 1983, he published The Mushroom Cultivator, which simplified growing techniques even further.

As he explains in his book Radical Mycology—a hybrid of fungal manifesto, guidebook, and grower’s guide—his goal is to create a “people’s mycological movement” versed in “the cultivation of fungi and the applications of mycology.” Radical Mycology is part of a larger movement of DIY mycology, which emerged from the psychedelic mushroom-growing scene kickstarted in the 1970s by Terence McKenna and Paul Stamets. The movement took on its modern form as it grew together with hackerspaces, crowdsourced science projects, and online forums. Although its center of gravity remains on the West Coast of North America, grassroots mycological organizations are rapidly spreading to other countries and continents.


pages: 411 words: 119,022

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, follow your passion, General Magic , Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hiring and firing, HyperCard, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Kickstarter, Mary Meeker, microplastics / micro fibres, new economy, pets.com, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, synthetic biology, TED Talk, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Y Combinator

But that was impossible. They were asking us to predict the future with near 100 percent confidence. They were asking for proof that a baby could run a marathon before it had even learned to walk. These guys didn’t know much about babies. They knew even less about how to create a new business. That’s why so many Kickstarter projects have failed. They thought, “If I build it for $50 and sell it for $200, then I’ll make money. My company will be a success.” But that’s not how companies work. That $150 profit gets sucked away with every new office chair and dependent on your employees’ insurance, with every customer support call and Instagram ad.

See also General Magic; iPhone; iPod; Nest Labs; Nest Learning Thermostat; Nest Protect; Philips Nino; Philips Strategy and Ventures Group; Philips Velo at Apple, xviii, 19, 55, 69, 78, 80, 81, 82, 84–86, 91, 93, 96, 117, 136, 163, 237, 303, 320, 374 Apple computer of, xv–xvi biography of, xiv–xix, 294 career of, xiv–xix failures of, xix, 3–4, 181 family of, 163, 175, 176 at Future Shape, xix as mentor, xi–xiv, xix–xx mentors of, xi, xii, 164 passion of, 68–69 at Philips, xvii, 18, 36–37, 45–46, 58, 61, 77, 81, 88, 89, 96, 125, 129–30, 209, 374 programming experience in school, xiv–xv at Quality Computers, xv startups of, xiv, xv–xix, 2, 6, 7, 46, 164, 181, 199 failure analysis of, 135 learning from, 5–6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 19, 119, 223, 253, 264, 329 startups and, 199 finance acquisitions and, 315, 316, 318, 353 product management and, 281, 285, 287 role of, 48 startups and, 182, 210 financial products, 202 Flint, Peter, 107n Free, 199 Frog, 283 Fuse Systems, xviii, 88–92, 89, 208 Future Shape, xix, 365, 374 GAP, 341 Gelsinger, Pat, 321–22 General Magic Bill Atkinson and, 2–3, 12, 27, 165 culture of, 46 Tony Fadell as engineer at, xvi–xvii, 2–3, 6, 7, 10–11, 13, 21, 24, 27, 35, 96, 129–30, 208, 327, 374 failure of, 3, 13, 18, 24, 37, 58, 90, 373 Andy Hertzfeld and, 2–3, 12, 27 launch of, 11–12 Magic CAP, 15 Pierre Omidyar and, 188 Philips as partner and investor in, 36, 37 Pocket Crystal, 1, 2, 12 private network system of, 12 problems with products of, 15 smartphone of, 130 Sony Magic Link, 12–13, 12, 15, 24, 31, 35–36, 58, 139–40 structure of, 10–11, 13 target customer of, 35–36, 58, 130 technology focus of, 15 TeleScript, 15 time constraints for, 139–40 General Magic Movie, 2n Glengarry Glen Ross (film), 296 goals of meetings, 255 moving forward with, 7, 19, 33 product development and, 128 team’s goals powering company goals, 237 Google Ads, 314, 346 all-hands meetings of, 255, 360 Alphabet created by, xix, 314 Android acquisition, 328 culture of, 313, 346, 349, 351–52, 359 disruption and, 123 individual contributors recognized by, 47 job applications with, 23 Nest acquisition of, xix, 304, 310–17, 338, 345–52, 354–55, 359–61, 371 Nest reabsorbed by, 319–20 Nest sold by, 317–19, 367 perks at, 358–59, 362 product managers and, 284 profitability of, 160 project rhythms of, 146 restructuring of, 314 review cycles of, 51 Search, 284, 314, 346 target customer of, 205 Google Facilities, 315 Google Fiber, 314 Google Glass, 16, 119 Google Nest, 55, 80, 278, 313, 314–17, 354–55 Google Store, 312, 317 Google Ventures (GV), 314, 349 Google X, 314 Grove, Andy, 322 Guenette, Isabel, 230 Gurley, Bill, 21 habituation, 262, 262n heroes, connections with, 20–25, 27 Hertzfeld, Andy, 2–3, 12, 20, 27 Hodge, Andy, 92 Hololens, 124 Home Depot, 160, 202 home stereo systems, 87 home theaters, 88, 90 honesty, in management, 44, 51 Honeywell, 117, 124–25, 164, 303–4 human resources (HR) breakpoints and, 255–56 dealing with assholes and, 72–73, 74 hiring and, 29, 215–17, 229–41 interviews and, 21, 258 legal team and, 302, 305 meetings of, 254 quitting and, 76, 81, 85, 86 startups and, 89, 182, 184, 210 team meetings and, 240, 241 team size and, 247 HVAC technicians, 124–25, 166 IBM, 121, 148 ideas chasing process, 171, 172, 173–77, 179, 373 elements of, 171 as painkillers, not vitamins, 172 problems solved by, 171, 172 research on, 171–72, 173, 174, 178 spotting great ideas, 124, 171–79, 180, 182, 327, 328 storytelling and, 172, 174, 177–78 vision for, 178 IDEO, 261, 283 IKEA, 106, 288 imposter syndrome, 37, 50 individual contributors (ICs) crisis and, 220 leadership of, 47 management contrasted with, 43 as managers, 238, 248, 251–53 perspective of, 26–27, 28, 29, 30, 31–33, 48, 58, 331 reverting to, 366 as stars, 47 trajectory in organizations, 47, 251–53 information gathering, 21 Instagram, 156, 205 Intel, 148, 189, 322 intellectual property (IP), 305, 306 internal customers, 30, 32, 233, 325 Inventec, 92 investors and investment angel investors, 173, 189–90, 192, 198–99, 200 board members and, 335, 337, 340–41 cyclical nature of, 90, 190–91 in Nest Labs, 164, 165–66, 177, 178 relationships and, 189–90, 192, 193–98, 199, 200 in Silicon Valley, 90, 192 startups and, 169, 181, 184, 189–200 storytelling and, 111, 178 iPad, 163 iPhone development of, xiv, xviii, 1, 15, 93, 122, 128, 132–33, 140–42, 142, 156, 163, 169, 175, 176, 283, 327–29, 343 glass front face of, 110, 329 launch of, 108–10, 117, 203 profitability of, 156 size of, 130, 131, 132 team of, 234 time constraints on, 140–41 touchscreen keyboard for, 110, 128–33 value of, 156, 176 iPod customer personas for, 287 defining feature of, 120, 140 design of, 263, 267–68 development of, xiv, xviii, 19, 24, 54, 55, 91–92, 91, 119–21, 133–35, 163, 165, 167, 169, 187, 202, 208–9, 268–69, 286, 347 full battery of, 269 iPod-phone model, 141 launch of, 84, 92–93, 92, 96, 108, 117, 133–34, 213 profitability of, 155 tagline “1000 songs in your pocket,” 87, 92, 112–13, 286–87 team of, 234 iPod Nano, 286–87 iPod Touch, 163 Isaacson, Walter, Steve Jobs, 84 iTunes, 119–20, 303 Ive, Jony, 267 Jobs, Steve on analogies, 112–13 on battery life, 121, 287 board of directors meetings and, 334, 339 design thinking and, 267 iPhone development, 15, 128–29, 130, 132, 133, 156 iPhone launch, 108–9 iPod development, 92, 120, 133–35, 187, 208–9, 268–69, 347 on lawsuits, 303 leadership style of, xii, 79, 82, 85, 203, 348, 358 level of detail expected by, 49 on MacWorld conferences, 147–48 on management consulting, 17 on marketing, 271, 277 Not Invented Here Syndrome, 327 as parent CEO, 329 passion of, 69, 70 on processors, 148 respect for, 329–30 Andy Rubin and, 327–28 Wendell Sander and, 24 on “staying a beginner,” 268 storytelling of, 177, 286 vacations of, 207–8 walking of, 214 Joswiak, Greg, 286–87 JPMorgan Chase, 321 Kahneman, Daniel, 171 Kare, Susan, 12 Kelley, David, 261, 283 Kickstarter, 158 Kindle, 118 Kleiner Perkins, 164 Kodak, 122–23, 327 Komisar, Randy, 164, 339–40 lawsuits, 117–18, 300, 302, 303–4 leadership characteristics of, 14, 326–27 crisis and, 221–22 decisions and, 61, 62–63 of individual contributors, 47 of Steve Jobs, xii, 79, 82, 85, 203, 348, 358 mentors and, 257 micromanagement contrasted with, 45 percentage of psychopathic traits in, 65 perspective of, 32 sitting on your idea, 63 for startups, 183 style of, 53 of teams, 37–41, 45, 46, 247 trust of, 62, 64, 330 vision for, 18 legal team contracts and, 300, 302, 305 lawsuits and, 117–18, 300, 302, 303–4 marketing and, 276, 306 outside law firms and, 300–302, 305 product management and, 287, 288, 306 role of, 24, 302–8 sales and, 295 startups and, 227 Le Guen, Sophie, 289 Letterman, David, 311 life, as process of elimination, 238, 253 limited partners (LPs), 189, 192, 198 Linux servers, 201 Lovinsky, Dina, xx Lowe’s, 160 Lutton, Chip, 117, 303, 306, 308 Macintosh, 3, 91, 108, 121, 133–34, 148, 208 McKinsey, 17 MacWorld conferences, 147 MagicBus, 24 Magic CAP, 15 Magic Leap, 16 management.


Lonely Planet Cyprus by Lonely Planet, Jessica Lee, Joe Bindloss, Josephine Quintero

Airbnb, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Kickstarter, urban decay

During Lent, traditional fare includes spanakopita (spinach and egg wrapped in filo pastry); the main dish at Easter is souvla (barbecued meat), along with flaounes (savoury cakes) made with cheese, eggs, spices and herbs. Summer (July–September) Figs, mangoes, peaches, pears, plums: there’s plenty of fresh fruit around, and in September, the Lemesos Wine Festival is an appropriate toast to autumn. Autumn & Winter (October–December) Kick-start this serious foodie season with the Kyrenia Olive Festival, then look for freshly harvested wild mushrooms, artichokes and winter greens. Closer to Christmas, bakeries overflow with kourabies and melomakarona (almond and honey cakes), while on Christmas day, families traditionally make and smoke their own loukanika (sausages made from lamb and pork).

One week later, in May, the Republic of Cyprus joins the EU. 2013 Veteran centre-right politician Nicos Anastasiades is elected president in the Republic. In March the Republic's financial crash causes banks to close for 12 days while a €10-billion bailout deal is struck. 2015–17 Mustafa Akinci wins Northern Cyprus' elections in April 2015, kick-starting the latest round of talks to reunify the island. Anastasiades and Akinci hold meetings throughout 2015–2017. The Cypriot Way of Life Cypriot culture is a unique blend of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern; it has been moulded by centuries of rule by different nations that have coveted, fought over and possessed the island.


pages: 933 words: 205,691

Hadoop: The Definitive Guide by Tom White

Amazon Web Services, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business logic, combinatorial explosion, data science, database schema, Debian, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, full text search, functional programming, Grace Hopper, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, loose coupling, openstreetmap, recommendation engine, RFID, SETI@home, social graph, sparse data, web application

Alternatively, if you would like to use RPMs or Debian packages for managing your Hadoop installation, then you might want to start with Cloudera’s Distribution, described in Appendix B. To ease the burden of installing and maintaining the same software on each node, it is normal to use an automated installation method like Red Hat Linux’s Kickstart or Debian’s Fully Automatic Installation. These tools allow you to automate the operating system installation by recording the answers to questions that are asked during the installation process (such as the disk partition layout), as well as which packages to install. Crucially, they also provide hooks to run scripts at the end of the process, which are invaluable for doing final system tweaks and customization that is not covered by the standard installer.

For small clusters, it is easy to write a small script to copy hadoop-env.sh from the master to all of the worker nodes. For larger clusters, tools like dsh can do the copies in parallel. Alternatively, a suitable hadoop-env.sh can be created as a part of the automated installation script (such as Kickstart). When starting a large cluster with rsyncing enabled, the worker nodes can overwhelm the master node with rsync requests since the workers start at around the same time. To avoid this, set the HADOOP_SLAVE_SLEEP setting to a small number of seconds, such as 0.1, for one-tenth of a second. When running commands on all nodes of the cluster, the master will sleep for this period between invoking the command on each worker machine in turn.

Cloudera makes the distribution available in a number of different formats: source and binary tar files, RPMs, Debian packages, VMware images, and scripts for running CDH in the cloud. CDH is free, released under the Apache 2.0 license and available at http://www.cloudera.com/hadoop/. To simplify deployment, Cloudera hosts packages on public yum and apt repositories. CDH enables you to install and configure Hadoop on each machine using a single command. Kickstart users can commission entire Hadoop clusters without manual intervention. CDH manages cross-component versions and provides a stable platform with a compatible set of packages that work together. As of CDH3, the following packages are included, many of which are covered elsewhere in this book: HDFS – Self-healing distributed file system MapReduce – Powerful, parallel data processing framework Hadoop Common – A set of utilities that support the Hadoop subprojects HBase – Hadoop database for random read/write access Hive – SQL-like queries and tables on large datasets Pig – Dataflow language and compiler Oozie – Workflow for interdependent Hadoop jobs Sqoop – Integrate databases and data warehouses with Hadoop Flume – Highly reliable, configurable streaming data collection ZooKeeper – Coordination service for distributed applications Hue – User interface framework and SDK for visual Hadoop applications To download CDH, visit http://www.cloudera.com/downloads/.


Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World by Jeffrey Tucker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, altcoin, anti-fragile, bank run, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, driverless car, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, informal economy, invisible hand, Kickstarter, litecoin, Lyft, Money creation, obamacare, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, public intellectual, QR code, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, the payments system, uber lyft

Lending services have been one of the biggest surprises. Prosper allows people who need extra cash to find someone with spare cash to lend. The Lending Tree looks up parties to lending transactions too. The Funding Circle helps restructure student debt. Many crowd-sourced platforms such as Indiegogo and Kickstarter provide a meeting spot for entrepreneurs and investors. Ten years ago, there was an emerging hysteria about how “quants” — super-smart number crunchers with private knowledge — were ruling the financial space, rigging the game and grabbing all available profits for themselves. Today, the same and better knowledge is being democratized with such services as Kensho, which is bringing quant-style power to every investor and institution, essentially running a Google-style search feature for investments, giving the information it gets based on real-time experience.


Pulling Strings With Puppet: Configuration Management Made Easy by James Turnbull

Debian, en.wikipedia.org, Kickstarter, revision control, Ruby on Rails, single source of truth, source of truth, SpamAssassin

Now that you’ve installed the required prerequisites, I am going to demonstrate how to install Puppet. You can install Puppet via source, from a package on some platforms, and using a Ruby Gem. I’ll demonstrate how to use all methods. Tip ➡ If you build your servers with tools like Jumpstart or Kickstart, you can also include the Puppet client (and its prerequisites) as part of your default build. That’ll help you to quickly add nodes to your Puppet environment. Installing from Source The latest source package for Puppet is available from the Reductive Labs site at http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/DownloadingPuppet.


pages: 154 words: 48,340

What We Need to Do Now: A Green Deal to Ensure a Habitable Earth by Chris Goodall

blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, decarbonisation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, food miles, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, hydroponic farming, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Ocado, ocean acidification, plant based meat, smart grid, smart meter

Elected at a moment of intense economic depression, he pursued a group of policies that he called the New Deal. Their purposes were varied. Some were intended to provide employment and others to improve business profitability, to create better housing and transport infrastructure and increased availability of electricity. Although the New Deal did use government spending to kick-start the American economy, one of Roosevelt’s aims was to encourage private capital to begin making investments again. Paralysed by the economic crisis of the Great Depression, banks had sharply cut their lending. His administration put in place measures that helped mortgages and loans grow rapidly.


pages: 184 words: 46,395

The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy by Richard Shotton

active measures, behavioural economics, call centre, cashless society, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Firefox, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Kickstarter, loss aversion, nudge unit, Ocado, placebo effect, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Rory Sutherland, TED Talk, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, World Values Survey

Conclusion Do you remember the story of Kitty Genovese I mentioned in the Introduction and Bias 24? She was the 28-year-old who was murdered while none of the 37 (or 38) witnesses intervened. It was a brutal incident – but some good came from it. It inspired Latané and Darley to begin their research into the bystander effect and it even kick-started the establishment of a single number, 911, for calling the police. But you may be surprised to learn that these important consequences were in fact based on a lie. Yes, Winston Moseley murdered Genovese in 1964, but the apathy that so enraged the New York Times was grossly exaggerated. Nearly fifty years after the stabbing, the New York Post published evidence from Kevin Cook that discredited the original press reports.


pages: 164 words: 44,947

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World by Robert Lawson, Benjamin Powell

Airbnb, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Kickstarter, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, profit motive, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

When it was my turn, I toasted Kakha Bendukidze. Kakha’s exuberance for economic freedom was matched only by his love of food and drink. A lifetime of excesses led to his death in London in 2014 during a heart operation. By the time of his death, he and Saakashvili had moved to Ukraine to try to kick-start free-market economic reforms there. I still mourn his loss, not only as a champion for freedom, but also as someone who became my friend during my many visits to his country. Kakha Bendukidze’s name and legacy live on, however, in the form of the Bendukidze Free Market Center in Kiev. We can only hope that the center that carries his name will bring Ukraine the same level of economic freedom and ultimate prosperity that his reforms are bringing to Georgia.


Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project by Karl Fogel

active measures, AGPL, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, collaborative editing, continuous integration, Contributor License Agreement, corporate governance, Debian, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, GnuPG, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, intentional community, Internet Archive, iterative process, Kickstarter, natural language processing, off-by-one error, patent troll, peer-to-peer, pull request, revision control, Richard Stallman, selection bias, slashdot, software as a service, software patent, SpamAssassin, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Wayback Machine, web application, zero-sum game

Crowdfunding campaigns are usually either "all or nothing", meaning that each funder pledges money toward a total threshold and the pledges are collected only if the threshold is met, or "keep it all", which is essentially traditional donation: funds go immediately to the recipient whether or not a stated goal amount is ever met. Goteo.org and Kickstarter.com are probably the best-known examples of all-or-nothing crowdfunding services, though there are many others (I like Goteo because their platform is itself free software, and because it is meant specifically for freely-licensed projects, whereas Kickstarter does not take a position on restrictiveness of licensing). There are also sites like Indiegogo that support both models[57] Bounties are one-time rewards for completing specific tasks, such as fixing a bug or implementing a new feature.


pages: 403 words: 132,736

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bretton Woods, call centre, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, demographic dividend, digital divide, dual-use technology, energy security, financial independence, friendly fire, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, informal economy, job-hopping, Kickstarter, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

The idea, which combined India’s critique of the imperial economic system with a widespread global distrust of free trade following the disasters that had resulted in Europe and elsewhere during the “hungry thirties,” was to give the state a primary role in an economy aiming for self-reliance, or swadeshi—the second most important rallying cry of India’s freedom movement after swaraj, or self-rule. Of great importance in kick-starting this model were a series of large projects that stimulated further economic activity—much as the widely admired Tennessee Valley Authority had in the United States. Nehru liked to call such projects “temples of concrete.” Nehru’s plans for a closed economy dominated by the state also came with the blessings of Britain’s postwar Labour government, which had agreed to Indian independence, and which carried out its own nationalization of private sector industries to a far greater degree than did Nehru’s India.

During my time in India I have often been amused by the foreign executives I have met who spend years occupying the same hotel rooms while they await the green light for their company to invest in India so that they can set up a permanent office. The fact that they are prepared to wait so long is an indication of how important the Indian market is to the global strategy of most U.S. and European corporations. In 2005 GE, which kick-started India’s offshore boom in the late 1980s when it set up its first Indian call center near Delhi, launched an Indian bank. GE said it anticipated “indefinite” double-digit growth in the Indian banking market over the coming decades. No one blinked. The fact that India has so far to travel makes it an especially attractive long-term prospect to many foreign investors.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Also key were the good people of the New York Public Library, who gave me a quiet spot in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room in the middle of Manhattan to finish my research and writing. Last but not least, I want to make a big bow to all the people who supported this book on Kickstarter when it was still just an idea back in the winter of 2014. Surveillance Valley would not have happened without their support and trust. Special thanks goes out to Kickstarter backers Carlo Trevisan, Ivor Crotty, Benjamin O’Connor, Michael Oneill of Baycloud Systems, and John Heisel. Yasha Levine is a Russian-born American investigative journalist and a founding editor of The eXiled.


pages: 482 words: 125,429

The Book: A Cover-To-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time by Keith Houston

clean water, Commentariolus, dumpster diving, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, invention of movable type, Islamic Golden Age, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, Suez crisis 1956, wikimedia commons

Upon reaching the city of Talas, a battle commenced that has since passed into legend: Salih is said to have comprehensively defeated the Chinese army encamped there, with 50,000 enemy soldiers slain upon the field of battle and a further 20,000 taken prisoner. Among those captured was a small cadre of conscripted Chinese papermakers who, according to tradition, instigated the practice of papermaking at Samarqand and so kick-started its diffusion throughout the Arab world.15 The stirring details of this anecdote—stupendous armies locked in a noble struggle; prisoners privy to a hitherto forbidden art—are, as might be guessed, a little too neat. The story of the battle at Talas was first set down some three hundred years after the fact in the Lata’if al-ma‘arif—“The Book of Curious and Entertaining Information”—by a poet and writer named Abu Mansur al-Tha‘alibi.16 As the title of his book suggests, al-Tha‘alibi was not interested in the general sweep of history: medieval Muslim writers saw the past as a heroic epic, a series of explosive conjunctions of portentous events, notable individuals, and famous places.

Sure enough, Dunhuang was overrun in 1035—only the invaders were not Muslims but Buddhists, hailing from the Xi Xia Empire to the east.46 As important as the Dunhuang library has turned out to be for modern scholars, however, its loss in the eleventh century would have been of little consequence to China at large. By then, woodblock printing had thoroughly permeated Chinese life. The man credited with kick-starting China’s woodcut printing renaissance was a slippery tenth-century politician named Feng Dao. Born only a few years after the printing of the Diamond Sutra, Feng rose from lowly stock to become a senior adviser to seven successive emperors. Contemporary Chinese historians cast him as a silver-tongued flatterer of deplorably plastic morals.47 In 932, Feng announced the printing of the entire set of Confucian “classics,” the canon of China’s other ancient religion, amounting to 150 volumes in all.


pages: 578 words: 141,373

Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain by John Grindrod

Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, garden city movement, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Martin Parr, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Right to Buy, side project, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, young professional

After all, here is a tale of Blitz reconstruction right in the heart of the burned-out city, with plans drawn up in the fifties, building commenced in the sixties, and residential communities flowering in the seventies. The origins of the National Theatre are even older. A National Shakespeare Theatre was first dreamt of in the mid-nineteenth century, yet it was Patrick Abercrombie’s wartime suggestion that arts centres should be central to the regeneration of the derelict south bank of the Thames that kick-started work in earnest. So why end up here? Well, the buildings seem to me a last push to create exciting and experimental public spaces, before responsibility for these kind of projects shifted decisively away from public and into private hands. Also, I love both of these places: they feel epic, imaginative and alive.

I am lucky to have seen and scaled and explored some of the most exciting places ever built in Britain, from the Post Office Tower to Coventry Cathedral, New Ash Green to Cumbernauld. I’ve tried to see them on their own terms, not with the baggage of received wisdom and hindsight. I thought I might hate what I saw, and what I found out. In some cases, of course, I did. But on the whole I have returned full of admiration for the people who kick-started this revolution, and the pioneers who gave living and working in these new environments their best shot. And rather to my surprise I find that, far from having become sated and disillusioned, I’m even more in love with the world, this ‘Concretopia’, they tried – and in many cases failed – to build.


pages: 424 words: 140,262

Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World by Christian Wolmar

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, book value, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, company town, high-speed rail, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, precautionary principle, railway mania, refrigerator car, side project, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, urban sprawl

By enabling the plantation owners to continue to grow sugar profitably, they helped perpetuate the slave system which might otherwise have collapsed as a result of its economic inefficiency. Moreover, oddly, the railways exacerbated regional differences between prosperous and poor areas. That was because the railways in Cuba were built to tap those boom areas with flourishing sugar estates; no railway promoter aimed to lay down a railway in the hope of kick-starting a backward region. Moreover, the government declined to provide any such subsidy in the less-developed regions, with the result that the railways were mainly concentrated in the western half of the island, while in the east just a couple of lines served the few sugar plantations. As the historians of the Cuban railways put it, ‘The railroad development of the first decades lacked the long-term perspective that would permit the growth of a national grid.’ 13 Despite mild support from the Spanish government, a plan to build an east–west line through the spine of the country, that would have provided an efficient transport network for most of the population, was shelved because of the lack of promoters.

With the British railway network almost complete, contractors and labourers were looking for work and therefore were willing to travel to the far end of the Pacific in search of riches. Inevitably there were delays caused by all the usual problems – construction difficulties, manpower shortages, finance and industrial disputes – but within five years 316 miles had been built and the programme was in full swing. Vogel had kickstarted New Zealand into the railway age and it never looked back. Neill Atkinson, the author of the history of New Zealand’s railways, explains: In the 1870s, iron and steel rails welded cities and towns to their hinterlands, connected farms, forests and mines to markets and ports, and widened New Zealanders’ physical and cultural horizons.


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Almaty, Kazakhstan’s commercial hub located near the borders of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and China, has become a melting pot for regional merchants and traders. This is a reminder that many Asians welcome China’s infrastructural forays in Asia because they provide cover to pursue their own commercial agendas—not China’s. Were China not taking the risk to kick-start a new modernization phase for the former Soviet republics, commentators would lament that those countries are risky backwaters no sane investor should dare enter. But now China is the biggest investor in Kazakhstan’s railways and pipelines, Uzbekistan’s energy and transport infrastructure, Turkmenistan’s gas fields, Kyrgyzstan’s mineral sector, and Tajikistan’s hydropower plants.

The reason is that China’s projects have inspired an infrastructural arms race by which India, Japan, Turkey, South Korea, and others are also making major contributions to building Asian connectivity. From Afghanistan to Myanmar, China finances and builds heavy infrastructure, while India and Japan train manpower. Taken together, all these investments help Asians deepen their ties to one another as much as to China. China is thus kick-starting the process by which Asians will come out from under its shadow. In the long run, both China and India’s preferred corridors will emerge, overlap, and even reinforce each other, ensuring that inner-Asian goods will make it to the Indian Ocean, deepening intra-Asian connectivity for Asians’ greater benefit.


pages: 505 words: 133,661

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole

Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, congestion charging, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital map, do-ocracy, Downton Abbey, false flag, financial deregulation, fixed income, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Global Witness, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, housing crisis, housing justice, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, linked data, loadsamoney, Londongrad, machine readable, mega-rich, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, sceptred isle, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, web of trust, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

And while various historical studies have now been done using the National Farm Survey, the records remain on paper only, stored in the National Archives. A 2006 report made the case for digitisation of all the maps, but so far, no funder has been found. What of the languishing Land Registry? Since its foundation in 1862 it had proved an embarrassing failure, and despite several further Acts intended to kickstart it – as well as the missed opportunity of 1909 – its progress remained glacial. Registration of land upon point of sale finally became compulsory after 1925, leading to an increase in activity. All information on who owned land, however, remained tightly guarded. Incredibly, not even the police were allowed to access Land Registry records without the landowner’s permission, thanks to Section 112 of the 1925 Land Registration Act.

Some potentially had an even darker motive: purchasing property in England or Wales as a means for kleptocratic regimes or corrupt businessmen to launder money, and to get a healthy return on their ill-gotten gains in the process. This was information which clearly ought to be out in the open, with a huge public interest case for doing so. And yet the government had sat on it for years. The political ramifications of Private Eye’s revelations were profound. They kickstarted a process of opening up information on land ownership that, though far slower and less complete than many would have liked, has nevertheless transformed our understanding of what companies own. No more than a day after Private Eye published its offshore property map, the Land Registry – caught on the back foot by the public interest in its ‘accidental’ data release – decided to make a virtue of necessity, and announced the publication of its own ‘official’ database of overseas-owned properties, though without the means to map their locations properly.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

Israel has the highest ratio of PhD’s per capita in the world, the highest ratio of engineers and scientists, and some of the world’s best research universities, notably Technicon. Israel’s native talent was also supplemented by the arrival of 100,000 well-educated Jewish refugees from the former Soviet empire. In 1993, with high-tech talent flooding into the country, the government kick-started a domestic venture capital industry by establishing a $100 million venture capital fund, Yozma, which matched private money with public. But Israel’s biggest advantage in embracing entrepreneurialism was more idiosyncratic: its status as an embattled Jewish state in a sea of Arab hostility. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) not only help to keep the country on the cutting edge of technology; they also train young Israelis (who are conscripted at age eighteen) in the virtues of both teamwork and improvisation.

Everywhere you go in India you are confronted by would-be Bilgays: budding entrepreneurs who have swapped the country’s traditional fatalism for can-do optimism. India has drawn heavily on its expat population, particularly the 250,000 Indians who live in California and 500,000 who live in the United States as a whole, to kick-start its entrepreneurial economy. Rajiv Gupta, a former head of McKinsey, helped to create the Indian Business School in Hyderabad. Ravi Deshpande, who sold his company, Cascade Communications, to Ascend for $3.7 billion, is a ubiquitous cheerleader for entrepreneurialism. Draper International, which became, in 1995, the first foreign venture fund to invest in India, relied on money from Silicon Valley’s Indian community.


pages: 447 words: 141,811

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Atahualpa, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Graeber, Easter island, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, life extension, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, zero-sum game

The story of organisms is called biology. About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history. Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different. This book tells the story of how these three revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms.

Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Arabs, Mameluks, Turks and British occupied it – and its society always remained patriarchal. Egypt was governed by pharaonic law, Greek law, Roman law, Muslim law, Ottoman law and British law – and they all discriminated against people who were not ‘real men’. Since patriarchy is so universal, it cannot be the product of some vicious circle that was kick-started by a chance occurrence. It is particularly noteworthy that even before 1492, most societies in both America and Afro-Asia were patriarchal, even though they had been out of contact for thousands of years. If patriarchy in Afro-Asia resulted from some chance occurrence, why were the Aztecs and Incas patriarchal?


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

In the few years that I have spent working at the University of Oxford, I have met more affluent young master’s students convinced that they will become successful entrepreneurs than in all the rest of my adult years combined. As you might have gathered by now, I am a bit of a skeptic. I don’t think these young people are especially creative. I do think that an unusually high proportion of the postgraduate students at the University of Oxford come from families with sufficient money to kick-start their children’s dreams, which leads them to seek more funding for schemes that mostly, inevitably, will fail. We rarely realize that for every idea that worked, millions of others were tried and failed. We also often fail to recognize how frequently amazing and complex collaborative inventions, such as languages, now die.

Forster and the origins of humanism, offers a valuable insight into the impact, at the beginning of the twentieth century, of a world in which so much was changing so quickly for so many—at first in places like the British Isles, but soon everywhere. The turn of the century was a time of frenzied advance and rapid rural development. Queen Victoria had just died, kick-starting our modern propensity for progress, and machines had begun to dominate industry and culture. As Forster writes in Howards End, “month by month the roads smelt more strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the air, and saw less of the sky.”


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

The melting pot The Dutch example would become important to the Industrial Revolution and global economy, since others imitated its successful policy of tolerance. Despite the discrimination of Catholics, Britain became a remarkably open country, especially after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 put the Dutch leader William of Orange on the British throne. Many of the skilled artisans and financial experts who kick-started the Industrial Revolution were immigrants, Huguenots and Jews. The union between Scotland and England in 1707 made for a productive cross-fertilization of ideas and technologies. The colonies in America took this openness one step further, after they broke free from Britain in 1776, to become not just a nation full of immigrants but a nation of immigrants.

Yet, even when he killed crews who did not create hits (it’s difficult to think of a stronger incentive), the Juche movie industry just didn’t take off – not for a lack of incentives, but because it lacked openness to diversity, experimentation and competition. (In desperation, Kim kidnapped a leading South Korean director and actor to kick-start the industry.)49 When communist planners realized workers behaved according to the ‘we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us’ principle, they created bonuses and public recognition for those who worked hard. Mostly this just led to people putting in time and producing more shoddy and unwanted goods.


pages: 909 words: 130,170

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

But it was not until around 540 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion that animal life really started to flourish. The fossil record for this period shows evidence of creatures representing all the major contemporary phyla – branches on the tree of life – that populate our world today. Additional energy from increasing atmospheric and marine oxygen certainly played a role in kick-starting the Cambrian explosion. But what likely played a more important role was that evolution began to positively select in favour of some life forms that harvested their energy from a novel, much richer source of free energy than oxygen: they consumed other living things which had already gone to the trouble of collecting and concentrating energy and vital nutrients in their flesh, organs, shells and bones.

Other skills that leave no obvious archaeological traces must also have played a role in increasing the efficiency of our ancestors in their food quest. And arguably the most important of all these skills was the one that not only helped provide the nutrition necessary to feed their big brains but that also kick-started the most important and far-reaching energy revolution in human history: mastery of fire. 3 Tools and Skills 4 Fire’s Other Gifts For the Ju/’hoansi fire is the great transformer. It is generated by the gods through lightning, but can be made by anyone with two dry sticks or a flint once they know how.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

Thiel was pleased enough with Johnson’s brand of activism to provide him with financial support. After Johnson was banned from Twitter for suggesting that he was going to raise money for a project aimed at “taking out” DeRay Mckesson, the Black Lives Matter organizer, he started WeSearchr, a crowdfunding company that, unlike Kickstarter, promoted itself as unregulated and, as a result, was open to alt-right content. (Johnson told me he was speaking metaphorically about Mckesson; he said he was planning on publishing a story about the activist.) Around this time, Thiel gave him a check between $100,000 and $200,000. It was a gift, according to Johnson, not an investment, but it would prove awkward for Thiel.

Olin Foundation, 42 Johnson, Charles, 197–204, 225–26, 229, 231–33, 239, 242–43, 268, 269, 278–79, 281, 285, 289, 296–97, 318, 333 Jones, Paul, 243 Jordan, David Starr, 13–14, 33, 94, 144 Jordan, Jeff, 89–90 JPMorgan, 118–19, 215, 216 Jungle, The (Sinclair), 14 Juul, 77 Justice Department, 274 Kaczynski, Ted, 252–53 Kalanick, Travis, 76, 77 Karp, Alex, 114–18, 150–52, 154–55, 215–19, 235, 258–59, 264, 283, 287, 311, 312, 317, 319 on Silicon Valley, 317–18 Kasich, John, 224, 236 kayfabe, 262, 282 Kelly, April, 89 Kennedy, Anthony, 33, 39 Kennedy, Donald, 26 Kennedy, Gregory, 33, 39 Kesey, Ken, 162 Kester, Scott, 97 Key, John, 208, 210 Kickstarter, 202 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 178, 303 Kleiner Perkins, 115 Kobach, Kris, 139, 266, 286, 314–15, 328 Koch, Charles, 140 Kogan, Alexander, 220 Köppel, Roger, 328 Kosinski, Michal, 219, 220 Kothanek, John, 78–79 Kotlyar, Grisha, 22 Kratsios, Michael, 248, 255–56, 283 Kristol, William, 42 Krzanich, Brian, 236, 264 Ku Klux Klan, 31 Kushner, Jared, 249, 257, 303, 304 Kvamme, Floyd, 93 Kyl, Jon, 83 Lambert, Hal, 225 Langham, Wallace, 159 Lapham, Lewis, 176 Lashinsky, Adam, 275 Last Ringbearer, The, 175 Law Review, 33 Lean In (Sandberg), viii, 298 Lehman Brothers, 131–33 Less Than Zero (Ellis), 25 Levandowski, Anthony, 328 Levchin, Max, 48–51, 53, 54, 56, 58–59, 67, 70–72, 78–80, 85, 86, 92, 98, 112, 151, 164, 171, 233, 274, 331 Lewinsky, Monica, 47 Lewis, Geoff, 269 Lewis, Michael, 132 libertarianism, 82, 94, 114, 140, 161, 175, 182, 184, 186, 250, 287 competitive government and, 140 seasteading and, 136–38, 169, 192, 229 of Thiel, xiv, 52, 80, 83, 94, 112, 122, 140–41, 209, 250 Thiel Fellowship and, 161, 166, 167 Liberty Defined (Paul), 178 Libra, 302 Lief, Adam, 21, 22 life extension, 23, 325–27, 335 cryonics, 23, 101 Halcyon Molecular, 138, 167–68 Methuselah Foundation, 101, 138 parabiosis, 325–27, 329, 330, 335 SENS Research Foundation, 138, 326–27 LinkedIn, xiii, 105, 107 Linn, Nathan, 33, 53, 101 Lockheed Martin, 147 Lonsdale, Jeff, 136 Lonsdale, Joe, 101, 105, 113, 114, 117, 118, 131, 289–90 Lord of the Rings trilogy (Tolkien), 8, 10, 113, 154, 175, 176, 285 Los Angeles riots, 178 Los Angeles Times, 26 Lotus, 97 Louden, Greg, 16 Lucent Technologies, 223 Luckey, Palmer, 285, 296, 309 Luminar, 271 Lyft, xiii, 189, 190, 269 Lythcott-Haims, Julie, 19 Mac, Ryan, 230 MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, 26 Majority Report, 287 Manafort, Paul, 237 Mandela, Nelson, 176 marijuana, 179 Markoff, John, 145 Marshall, Roger, 314, 315 Martin, Paul, 53, 67, 70 Marxism, 15 Massie, Thomas, 186 Massyn, Pierre, 5 Mast, Lucas, 99 Masters, Blake, 170–71, 190, 201, 256, 265, 314, 319, 332–33 Matthies, Dennis, 34–35 Mattis, Jim, 283 Maxwell, Megan, 16, 18–19, 32 Mayer, Marissa, 123 McCain, John, 135, 236 McConnell, Mitch, 242 McCormack, Andrew, 97, 98, 209–10 McHugh, John, 216 McHugh, Katie, 204 Mckesson, DeRay, 202 McMaster, H.


pages: 502 words: 132,062

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence by James Bridle

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, experimental subject, factory automation, fake news, friendly AI, gig economy, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, James Bridle, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, music of the spheres, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, recommendation engine, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, speech recognition, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, techno-determinism, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, UNCLOS, undersea cable, urban planning, Von Neumann architecture, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Together, the pair came up with a resonant new phrase to describe the mycorrhizal networks, which became the headline on the cover of that issue of Nature: ‘The Wood Wide Web’.13 Back in the 1960s, when the nascent internet started to thread its filaments across the planet, it did so primarily through university departments. It was the development of hypertext and the invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 (specifically to facilitate the sharing of academic documents) which kick-started its wider adoption and understanding. But the gift of the Web wasn’t only informational: by its very existence it gave us new tools to identify and understand networks themselves. Before the Web’s arrival, scientists lacked the tools needed to understand how networks functioned in the real world.

The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), another project on the drawing board which had been struggling for years to get funding, was designed to measure the effects of dark energy on the formation of the Universe, as well as the consistency of general relativity and the curvature of space–time. The sudden availability of the NRO satellites kick-started the programme, which now has a launch date in 2027. The shortness of the satellites – nicknamed ‘Stubby Hubbles’ – and their resulting wide depth of field, are actually an improvement on NASA’s planned designs. With the addition of a device called a coronagraph, which blocks direct stellar light, the new observatory will also search for exoplanets: new worlds formed around distant stars.


pages: 224 words: 45,431

Python Web Penetration Testing Cookbook by Cameron Buchanan, Terry Ip, Andrew Mabbitt, Benjamin May, Dave Mound

en.wikipedia.org, information security, Kickstarter, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, SQL injection, web application

Chapter 9, Reporting, covers scripts that focus to make the reporting of vulnerabilities easier and a less painful process. What you need for this book You will need a laptop, Python 2.7, an Internet connection for most recipes and a good sense of humor. Who this book is for This book is for testers looking for quick access to powerful, modern tools and customizable scripts to kick-start the creation of their own Python web penetration testing toolbox. Sections In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also). To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows: Getting ready This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.


pages: 183 words: 49,460

Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup by Rob Walling

8-hour work day, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, inventory management, Jeff Hawkins, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Network effects, Paul Graham, rolodex, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, software as a service, Superbowl ad, web application

Tell them the day and time they will receive the email. Step 4: Launch Day On launch day, email your list. Almost immediately, sales will start rolling in. You’re going to have the best sales day you will see for a while. Conversion rates on targeted mailings can be 20%+. A few hundred sales of your $19/month SaaS application is not a bad way to kick-start your startup. Step 5: Thirty Six Hours After Launch Send your list a final email informing them that the deal will end in 12 hours. You will receive another few sales before you close down your special pricing. There are more complex variations to this, but it’s a simple, proven approach to increasing your launch-day sales by ten-fold.


Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations by Garr Reynolds

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business process, cloud computing, cognitive load, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Hans Rosling, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Aisyah Saad Abdul Rahim Lecturer in Pharmaceutical Chemistry School of Pharmaceutical Sciences Universiti Sains Malaysia www.pha.usm.my/pharmacy/Aisyah2006.htm The 1PZ VIoxx slides were used in an introductory lecture for NSAIDs (painkillers) in the Central Nervous System course. “Normally, lecturers would start with the common painkillers, e.g., aspirin or paracetamol,” says Dr. Saad. But she starts with the end in mind. A sensational preamble of Vioxx helps kick-start the main story about the medicinal chemistry of aspirin and other NSAIDs. She then moves on to the design of COX-2 inhibitors. “In both slide examples, the Presentation Zen approach gives me the freedom to express my thoughts without hanging so strongly to text,” Dr. Saad said. “Yes, I do have notes tucked away from the audience (students) in presenter’s view, but once my lectures start the notes disappear and the story starts to flow, with the pictures/diagrams as illustrations of my story.”


Saveur New American Comfort Food by James Oseland

Kickstarter, spice trade, trade route

I’d previously dismissed tropical cocktails as slushy umbrella drinks, but the Tiki-Ti’s came with an impressive pedigree: many of them were invented at the country’s first tiki bar, Don the Beachcomber (opened in the mid-1930s), where Ray Buhen, a native of the Philippines, was one of the original bartenders. The Beachcomber attracted a Hollywood crowd and kick-started the midcentury Polynesian craze. Ray Buhen spent the golden age of tiki honing his craft behind some 60 different bars. In 1961, Ray; his wife, Geraldine; and son Michael (pictured) opened a place of their own. Ray died in 1999, but his spirit lives on at the Tiki-Ti. —Jeff Berry Hot Buttered Rum This drink is a holdover from the colonial period in America, when the harsh edges of old-style rums were softened with the addition of warm butter, dark sugar, and spices.


pages: 171 words: 51,276

Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe by Marcus Chown

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Carrington event, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, gravity well, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

To stop this, they must be propped open by stuff with repulsive gravity—stuff that blows rather than sucks. Remarkably, such “exotic matter” exists. In fact, it is the major mass component of the universe, accounting for about two thirds of the mass-energy of the cosmos. In 1998, astronomers found that the expansion of the universe—which had been kick-started by the Big Bang and should, after 13.82 billion years, be running out of steam—was not running out of steam. It was speeding up. To explain this anomalous cosmic acceleration, they were forced to postulate the existence of dark energy, which was mentioned in Chapter 34. We know it is invisible, fills all of space, and has repulsive gravity.


pages: 214 words: 14,382

Monadic Design Patterns for the Web by L.G. Meredith

barriers to entry, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, finite state, functional programming, Georg Cantor, ghettoisation, higher-order functions, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, semantic web, seminal paper, social graph, type inference, web application, WebSocket

eBook <www.wowebook.com> Acknowledgments Many people have contributed to this book and to the material it covers. We are grateful to all of them. i want to acknowledge my family for their patience and support while i have been writing this book. We are especially grateful to all our backers from the Kickstarter Project Lucian Wischik Nick Partridge Michael Uhlenberg Bjarte Stien Karlsen Sylvain HENRY Richard Dallaway Tobias Ahlers Eckart Seth Tisue Lally Singh Tuple23 John Kodumal Steve Pierce Colin Bullock Tyler Weir e.e d3si9n Binil Thomas Nilanjan Raychaudhuri Adrian King Odd Möller Daryoush Mehr chilang Thomas Lockney Yuan Wang Sébastien Bocq Christopher Hawkins Bent Rasmussen Andrei Formiga Patrick Martini Logan Johnson Ross McDonald Simon Weijgers Jarle Stabell Alvaro Carrasco Alexi Polenur Michael Fortson Ryan Burrows siryc David Waern Janne Mäki Spyros Komninos Rowan Limb Harold Mills Johan Prinsloo Volker Heinisch Christos KK Loverdos Patrick Roemer Markus Joschko Florian Hars Alexandre Bertails Dominik Gruntz Eric Jonathan Ferguson Alan Hardy Andrei Dolganov Alexis Agahi Gabriel Kastenbaum jherber Karl Tietze Martin Weber Valeria de Paiva Heikki Hulkko Ted Leung Andrew O’Malley Arnaud Bailly Rob Wills Philippe Jean Tupshin Harper Dave Fayram Aaron Valade contextfree Yousef Ourabi Jon-Anders Teigen David Christiansen Francois michael holzer slmusk Martin Ellis Gavin Bierman Teemu Antti-Poika JR Boyens Brad Fritz Egon Nijns Scott Parker Lieven Lemiengre Florian Heinisch Scott Smith Brian KimJohnson daniel kroeni Mirko Stocker Lukas Joni Freeman Kris Nuttycombe Michael Bridgen Danielle Hulton didierd Igor Rumiha Daniel Proudfoot Eugene Wagner Lutz Wrage hamjad Johannes Rudolph Eric J.


pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Jonathan Vanian, “7-Eleven Just Used a Drone to Deliver a Chicken Sandwich and Slurpees,” Fortune 22 July 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/07/22/7-eleven-drone-flirtey-slurpee (accessed 21 October 2016). 2. Mary Meeker, “Internet Trends 2015—Code Conference,” Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, http://www.kpcb.com/blog/2015-internet-trends. 3. Chris Anderson, “How I accidentally kickstarted the domestic drone boom,” WIRED 22 June 2012, http://www.wired.com/2012/06/ff_drones (accessed 21 October 2016). 4. “Malawi tests first unmanned aerial vehicle flights for HIV early infant diagnosis,” UNICEF 14 March 2016, http://www.unicef.org/media/media_90462.html (accessed 21 October 2016). 5.


pages: 309 words: 54,839

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts by David Gerard

altcoin, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, Californian Ideology, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, Dunning–Kruger effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, functional programming, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, margin call, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, operational security, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, slashdot, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

(Mullins was also famous for his anti-Semitism; every time Mullins said “banker” he meant “Jew,” but this mostly isn’t consciously the case amongst Bitcoiners, who only occasionally rant about Zionists.) These ideas had also been propagated in the mainstream by Ron Paul in the wake of the 2008 credit crunch and the quantitative easing (just printing money, to kick-start the economy) that followed. Though Paul isn’t a fan of Bitcoin – he wants a return to actual gold after he abolishes the Fed.19 Old ideologies come back when they fill a present desire and there’s an opening for them. So these claims, somewhere between incorrect and nonsensical, showed up full-blown in Bitcoin discussion, proponents straight-facedly repeating earlier conspiracy theories as if this was all actually proper economics.


pages: 155 words: 51,258

Bike Snob by BikeSnobNYC

book value, call centre, car-free, fixed-gear, gentrification, Kickstarter, messenger bag, safety bicycle, urban sprawl

Hipsters also occasionally embrace certain motorized forms of transport, such as Vespa scooters, vintage mopeds, and café racer—style motorcycles. However, those too keep the hipster localized, as they are seldom reliable. When they are actually running, hipsters opt to travel as far on them as they can, and it’s not worth the forty-five minutes it can sometimes take to kick-start a recalcitrant Triumph Bonneville simply to ride to a bar the next neighborhood over. They can also require considerable expense to maintain. And as far as cars go, those are generally graduation presents, and hipsters usually return those to their parents when they realize they can’t afford to pay their parking tickets.


pages: 196 words: 58,122

AngularJS by Brad Green, Shyam Seshadri

business logic, combinatorial explosion, continuous integration, Firefox, Google Chrome, Kickstarter, MVC pattern, node package manager, single page application, systems thinking, web application, WebSocket

These are the Config and the Run blocks (or phases): The Config block AngularJS hooks up and registers all the providers in this phase. Because of this, only providers and constants can be injected into Config blocks. Services that may or may not have been initialized cannot be injected. The Run block Run blocks are used to kickstart your application, and start executing after the injector is finished creating. To prevent further system configuration from happening from this point onwards, only instances and constants can be injected into Run blocks. The Run block is the closest you are going to find to a main method in AngularJS.


pages: 194 words: 54,355

100 Things We've Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Big Tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, financial independence, Google Earth, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, TikTok, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Wall-E

I couldn’t think beyond the disappointment I would have endured if he’d said no. “These illustrations will make people think your book is fun,” one of my children observed. Here’s my view: These illustrations make this book. Thank you, Nishant, for saying yes. Thanks to the incomparable Honor Jones, who got this whole thing kick-started editing my op-ed on boredom. Thanks to the poor souls who read early drafts and made clear everything that was terribly wrong: Bob Gottlieb, Sarah Lyall, Susan Dominus, Debra Stern, and Ericka Tullis. Thank you to the many friends who got me through 2020; you know who you are, but in particular, Ericka, Sue, Sarah, Alysia Abbott, Jen Senior, and my loyal Brown crew.


Ireland (Lonely Planet, 9th Edition) by Fionn Davenport

air freight, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, British Empire, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, centre right, classic study, country house hotel, credit crunch, Easter island, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacquard loom, Kickstarter, McMansion, new economy, period drama, reserve currency, risk/return, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Rossinver Organic Centre (Rossinver, County Leitrim;) has courses on organic horticulture and sustainable living. TOP IRISH FICTION Getting stuck into some fiction is the best way to gain insight into Irish issues and culture, for there’s no greater truth in Ireland than the story that’s been made up. Here are the essentials to kick-start a lifelong passion; for more information, Click here. Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce The Book of Evidence (1989) by John Banville The Butcher Boy (1992) by Patrick McCabe Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) by Roddy Doyle The Ballroom of Romance & Other Stories (1972) by William Trevor The Third Policeman (1967) by Flann O’Brien Amongst Women (1990) by John McGahern All the Names Have Been Changed (2009) by Claire Kilroy Brooklyn (2009) by Colm Toibin Angela’s Ashes (1996) by Frank McCourt MUST-SEE IRISH MOVIES Predeparture planning is always more fun if it includes a few flicks to get you in the mood.

In 1972 the Republic (along with Northern Ireland) became a member of the European Economic Community (EEC), which brought an increased measure of prosperity thanks to the benefits of the Common Agricultural Policy, which set fixed prices and guaranteed quotas for Irish farming produce. Nevertheless, the broader global depression, provoked by the oil crisis of 1973, forced the country into yet another slump and emigration figures rose again, reaching a peak in the mid-1980s. Nevertheless, European aid was to prove instrumental in kick-starting the Irish economy in the early 1990s. Huge sums of money were invested in education and physical infrastructure, while the renewal of Lemass’ industrial policy of incentivising foreign investment through tax breaks and the provision of subsidies made Ireland very attractive to high-tech businesses looking for a door into EU markets.

Cultural Centres Alliance Française (Map; 676 1732; www.alliance-francaise.ie; 1 Kildare St) British Council (Map; 676 4088; www.britishcouncil.org; Newmount House, 22-24 Lower Mount St) Goethe Institute (Map; 661 1155; www.goethe.de; 37 North Merrion Sq) Instituto Cervantes (Map; 631 1500; http://dublin.cervantes.es; Lincoln House, Lincoln Pl) Italian Cultural Institute (Map; 662 0509; www.iicdublino.esteri.it; 11 Fitzwilliam Sq East) * * * DUBLIN IN… Two Days Kick-start your day the right way with breakfast at Honest to Goodness Click here in the wonderful George’s St Arcade Click here – and when you’re done have a ramble through the arcade’s collection of stalls and funky stores. A stone’s throw away is Trinity College Click here, where the walking tour includes entry to the Book of Kells (see the boxed text, Click here).


pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

Initially, cardholders were affluent businessmen; they could present their Diners Club card (actually a cardboard booklet) as payment for meals, travel tickets, rental cars, and so on. Diners Club users were billed monthly, and full payment was required monthly. Gas station and department store “charge cards” had been around for decades, but Diners Club and the credit and debit cards that followed kick-started a revolution in cashless and checkless payments. Before ATMs, banks developed machines that dispensed cash and nothing more. The first such efforts—in Japan, Sweden, and Great Britain—took place independently at around the same time in the late 1960s. For example, Barclays, the first British bank to launch a computer center (in 1961), contracted with De La Rue (originally a banknote printing firm founded in 1821), which had developed secure fuel-dispensing machines at unattended depots for Royal Dutch Shell in the late 1950s.

Video games were made possible by the advent of microchips. The hugely successful Space Invaders was introduced as an arcade game in 1978. A domestic version was produced by Atari two years later, establishing one of the most popular videogame genres. COURTESY OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES. In the early 1980s the French government kick-started a national information network by distributing millions of Minitel terminals free to telephone users. As well as directory inquiries, Minitel offered services such as chat rooms, entertainment, and mail order. Minitel finally yielded to the global Internet in 2012, when the service was decommissioned.


pages: 532 words: 155,470

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

Evidence from a Malaria prevention Experiment,” Brookings Global Economy and Development Working Paper, no. 11 (2007); Michael Kremer and Edward Miguel, “The illusion of Sustainability,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, no. 3 (2007): 1007–1065; Christopher Shea, “a Handout, not a Hand Up: a popular approach to ‘Sustainable Development’ Doesn’t Work, Critics Say,” Boston Globe, november 11, 2007. Martin Fisher, of Kickstart, says, “The disadvantage to giving things away is that it’s not really fair. How do you decide who is going to get one of these things and who isn’t going to get one of these things. . . . you really don’t appreciate it in the same way as something that you buy. . . . [W]hen you give things away you’re really just creating dependency and people are hanging out waiting for more handouts.” “african Farmers Try Kickstarting Their Farms,” national public radio, July 22, 2006. nancy rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, nC: Duke University press, 1999), 176.


pages: 874 words: 154,810

Lonely Planet Florence & Tuscany by Lonely Planet, Virginia Maxwell, Nicola Williams

Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Costa Concordia, G4S, haute couture, Kickstarter, period drama, post-work, retail therapy, Skype, trade route

His story is visually narrated in great detail in the stunning fresco series (1497–1505) by Il Sodoma and Luca Signorelli in the Great Cloister at the Abbazia di Monte Oliveto Maggiore, near Siena. One early Benedictine monastery, San Pietro in Valle, was built in neighbouring Umbria by order of the Longobard duke of Spoleto, Faroaldo II. It kick-started a craze for the blend of Lombard and Roman styles known as Romanesque, and many local ecclesiastical structures were built in this style. The basic template was simple: a stark nave stripped of extra columns ending in a domed apse, surrounded by chapels usually donated by wealthy patrons. In the 11th century the Romanesque style acquired a distinctly Tuscan twist in Pisa, when the coloured marble banding and veneering of the city’s duomo (cathedral) set a new gold standard for architectural decoration.

A Stop on the Grand Tour A ‘Grand Tour’ of Italy became an obligatory display of culture and class status by the 18th century, and Tuscany was a key stop on the itinerary. German and English artists enraptured with Michelangelo, Perugino and other early High Renaissance painters took the inspiration home, kick-starting a neoclassicist craze. Conversely, trends from northern Europe (impressionism, plein-air painting and romanticism) became trendy among Italian artists, as witnessed in the collection at Florence’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna in the Palazzo Pitti, which is dominated by late-19th- century works by artists of the Tuscan Macchiaioli school (the local equivalent of impressionism).


Barcelona by Damien Simonis

Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, land reform, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, retail therapy, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Eight years later, Damien turned up in a Rambla-side pensión on assignment for Lonely Planet. And that old magic started doing its work again. A chat with a fellow in a bar and he had a room in a top-floor flat in Gran Via. Barcelona was for years a second home for Damien and is now our restless correspondent’s main base. DAMIEN’S TOP BARCELONA DAY A great way to kick-start the day is with every-one else, leaning up against a bar over a cafèamb llet (coffee with milk), an orange juice and a pastry (preferably something nice and creamy like a canya). A quick read of the paper to find out where we stand on the latest round of squabbling over Catalan autonomy, ETA, the bishops’ spat with the Socialists and FC Barcelona’s results and it’s time to hit the streets

Companys, its president, carried out land reforms and planned an alternative Barcelona Olympics to the official 1936 games in Nazi Berlin. But things were racing out of control. The left and the right across Spain were shaping up for a showdown. Return to beginning of chapter THE CIVIL WAR On 17 July 1936, an army uprising in Morocco kick-started the Spanish Civil War. Barcelona’s army garrison attempted to take the city for General Franco but was defeated by anarchists and police loyal to the government. Franco’s Nationalist forces quickly took hold of most of southern and western Spain; Galicia and Navarra in the north were also his.


pages: 476 words: 148,895

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan

biofilm, bioinformatics, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Drosophila, energy security, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, Hernando de Soto, hygiene hypothesis, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, peak oil, pneumatic tube, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steven Pinker, women in the workforce

And water was the key. I had read about techniques for “presoaking” flours—part of the traditional culture of whole-grain baking that we have lost—and now I understood the logic behind them: to trick the crushed seed into thinking it was time to germinate. So I embarked on a set of experiments to kick-start the enzymatic activity in my dough even before fermentation got under way. I began mixing my flour and water in the evening, at the same time I started my leaven. Not until the next morning, however, would I introduce the one to the other. By the time the sourdough culture began to work on the presoaked flour, it would find all the nutrients it could want: plenty of sugars, amino acids, and minerals.

This new metabolic pathway is a less efficient way to generate energy—the alcohol produced by it still has plenty left to burn—yet it has the considerable advantage of expanding the yeast’s habitat and poisoning its competition—not to mention endearing itself to some of the higher animals, notably including ourselves.* Because aerobic metabolism gives the yeast the maximum amount of energy from its food, oxygenating the liquid in question is a good way to kick-start a fermentation. So I started a new batch of mead, diluting the honey with four parts water and leaving it out on the kitchen counter for several days, uncovered. I had read that mead was often flavored with various herbs and spices, in order to contribute a bit of acidity, some tannins, and nutrients for the yeasts, so I added a bay leaf, some cardamom seeds, a star anise, and a few tablespoons of black tea.


pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The Amazon rainforest is in a state of constant perturbation: from tree falls to fires and floods, its diversity requires it to be constantly changing. There is no equilibrium in nature; there is only constant dynamism. As Heraclitus put it, ‘Nothing endures but change.’ Innovation is like a bush fire To explain the modern global economy, then, you have to explain where this perpetual innovation machine came from. What kick-started the increasing returns? They were not planned, directed or ordered: they emerged, evolved, bottom-up, from specialisation and exchange. The accelerated exchange of ideas and people made possible by technology fuelled the accelerating growth of wealth that has characterised the past century. Politicians, capitalists and officials are flotsam bobbing upriver on the tidal bore of invention.

Some African leaders are so disenchanted with government aid that they even embraced the recommendations of the Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo who concludes, bleakly, ‘aid doesn’t work, hasn’t worked, and won’t work ... no longer part of the potential solution, it’s part of the problem – in fact, aid is the problem.’ Moreover, in recent years much aid has been granted on condition of free-market economic reform, which far from kick-starting economic growth, frequently proves damaging to local traditions, undermining the very mechanisms that get enrichment started. As William Easterly puts it while criticising the shock therapy that did such harm in both the Soviet bloc and Africa, ‘you can’t plan a market’. The top-down imposition of a bottom-up system is bound to fail.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

Jumpstarting investment Because Britain’s broken banks have kept zombie companies alive while failing to lend to promising ones, the recovery has been stifled, seemingly justifying their caution. Meanwhile, even companies with piles of cash have not invested, for fear that demand would remain weak. Instead of trying to kickstart the economy onto a healthy growth path, the government dug a bigger hole by slashing public investment too. As a result, for several years the economy got stuck in a rut where weak demand led to low investment and hence to weak growth, which in turn seemed to justify low investment. What was needed was a jolt to jumpstart the economy.

Britain and France still controlled large global empires. The leaders of France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg were starting to bury the hatchet with West Germany, tying their economies together and building common institutions with the aim of making war between them unthinkable. Kickstarted by Marshall Plan aid from America and burgeoning trade, western Europe was booming. But class divisions were rife. The middle classes had knocked the upper classes off their pedestal. Bolstered by the fear of communism, the working classes had gained much more clout too: unions were in the ascendant, working conditions had improved and welfare provision was expanding.


pages: 492 words: 153,565

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, Brian Krebs, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Doomsday Clock, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, false flag, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Earth, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, pre–internet, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, Stuxnet, Timothy McVeigh, two and twenty, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

This process gets repeated until gas containing the desired concentration of U-235 isotopes is achieved.24 In 1987, after Iran revived its nuclear program, officials there contacted a German engineer-turned-black-marketeer, who was a key supplier of equipment for Pakistan’s illicit nuclear program. He helped arrange a secret meeting in Dubai between Iranian officials and other members of the Khan supply network. In exchange for $10 million, the Iranians walked away with two large suitcases and two briefcases filled with everything they needed to kick-start a uranium enrichment program—technical designs for making centrifuges, a couple of disassembled centrifuge prototypes, and a drawing for the layout of a small centrifuge plant containing six cascades.25 Apparently as a bonus, the marketeers threw in a fifteen-page document describing how to turn enriched uranium into uranium metal and cast it into “hemispheres,” the core component of nuclear bombs.26 Khan later told Pakistani television that he helped Iran develop its nuclear program because he thought if both Pakistan and Iran became nuclear powers, they would “neutralize Israel’s power” in the region.27 The disassembled centrifuges the Iranians received were based on one of the designs Khan stole from Urenco.

He based this in part on the fact that Resource 207 found in the 2009 version of Stuxnet—which contained the Autorun code and the wallpaper exploit—looked a lot like an early version of Flame’s main module. Flame would have already existed as a basic espionage tool by 2007, and when it came time to write the missile portion of Stuxnet in 2009, it appeared that the team behind Flame shared source code for Resource 207 with the Stuxnet crew, essentially kick-starting the creation of the missile code. The payload was already created by then, and the attackers just needed something to deliver it. “Probably there was some kind of urgency to get [Stuxnet] out the door, so that’s why they took this already mature plug-in from Flame and used it in Stuxnet,” Raiu says.


pages: 665 words: 146,542

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power by Michel Aglietta

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, secular stagnation, seigniorage, shareholder value, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stochastic process, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, the scientific method, tontine, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus

Finance itself produced the devastating contagion that was now spreading unopposed. Everything was unfolding as if the counterfactual horizon of the future had disappeared. Financial agents were exclusively driven by immediacy, which is to say, by the exclusive search for money – not in order to kick-start spending, but in order to protect themselves. This is the reason why finance was saved only through the coordinated action of the central banks, or in other words, by money. Economies nonetheless fell into a deep recession, which could be overcome only through an expansionary fiscal policy coordinated at the G20 level, and thus through the power of the state seeking to reconstruct a future at the level of the world economy.

Central banks are the only public authorities to have taken reactive measures, but this cannot compensate for the negligence of the political authorities, particularly in Europe. The central banks’ ‘non-conventional’ policies, involving the massive creation of liquidity by buying mostly public equities on the secondary markets, have only had very limited success in the attempt to revive effective demand and kickstart growth. This is because the process of transmitting monetary policy through the purchase of pre-existing financial assets does not directly create any new income. It has only an indirect and uncertain effect on the behaviour of private actors, coming as it does after the trauma of the crisis. And even this is vulnerable to serious losses along the way.


We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

In 2009 he’d encountered a thread that had morphed from a silly idea to a full-fledged crowdfunding effort—and a contest. It read, “Anyone else remember that JetBlue $600 for a month deal? What if we sponsor some unemployed redditor to travel around and do stuff for us, like courier packages, or do requests for us as compensation?” It was actually happening: One of the first campaigns on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter was already under way to accept donations to buy at least one “All You Can Jet Deal” ticket. McComas felt a tiny pang of remorse for being too old, and, well, too employed to volunteer himself. He’d long grown out of his punk past and was settling into middle age. He’d married, had a couple little kids, and let some extra pounds accumulate on his already large frame.

Later, Ohanian explained the decision that came from Huffman to stop devoting Reddit’s resources to traditional media. “It came down to the question: What is Reddit going to be?” Reddit needed to hire engineers and to ship product. These departments Ohanian had created were not core to that vision. So Huffman shut them down. Another project did work. Within months of his return, Huffman kick-started an initiative to upgrade Reddit’s mobile app. After six months of development, on April 6, 2016, a Facebook post teased, “Reddit for your thumbs. Coming soon to iOS and Android.” Some users complained that the app was a tidied-up, simplified Reddit—and sure, it was. Images on the official app, which is just called Reddit, are displayed in-line, so the appearance is initially just an up-to-the-minute meme reader.


The Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway, urban planning, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

Alan had been looking closely at the books and realized that if he brought the Mars program in line and simultaneously imposed some serious fiscal discipline on the wider planetary science division, he could find two-point-one billion dollars—not to study more mission concepts, or to get things kickstarted and hope for funding down the line. No, for two-point-one billion, he could launch an outer planets flagship. Better still, the European Space Agency had offered to help; it wanted to get in on the science, too. So, although the Quad Studies were intended to take four potential missions and settle on a single destination, Stern directed a second round, reducing the competitors to two: a Europa mission (doing as much of the Ganymede mission science as possible) and a Titan mission (doing as much Enceladus science as it could).

,” Ask an Astronomer (Astronomy Department, Cornell University), last modified June 27, 2015, http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/physics/109-the-universe/cosmology-and-the-big-bang/inflation/664-how-can-the-universe-expand-faster-than-the-speed-of-light-during-inflation-advanced. See also M. Strassler, “Inflation,” Of Particular Significance, last modified March 17, 2017, https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/relativity-space-astronomy-and-cosmology/history-of-the-universe/inflation. See also K. Tate, “Cosmic Inflation: How It Gave the Universe the Ultimate Kickstart,” Space.com, last modified March 17, 2014, https://www.space.com/25075-cosmic-inflation-universe-expansion-big-bang-infographic.html. See also “The Origins of the Universe: Inflation,” University of Cambridge, Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology online, accessed October 14, 2019, http://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/outreach/origins/inflation_zero.php. 28.W.


pages: 511 words: 151,359

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, short selling, social distancing, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, yield curve

Let’s take a look at Asia as it exists in real life rather than on our pictorial version of how Asia looks to the equity investor. Just a few minutes pondering the difference may produce serious strategy consequences for those investors who believe the collapse of Indonesia will undermine the whole of the Asian investment story. Some of the greatest economic success stories in Asia were kick-started by wars in the other Asian nations. The sourcing of materials for the Korean war from Japan certainly resulted in the acceleration of Japan’s post-war recovery. The Vietnam war provided further boosts to the economies of those Asian nations which managed to escape associated political problems.

New record high valuations were to be justified by a conclusion that new record low risks were on offer. There was a problem in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a solution brewing to that problem at the headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that would transform investors' perception of risk and kick-start the age of debt. The decomposing composers 24 September 1998, Global There appear to have been some problems at Mr Meriwether’s Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). According to the newswires, emergency credit lines have had to be extended. LTCM is no ordinary fund management company.


pages: 535 words: 149,752

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

In many ways, the iPad was the least taxing and most rewarding product they made. They had been toying with the idea of making a tablet before they made the iPhone, and Jobs had resurrected work on it before his transplant. The iPhone would inform the design of the tablet, which would use the same software. The biggest question was: What size should it be? Ive kick-started the evaluation by making twenty models in various sizes with rounded corners. He invited Jobs to the studio, where he laid them out for review. They went from model to model, evaluating each one’s look and feel. They settled on a nine-by-seven-inch rectangle that sat flat on the table like a legal pad.

He told his longtime friend: Interview with Clive Grinyer; Parker, “The Shape of Things to Come.” In May 2009, Jony Ive arrived: Isaacson, Steve Jobs. Representatives of Ive said he hadn’t spoken with Isaacson about that important episode. Isaacson didn’t provide Jobs’s response or detail who had provided Ive’s quotes in this exchange. Ive kick-started the evaluation: Isaacson, Steve Jobs. Accompanied by Heather: “Apple Design Chief Jonathan Ive Is Knighted” (video), BBC, May 23, 2012, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-18171093; Yukari Kane, Haunted Empire. Later that day, Ive shed: Interview and photographs provided by event organizer Tracy Breeze.


pages: 525 words: 147,008

SuperBetter by Jane McGonigal

autism spectrum disorder, data science, full employment, game design, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mirror neurons, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, social intelligence, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel

Staying in shape is important for cancer, especially with multiple myeloma, because I need to keep my bones strong. If the bones in my legs become brittle, I can have problems walking, I can break my legs very easily. I haven’t been doing as much to keep my legs strong as I should. The photography quest helped me kick-start this whole other area of my health and well-being.” The upward spiral continued with each daily quest. Weeks later Phillip reported: “Every day I’m feeling more confident about what I’m learning. I’m understanding photography better, self-portraiture better, my camera better—I realized I hadn’t even used all the features before.

On day ninety, he shared the following reflection: “This has been amazing. I’m not feeling depressed anymore. I have more energy. I’ve seen real improvement in my photography. I’ve used SuperBetter to understand my world better and, through that, to understand myself. It was just what I needed to kick-start my life again and to focus on remaining positive, happy, and living each day to the fullest.” Phillip continues to fight cancer creatively today. Approximately one year after reaching his goal of ninety creative self-portraits, he received a new and experimental treatment for multiple myeloma.


pages: 590 words: 156,001

Fodor's Oregon by Fodor's Travel Guides

Airbnb, bike sharing, BIPOC, car-free, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, off-the-grid, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, tech bro, tech worker, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

Wineries That Define Oregon’s Willamette Valley KING ESTATE WINERY King Estate immediately stands out from the smaller-scale outfits clustered along Territorial Highway, the main touring route in the quieter southern stretches of the valley, and it’s easy to spend an entire day here touring the winery complex. THE EYRIE VINEYARDS David and Diana Lett defied conventional wisdom when they founded the Eyrie Vineyards in 1965, helping to kick-start a Pinot Noir frenzy that’s shaped the valley’s vino reputation. Today, David’s son, Jason Lett, oversees operations and continues to turn out top Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, and other varieties. PENNER-ASH WINE CELLARS Wine critics of the caliber of Robert Parker consider the women-led team at Penner-Ash Wine Cellars among the nation’s top producers of Pinot Noir—considerable praise in a region where that’s the top grape.

But the best part is that most of the hottest chef-driven spots around the state offer meals that cost a fraction of what you’d pay for comparable cuisine in San Francisco or even Seattle. DRINKING Oregon is beyond merely beer obsessed, although craft ales are clearly at the forefront of the state’s assiduous attention to beverages. Portland is well regarded for longtime breweries like Widmer that helped kick-start the local industry, but you’re more likely to find serious fans hanging out at newer spots like Breakside Brewery and Ecliptic Brewing. There are many acclaimed beer makers outside the Portland area—consider Rogue in Newport, pFriem in Hood River, Deschutes Brewery in Bend, Yachats Brewing in Yachats, Ninkasi in Eugene, and Terminal Gravity in Enterprise.


Lonely Planet Belgium & Luxembourg by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, centre right, charter city, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, friendly fire, gentrification, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Peace of Westphalia, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, three-masted sailing ship, urban renewal

RoskamBAR (map Google map; %02-503 51 54; www.cafe-roskam.be; Rue de Flandre 9; h4pm-2am, to 4am Fri; mSte-Catherine) Navy tiles and a stylised horse-head sign identify this bar and music venue, a small and welcoming neighbourhood place that hosts great Sunday-night jazz concerts. Bar des AmisBAR (map Google map; www.bardesamis.be; Rue Ste-Catherine 30; h5pm-late Sun-Thu, 3pm-late Fri & Sat; W; mSte-Catherine) A great bar to kick-start a night out, right in the centre of the vibrant Ste-Catherine area. The cosy atmosphere is enhanced by vintage items on the walls. Club des HallesCLUB (map Google map; %02-289 26 60; www.cafedeshalles.be; Pl St-Géry 1; h10am-midnight; jBourse) Popular city-centre club in the vaulted cellars beneath the buzzing Café des Halles.

Moules-frites | NITO / SHUTTERSTOCK © History The current nation states of Belgium and Luxembourg first appeared on the political map of Europe rather haphazardly in the 19th century. Little Luxembourg only emerged from under the Dutch umbrella due to a quirk in royal inheritance rules. And when an opera kick-started Belgium’s independence in 1830, nobody thought that the country would last. Some still doubt that it will. However, the fascinatingly tangled history of the ‘Low Countries’ goes back way before such shenanigans. Overview The region had a rich Roman history but really came to prominence in the 13th and 14th centuries, when the cloth trade brought Bruges, Ghent and Ypres international stature.


Fodor's Essential Belgium by Fodor's Travel Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, bike sharing, blood diamond, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Easter island, Ford Model T, gentrification, haute cuisine, index card, Kickstarter, low cost airline, New Urbanism, out of africa, QR code, retail therapy, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Monsel HATS & GLOVES | Something of an old stager, this traditional umbrella shop and milliners has a wide choice of caps and hats. It has also been going for generations (since 1847) and was one of the original shops in the Galeries Royales St-Hubert. EGalerie du Roi 5, Lower Town P02/511–4133 wwww.monsel.be mMetro: De Brouckère. Stijl MIXED CLOTHING | Often credited with kickstarting the boutique rush on rue Antoine Dansaert, Stijl has been knocking around since the 1980s yet still retains its couture chops, championing a wide range of Belgian avant-garde designers for women. It also has a men’s branch on place du Nouveau Marche aux Grains. ERue Antoine Dansaert 74, Lower Town P02/512–0313 wwww.stijl.be mMetro: Ste-Catherine.

Musée international du Carnaval et du Masque (Museum of International Carnivals and Masks) HISTORY MUSEUM | The city’s carnival museum, set within a sprawling former Augustinian college opposite the church, offers colorful context for February’s festivities and even captures their atmosphere a little. It goes into great detail on the carnival’s history, costumes, and preparation—planning begins six months in advance and, judging from the photo display, requires a few beers to kickstart—and it looks at similar carnivals from Wallonia and the rest of the world. The star attractions, however, are the private cinema, which shows nonstop films of the day’s festivities, and the VR headsets that drop you right into the day’s action. Downstairs, temporary exhibitions usually focus on masks from around the world.


France (Lonely Planet, 8th Edition) by Nicola Williams

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, double helix, flag carrier, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information trail, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, post-work, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, Sloane Ranger, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Return to beginning of chapter ROADS LESS TRAVELLED OUTDOOR ACTION Two Weeks / Chamonix to Cauterets * * * This highly energetic 1500km tour from the French Alps to the Pyrenees will leave you breathless, especially if you take a few days out to indulge in an adrenaline rush of outdoor activity up, down or on the mountain slopes. * * * Kick-start your Alpine adventure in Chamonix at the foot of Europe’s highest peak: ride a cable car to the Aiguille du Midi and Le Brévent or a train to the Mer de Glace. Skiing the legendary Vallée Blanche and paragliding are daredevil choices. For the truly Alpine-dedicated there are the Vanoise and Écrins national parks to explore.

Louis XIV, also known as the Sun King, ascended the throne in 1643 at the age of five and ruled until 1715, virtually emptying the national coffers with his ambitious building and battling. His greatest legacy is the palace at Versailles, 21km southwest of Paris. The excesses of Louis XVI and his queen, Marie-Antoinette, in part led to an uprising of Parisians on 14 July 1789 and the storming of the Bastille prison – kick-starting the French Revolution. At first the Revolution was in the hands of moderates, but within a few years the so-called Reign of Terror, during which even the original patriots were guillotined, was in full swing. The unstable post-Revolutionary government was consolidated in 1799 under a young Corsican general named Napoleon Bonaparte, who declared himself First Consul.

Cobbled rue Mercière, rue des Marronniers and the northern side of place Antonin Poncet – all in the 2nd arrondissement (metro Bellecour) – are chock-a-block with eating options, pavement terraces overflowing in summer. Near the opera house, rue Verdi, 1er, is likewise table-filled. * * * GO LOCAL A bouchon might be a ‘bottle stopper’ or ‘traffic jam’ elsewhere in France, but in Lyon it’s a small, friendly bistro that cooks up traditional city cuisine. Kick-start what will surely be a memorable gastronomic experience with a communard, an aperitif of red Beaujolais wine and crème de cassis (blackcurrant liqueur), named after the supporters of the Paris Commune killed in 1871. Blood-red in colour, the mix is considered criminal elsewhere in France. When ordering wine, don’t ask for a wine list.


The River Cottage Fish Book: The Definitive Guide to Sourcing and Cooking Sustainable Fish and Shellfish by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

air gap, California gold rush, clean water, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, haute cuisine, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Kickstarter, market bubble, means of production, sensible shoes

There are some other, more localized labeling initiatives that we applaud too; the South West Handline Fishermen’s Association, for instance, tags all its line-caught pollock and bass so that consumers can find out when and by whom it was caught. But there is scope for far more extensive and informative labeling of fish. We don’t think it’s overstating the case to say that it could deliver a monumental boost to fish conservation all around the world. The time is right to kick-start a virtuous circle: the more positive choices, with ecological upsides, that can be offered to the consumer, the better. More friends of fish The MSC is not the only nongovernment organization blazing a trail for sustainable fishing. The Marine Conservation Society (MCS), for instance, is a UK charity dedicated to the conservation of our seas and seashores.

As their numbers tumble, the wily dogfish seem ever on hand to fill the gaps. In places where there was once a huge diversity of species, now you’ll often find only a few stragglers—and endless dogfish. Around January and February, before the sea has started to warm up and grow the algae and plankton that kickstart the food chain, most species migrate to deeper, more southerly waters. But the dogfish sticks around to pick up the pieces. In the absence of others, whatever food is around is theirs for the taking. So in tough times these fish don’t just survive, they thrive. Sadly, this isn’t the case for the dogfish’s larger cousins, such as the bull huss, spurdog, and smooth hound.

Because squid live fast and die young, a squid fishery can fluctuate wildly from year to year, as numbers depend largely on the success or failure of each individual breeding season. We’re lucky to have a reliable seasonal opportunity to catch squid ourselves on rod and line. It’s a winter-afternoon affair, kick-started by the drop in water temperature and shortening days some time around mid-November. This is when the squid migrate close inshore, around Weymouth and Portland harbors, in search of easy food. We often catch them in no more than 12 to 18 feet (4 to 6m) of water, just as the day fades and the night sucks up the light.


Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area by Nick Edwards, Mark Ellwood

1960s counterculture, airport security, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, period drama, pez dispenser, Port of Oakland, rent control, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, transcontinental railway, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

At Columbus’s intersection with Broadway, you’ll find, among the many strip joints, the sites of many bars and comedy clubs from the 1950s – among them the Hungry I and the Purple Onion, where many of the era’s politically conscious comedians, from Mort Sahl and Dick Gregory to Lenny Bruce, once performed.The strip clubs and porno stores that dominate this part of town first arrived with the Beats’ exodus, and gained considerable steam with the topless waitress phenomenon kick-started by Carol Doda (see box, p.72) at the Condor Club (300 Columbus St at Broadway) in 1964. For years, a notorious pair of neon nipples were set on the wall outside, but the iconic items were eventually auctioned off to a nostalgic bidder. A few pieces of memorabilia from the club’s topless heyday remain intact inside the building, including its piano suspended from the ceiling.

They made North Beach the nexus of the Beat Generation in the 1950s, which in turn helped make San Francisco a beacon for counterculturalists in the ensuing decades, from flower children in Haight-Ashbury in the late 1960s, to gays in the Castro in the 1970s and warehouse-dwelling ravers in SoMa in the 1990s. 71 Carol Doda and topless waitressing North Be ach an d the hi l l s | North Beach 72 Carol Doda is an unsung pioneer of the Sexual Revolution. Like the feminists that followed her, she proudly burned her bra, albeit for very different reasons. Knowing that she’d make bigger tips by baring her best assets, the North Beach cocktail waitress kick-started topless waitressing on June 19, 1964, creating a trend that at one point led to almost thirty different topless bars clustered together around the intersection of Columbus and Broadway. Doda’s bra-doffing was much less impromptu than legend has it. The original idea didn’t come from Doda, but rather, a bouncer at the Condor Club.

The robust menu includes cod in smoky broth and the namesake, ratatouille-esque stew, while the warm | North Beach and the hills Southeast Asian e ati ng San Francisco has enjoyed a recent proliferation of locally based “microroasters” that offer particularly strong cups of joe. Listed below are a few espresso bars to seek out if you’re looking for a robust kickstart any time of day. You won’t find any grande eggnog lattes at these places, but you can expect to get a cup of fresh coffee for a mere $1.50–2.25. Blue Bottle Coffee 315 Linden St at Gough, Hayes Valley t415/252-7535. Located down an alley off a main thoroughfare, this quirky spot offers excellent breakfast and dessert items, but it’s the own-roasted coffee that has taken San Francisco by storm.


Learning Ansible 2 - Second Edition by Fabio Alessandro Locati

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, business logic, cloud computing, continuous integration, Debian, DevOps, don't repeat yourself, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, Kickstarter, revision control, source of truth, web application

This means, having a single language for all components and all people within your IT, and this will allow people to understand better how the company IT works as well as working more closely with each other. Ansible Galaxy Ansible Galaxy is a free site from where you can download Ansible roles developed by the community and kick-start your automation within minutes. You can share or review community roles so that others can easily find the most trusted roles on Ansible Galaxy. You can start using Ansible Galaxy by simply signing up with social media applications such as Twitter, Google, and GitHub or by creating a new account on the Ansible Galaxy website at https://galaxy.ansible.com/ and downloading the required roles using the ansible-galaxy command, which ships with Ansible version 1.4.2 and higher.


pages: 261 words: 57,595

China's Future by David Shambaugh

Berlin Wall, capital controls, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, high-speed rail, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, market bubble, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent-seeking, secular stagnation, short selling, South China Sea, special drawing rights, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional

The remaining members of the Standing Committee, though, were still tainted by Tiananmen and held very conservative outlooks. This included Premier Li Peng, internal security czar Qiao Shi, and military supremo Liu Huaqing. Thus, although Deng had succeeded in slightly shifting the balance in the leadership and had managed to kick-start economic reforms again (triggering four straight years of double-digit GDP growth), the political atmosphere remained very constrained and harshly repressive. Jiang Zemin’s power was not yet consolidated and China’s leaders remained traumatized from their Party’s own near-death experience and having just witnessed the disintegration and collapse of the Soviet Union and East European communist party-states.


pages: 164 words: 57,068

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, bonus culture, British Empire, call centre, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, falling living standards, future of work, G4S, greed is good, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, late capitalism, mass immigration, megacity, mittelstand, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Veblen good, Walter Mischel

The good news is the power that individuals now have, with which they can use those bypasses to manage their own lives. It is becoming a do-it-yourself economy. We can not only buy books online, we can publish our own, should we wish to write any. We need no longer go anywhere near a physical bank; we can even start our own by creating a crowd-funding site. Kickstarter, one of the leading sites, began in 2009 and opened in Britain in 2012. You can, should you wish to take the risk, start your own currency. Bitcoin, Peercoin and Primecoin already exist as internet currencies with a defined amount whose value varies according to the demand, although the risk quickly overtook a couple of the early Britcoin exchanges.


The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Kickstarter, Menlo Park, obamacare, Parler "social media", Skype, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois

A Jack-of-all-trades but master-of-none, this black is still figuring everything out in his attempt to find a place in this world. THE APPROACH: Encourage this black to find a focus, but show your support along the way. KEY PHRASES: “Sure, we can do lunch”; “Yes, I’ll listen to your new idea”; “Fine, I’ll donate to your Kickstarter.” The Insecure Black: Constantly concerned with how race plays a factor in their everyday life, these blacks get really uncomfortable when race is brought up, fearing that all eyes will be on them. Does everything have to be about race? they ask. They don’t offer opinions about Obama for fear of appearing biased.


Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore

Airbnb, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, call centre, chief data officer, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, data science, Diane Coyle, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, G4S, hype cycle, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, loose coupling, M-Pesa, machine readable, megaproject, minimum viable product, nudge unit, performance metric, ransomware, robotic process automation, Silicon Valley, social web, The future is already here, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture

There’s no rule that says that a government website has to look worse than a website for Apple, just because it’s ‘good enough for government’. Some of the best and most loved designs in history come from public sector projects: the 1970s’ NASA identity guidelines were released as a hugely popular Kickstarter project. A digital organisation working in any sector should have high design ambitions. As well as using design differently, you’ll need a different type of designer. Good designers work side by side with user researchers and with developers. Good designers can code. Good designers are involved at every stage of a service, not just coming in at the beginning or the end.


pages: 169 words: 56,250

Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City by Brad Feld

barriers to entry, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, deal flow, fail fast, G4S, Grace Hopper, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, minimum viable product, Network effects, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, place-making, pre–internet, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Jobs, text mining, vertical integration, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Venture capital need not be located in your city for it to find opportunities to invest in. We operate in an increasingly flat and mobile world, one where investors quickly hear about interesting opportunities, no matter where they are located. They can find and even invest in deals online and from afar, through services like Angellist (http://startuprev.com/b3) and Kickstarter (http://startuprev.com/e1). Even if venture capitalists miss a good deal, there is nothing like having missed one to convince investors to pay more attention in the future. Communities should spend more time showing investors what they’ve missed, and less time complaining that investors won’t buy into promises of future gains.


pages: 236 words: 57,368

One Pan, Two Plates: More Than 70 Complete Weeknight Meals for Two by Carla Snyder Snyder

Kickstarter

SEE ALSO ZUCCHINI Flank Steak with Chimichurri and Summer Squash Hash Lamb Kebabs with Harissa, Chickpeas, and Summer Squash Summer Rolls with Shrimp, Cucumber, and Mango SWEET POTATOES Barley Risotto with Sweet Potato and Andouille Sausage Cornflake-Crusted Chicken Fingers with Rosemary–Sweet Potato Pan Fries and Chutney Dipping Sauce Herb-Rubbed Pork with Honey-Lime Roasted Sweet Potatoes, Cauliflower, and Major Grey’s Chutney Pan-Roasted Chicken Leg Quarters with Thyme, Sweet Potatoes, and Pineapple Sautéed Pork Chops with Sweet Potato, Apple, and Mustard Sauce t Tacos, Catfish, with Chipotle Slaw Thai Red Curry Chicken with Bell Peppers and Broccoli Tips TOMATOES Chicken Stew with Tomatoes, Oranges, and Olives Citrus-Marinated Salmon with Heirloom Tomato Concassé and Goat’s-Milk Feta Fresh Summer Pasta with Tomatoes, Garlic, Basil, and Buttery Croutons Fried Green Tomato Sandwiches with Bacon and Chutney Herbed Chicken Paillards with Zucchini Pancakes and Cherry Tomato Pan Sauce Jambalaya with Chicken, Shrimp, and Andouille Sausage Panko-Fried Crab Cakes with Heirloom Tomato, Nectarine, and Avocado Salad TORTILLAS Catfish Tacos with Chipotle Slaw Skirt Steak Fajitas with Pico de Gallo and Avocado TUNA Fresh Pepper Linguine with Olive Oil–Packed Tuna, Capers, and Golden Raisins Salade Niçoise Tuna Burgers with Wasabi Mayo and Quick Cucumber Pickle TURKEY Balsamic Turkey with Artichokes and Eggplant Caponata Turkey Chili with Poblano and Queso Fresco Turkey Tonkatsu with Cabbage, Portobellos, and Pickled Ginger Turnips, One-Pan Roast Deviled Chicken with Carrots, Parsnips, and v VEAL Veal Piccata with Brussels Sprout Hash and Apples Veal Rolls with Currants, Pine Nuts, and Parmesan Polenta Stacks Veal Saltimbocca with Asparagus, Lemon, and Israeli Couscous w Wild Rice, Braised Chicken Thighs with Walnuts, Grapes, and z Zesting ZUCCHINI Baked Halibut with Warm Fennel-Zucchini Chopped Salad Citrus-Marinated Salmon with Heirloom Tomato Concassé and Goat’s-Milk Feta Herbed Chicken Paillards with Zucchini Pancakes and Cherry Tomato Pan Sauce acknowledgments I’d like to give thanks to my dad, Eugene Lewis Ferguson, who loved to tickle his taste buds. He unwittingly guided me into the culinary arts, first with the genetic gift of his palate and later with his 1970s Gourmet magazines, which kick-started my culinary life. Thank you to the extraordinary people at Chronicle Books for creating the most beautiful cookbooks in the business. I send much gratitude to my editor, Bill LeBlond, for his vision of this book and the encouragement to write it my way; to editor Amy Treadwell for her expert eye and unerring advice; to managing editors Doug Ogan and Claire Fletcher for cleaning and polishing the manuscript till it sparkled; and to copyeditor Carrie Bradley Neves for her tireless attention to detail.


pages: 202 words: 59,883

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

Albert Einstein, Apple II, augmented reality, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, connected car, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, factory automation, Filter Bubble, G4S, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, lifelogging, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, ubercab, urban planning, Zipcar

It is an open platform—the company hopes growth will come from adding not only its own apps, but new functionality from third-party sources. Austin-based WigWag, a similar household PCA, is even younger than SmartThings. When we talked with founder-CEO Ed Hemphill in July 2013, he was raising funds on Kickstarter, the popular crowd-funding site. WigWag is also an open platform that performs tasks similar to those done by SmartThings. What differentiates WigWag are the sensor packs that you set up in each room. The sensors detect unexpected changes, such as patio motion or garden frost, and alert you via text message.


Rough Guide Directions Bruges & Ghent by Phil Lee

British Empire, gentrification, Kickstarter, place-making, spinning jenny, the market place

Nonetheless, obvious highlights include the paintings of the Symbolists, amongst whom Fernand Khnopff (1858–1921) is represented by Secret Reflections, not one of his better paintings perhaps, but interesting in so far as its lower panel, showing St Janshospitaal (see p.70) reflected in a canal, confirms one of the Symbolists’ favourite conceits: “Bruges the dead city”. This was inspired by Georges Rodenbach’s novel Bruges la Morte, a highly stylized musing on love and obsession first published in 1892. The book kickstarted the craze for visiting Bruges, the “dead city”, where the action unfolds. The upper panel of Khnopff ’s painting is a play on appearance and desire, but it’s really rather feeble, unlike his later attempts, in which he painted his sister, Marguerite, again and again, using her refined, almost plastic beauty to stir a vague sense of passion – for she’s desirable and utterly unobtainable in equal measure.


The Interior Design Handbook by Frida Ramstedt

Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, microplastics / micro fibres

You can expect to spend some time circling around ideas before you finally home in on what you really like and want. 2. Exterior Is there anything about the exterior of the house and its architecture that will help advance your interiors project? The color of the facade, the materials, the style, the history—anything at all that could kick-start your project? 3. Styles Once you’ve been through a huge number of photographs of interiors, the type and style of interior that speaks to you will begin to emerge. The challenge now is to find the courage to sort through everything and to be selective so that your vision becomes clearer in your own mind.


England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

The first artist with a truly English style and sensibility was arguably William Hogarth, whose riotous (and deeply rude) canvases exposed the vice and corruption of 18th-century London. His most celebrated work is A Rake’s Progress, displayed today at Sir John Soane’s Museum Click here in London, kick-starting a long tradition of British caricatures that can be traced right through to the work of modern-day cartoonists such as Gerald Scarfe and Steve Bell. While Hogarth was busy satirising society, other artists were hard at work showing it in its best light. The leading figures of 18th-century English portraiture are Sir Joshua Reynolds; his rival, Thomas Gainsborough; the Cumbrian-born George Romney; and George Stubbs, known for his intricate studies of animal anatomy (particularly horses).

Another worthwhile trip from Lechlade is Buscot Park (NT; 01367-240786; www.buscot-park.com; adult/child £7.50/3.75, grounds only £5/2.50; 2-6pm Wed-Fri, grounds only Mon & Tue Apr-Sep & selected weekends), an ornate, Italianate country house set in gardens designed by Harold Peto. The house is now home to the Faringdon art collection, which includes paintings by Rembrandt, Reynolds, Rubens, Van Dyck and Murillo. The house is 2¾ miles southeast of Lechlade on the Faringdon road (A417). * * * SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND Kick-start your weekend by checking into the seductively stylish Cotswold House Hotel Click here in Chipping Campden, and take a sunset stroll around the village before dining at Juliana’s or Hick’s Brasserie. First thing the following morning, blow away the cobwebs with a short stroll and magnificent views at Broadway Tower Click here and then head south to Winchcombe Click here, where you can loll about the lovely village or take in some history at the Tudor pile Sudeley Castle Click here.

It’s also become a magnet for stunt artists and suicides; in 1885 Sarah Ann Hedley jumped from the bridge after a lovers’ tiff, but her voluminous petticoats parachuted her safely to earth and she lived to be 85. * * * HUMAN CARGO It’s a sobering thought that some of Bristol’s 18th-century wealth and splendour was fuelled by brutality and human exploitation. In the late 1600s, the first slave ship set sail from Bristol harbour, kick-starting the city’s connections with the so-called ‘triangular trade’. Africans were kidnapped from their homes, shipped across the Atlantic to America and the Caribbean and sold into a life of slavery. Conditions on the boats were unimaginably horrific; it was expected that one in 10 of those captured would die en route – in reality, many more did.


Coastal California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, flex fuel, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, Lyft, machine readable, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Creative Culture From the mid-19th-century gold rush to the dot-com bubble, California has survived extreme booms and busts, often getting by on its wits. Today Hollywood still makes most of the world’s movies and TV shows, fed by a vibrant performing-arts scene on stages across the state. In California the hottest trends are usually kick-started not by moguls in offices, but by motley crowds of surfers, artists and coastal dreamers concocting the out-there ideas behind everything from skateboarding to biotechnology. If you linger long enough, you might actually see the future evolving here. Surfing in San Diego | SEBASTIEN BUREL / SHUTTERSTOCK © Why I Love Coastal California By Sara Benson, Writer Like almost half of the people who live here, California wasn't where I was born, but it's where I've chosen to make my home.

French Bakery CafeBAKERY, CAFE$ ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %760-729-2241; www.carlsbadfrenchpastrycafe.com/; 1005 Carlsbad Village Dr; mains $6; h7am-7pm Mon-Sat, 7.30am-5pm Sun; W) Its location may be in a drab-looking shopping center just off I-5, but it’s the real deal for croissants and brioches (baked daily) and kick-start espresso, plus omelets, salads and sandwiches. Pizza PortPIZZA$$ ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %760-720-7007; www.pizzaport.com; 571 Carlsbad Village Dr; pizzas $7-24; h11am-10pm Mon-Thu, to midnight Fri & Sat, 10am-11pm Sun; c) Rockin’ and raucous local brewpub chain with surf art, rock music and ‘anti-wimpy’ pizzas to go with the signature Sharkbite Red Ale.

But since the 1960s, Californians have trailblazed another, ‘greener’ way by choosing more sustainable foods and low-impact lifestyles, preserving old-growth forests with tree-sitting activism, declaring urban nuclear-free zones, pushing for environmentally progressive legislation and establishing the biggest US market for hybrid vehicles. Over 60% of Californians admit that, yes, they’ve actually hugged a tree. That shouldn’t really come as a surprise. It was Californians who helped kick-start the world’s conservation movement in the midst of the 19th-century industrial revolution, with laws curbing industrial dumping, swaths of prime real estate set aside as urban green space, and pristine wilderness protected by national and state parks. Today, even conservative California politicians may prioritize environmental issues on their agendas – at least as much as the state’s economic recovery and several recent years of severe drought allow.


pages: 223 words: 59,820

The One-Minute Workout by Martin Gibala

Biosphere 2, Kickstarter, large denomination, meta-analysis

Peak Intensity • 3 Duration • 30 minutes The Evidence • Walking is the best medicine, according to many doctors. It’s easy, convenient, and cheap. The problem is that some people’s pace may not be fast enough to increase their physical fitness. So a group out of Japan’s Shinshu University pioneered interval walking for older people who don’t do much physical activity, kick-starting a whole series of studies on the topic. In general, these protocols involve speeding up the pace for around three minutes, easing off for about the same amount of time, and then pushing up the pace again. Compared with walking at a steady pace, the interval-based routine has been shown to result in much larger improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness and much larger decreases in blood pressure for those who are out of shape.


pages: 200 words: 60,314

Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss by Frances Stroh

cognitive dissonance, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Ford Model T, Golden Gate Park, imposter syndrome, Kickstarter, new economy, nuclear winter, post-work, South of Market, San Francisco, urban renewal

Then Trevor and I arranged a theory seminar for the MA program, inviting all the top theorists in London. Suddenly I had access to people I’d only read about in the States. These luminaries came out to the pub with us after class and, later, to my dinner parties. I had finally landed exactly where I needed to be, it seemed. The change of longitude acted as a kick-starter for my art. I worked feverishly day and night to keep up with the intense flow of ideas, making small installations in my studio as sketches for larger pieces. I spent hours each day slicing up Dennis Cooper’s Frisk, line by line, just as Cooper’s protagonist sliced up his victims’ bodies. I relabeled beer bottles with the dismembered text and sold them as art objects at a pub on the King’s Road.


pages: 223 words: 62,564

Life in the Universe: A Beginner's Guide by Lewis Dartnell

anthropic principle, biofilm, carbon-based life, double helix, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, Mars Rover, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, silicon-based life

The solar wind would generally be strong enough to blow aside the cloud without any ill effect but an especially dense section of cloud would overpower the Sun’s protective bubble and flood into the solar system. The dust would gravitate towards the planets and settle in the upper atmosphere, blocking out the sunlight for around 200,000 years while the solar system passes through the cloud. At the least, this could shut down photosynthesis, at the worst, it could kick-start global glaciation. So, the spiral arms pose three main dangers – supernovae, close shaves with other stars and interstellar dust clouds. It is difficult to calculate exactly the Sun’s path around the galaxy but some researchers have attempted it, finding that several mass extinctions do indeed correspond with previous crossings of spiral arms.


pages: 223 words: 60,909

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

In fact, most of the recruiters didn’t even want to see her résumé. They would avoid looking her in the eye. Or tell her to go online and apply. Or turn away to talk to someone else. And so she felt invisible—erased from an event that, she thought, was designed for people like her: young women aiming to kick-start their technical careers. Thomas had good reason to think Grace Hopper would lead to internship opportunities, too. These companies talk endlessly about how hard it is to find enough programmers to fill their positions. Other women told her they’d left the event swimming in job offers to choose from.


pages: 196 words: 61,981

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

Curated Instagram campaigns, featuring prominent influencers, are launched by a vast landscape of small, new “lifestyle brands”—companies based outside China that source directly from AliExpress. Manufacturers on AliExpress also move with lightning speed in customizing designs. Many crowdfunded products made on Kickstarter are produced by these small manufacturers as well. Wish.com, with headquarters based in Menlo Park, is a peculiar version of Amazon with half a billion users. It is a drop-shipper, sourcing from AliExpress, but its customer base is in the Midwest, Texas, and Florida. Its diverse users range from those who frequent flea markets and swap meets to racists who post on 4chan about the “cheap chink gear” available.


pages: 231 words: 60,546

Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century by Adam, Georgina(Author)

BRICs, Frank Gehry, greed is good, high net worth, inventory management, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

And at the end of 2013 the city’s new profile as an art destination was boosted by the opening of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), in a landmark Herzog & De Meuron-designed building on the waters of Biscayne Bay. National pride is also involved, and hosting an art fair is a way of putting a country on the world’s cultural map. So particularly in the Gulf, where states are feverishly competing to build museums and kick-start an art scene, fairs may be partly state-funded. Dubai’s art fair is part owned by the Dubai International Finance Centre, and Abu Dhabi Art is wholly created by the emirate’s cultural arm. Many question the logic of organising and funding an art fair in Abu Dhabi, a country with essentially just one major buyer, in the form of the royal family.


Phil Thornton by The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, double helix, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, loss aversion, mass immigration, means of production, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, trade route, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce

Since aggregate growth is made up of consumer spending, business investment and government expenditure – plus the difference between imports and exports – if the first two are declining only the intervention of the third can stop the rot. But Keynes was not an advocate of Marx – he was in fact contemptuous of Das Kapital. Instead he believed the state should ‘prime the pump’, using its economic weight to kick-start a recovery, by encouraging spending and investment that would not otherwise take place. Spending by the state would lead to greater spending by people and thus by businesses, ultimately leading to more people finding a job. In one of the most-cited passages of The General Theory, Keynes says that if the Treasury were to ‘fill old bottles with banknotes [and then] bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with Chapter 5 • John Maynard Keynes103 town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again … there need be no more unemployment and … the real income of the community and its capital wealth also would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is’.


pages: 221 words: 59,755

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, big-box store, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Donald Davies, double helix, Hernando de Soto, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, negative emissions, ocean acidification, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

“The start of the switchover from control of climate by nature to control by humans occurred several thousand years ago,” William Ruddiman, a professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and the most prominent proponent of an “early Anthropocene,” has written. According to a second, more widely held view, the switchover only really started in the late-eighteenth century, after the Scottish engineer James Watt designed a new kind of steam engine. Watt’s engine, it’s often said, anachronistically, “kick-started” the Industrial Revolution. As water power gave way to steam power, CO2 emissions began to rise, at first slowly, then vertiginously. In 1776, the first year Watt marketed his invention, humans emitted some fifteen million tons of CO2. By 1800, that figure had risen to thirty million tons. By 1850 it had increased to two hundred million tons a year and by 1900 to almost two billion.


pages: 282 words: 63,385

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance by Matthew Brennan

Airbnb, AltaVista, augmented reality, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, ImageNet competition, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, paypal mafia, Pearl River Delta, pre–internet, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WeWork, Y Combinator

Given how Douyin and TikTok were separate networks, there was much scope for beneficial exchanges between the operations teams. When something became popular in China, the teams would judge if it was suitable to introduce into other markets. Vise-versa, something trending on TikTok, may be brought into Douyin. Videos imported from Douyin and other regions could be used to kickstart a new region’s content pool. These were essential “teaching materials” to guide and inspire. The videos had been verified as enjoyable and reproducible, allowing users to imitate them easily. Above: Search was global, while each region drew from their isolated local pool of videos to display a personalized ‘For You’ feed.


pages: 265 words: 60,880

The Docker Book by James Turnbull

Airbnb, continuous integration, Debian, DevOps, domain-specific language, false flag, fault tolerance, job automation, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, microservices, MVC pattern, platform as a service, pull request, Ruby on Rails, software as a service, standardized shipping container, web application

His most recent book was The LogStash Book (http://www.logstashbook.com) about the popular open source logging tool. James also authored two books about Puppet (Pro Puppet and the earlier book about Puppet). He is the author of three other books, including Pro Linux System Administration, Pro Nagios 2.0, and Hardening Linux. For a real job, James is CTO at Kickstarter. He was formerly at Docker as VP of Services and Support, Venmo as VP of Engineering and Puppet Labs as VP of Technical Operations. He likes food, wine, books, photography, and cats. He is not overly keen on long walks on the beach and holding hands. Conventions in the book This is an inline code statement.


pages: 1,331 words: 163,200

Hands-On Machine Learning With Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems by Aurélien Géron

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, backpropagation, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't repeat yourself, duck typing, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, machine translation, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NP-complete, OpenAI, optical character recognition, P = NP, p-value, pattern recognition, pull request, recommendation engine, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, SpamAssassin, speech recognition, stochastic process

Not only does this hierarchical architecture help DNNs converge faster to a good solution, it also improves their ability to generalize to new datasets. For example, if you have already trained a model to recognize faces in pictures, and you now want to train a new neural network to recognize hairstyles, then you can kickstart training by reusing the lower layers of the first network. Instead of randomly initializing the weights and biases of the first few layers of the new neural network, you can initialize them to the value of the weights and biases of the lower layers of the first network. This way the network will not have to learn from scratch all the low-level structures that occur in most pictures; it will only have to learn the higher-level structures (e.g., hairstyles).

Such an RBM stack is called a deep belief net (DBN). Yee-Whye Teh, one of Geoffrey Hinton’s students, observed that it was possible to train DBNs one layer at a time using Contrastive Divergence, starting with the lower layers and then gradually moving up to the top layers. This led to the groundbreaking article that kickstarted the Deep Learning tsunami in 2006.2 Just like RBMs, DBNs learn to reproduce the probability distribution of their inputs, without any supervision. However, they are much better at it, for the same reason that deep neural networks are more powerful than shallow ones: real-world data is often organized in hierarchical patterns, and DBNs take advantage of that.


pages: 531 words: 161,785

Alcohol: A History by Rod Phillips

clean water, conceptual framework, European colonialism, financial independence, GPS: selective availability, invention of the printing press, Kickstarter, large denomination, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, New Urbanism, profit motive, restrictive zoning, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

By the beginning of the Christian era, Romans had sponsored the planting of vineyards in many of the best-known modern wine regions in France (including Bordeaux, the Rhône Valley, and Burgundy), as well as in England and many parts of central and eastern Europe. At first, vineyards were owned by Romans, but in time, non-Roman inhabitants of the empire were given rights of ownership. With due recognition to Greek influence in the south and Etruscan winemakers in the north of Italy, the modern European wine industry was kick-started by the growth of Rome and its enormous demand for wine. It is possible that what became a massive wine market in Rome resulted from a shift in diet. For centuries, Romans consumed cereal in the form of gruel or porridge, known as puls, and bread was a relative latecomer to the Roman diet. Bread might have been baked in private homes, but the first public bakeries were set up between 171 and 168 BC.19 The shift from a wet food (puls) to a dry one (bread) required liquid to wash it down, and wine was the chosen beverage.

Be that as it may, it is clear that the production and consumption of spirits did increase dramatically in some parts of England (especially in London) during the first half of the eighteenth century, and that this must have had implications for the health and well-being of many individuals and for the social order more generally. It is difficult, however, to assess the scale of the phenomenon and its consequences and to understand why they provoked a moral panic. The popularity of gin in England was kick-started by a shortage of brandy, which by the late seventeenth century was being imported from France in substantial volumes: 2 million gallons a year by the 1680s. These imports were interrupted when William of Orange, a Protestant Dutch prince, became king of England in 1688, causing a rupture in England’s relations with the aggressively Catholic king of France, Louis XIV.


pages: 497 words: 161,742

The Enemy Within by Seumas Milne

active measures, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, corporate governance, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, Etonian, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, union organizing, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, éminence grise

Copeland had made repeated attempts to track down the miners’ leader, even calling the NUM’s barrister, John Hendy QC, at his Lincoln’s Inn chambers in London, to leave an urgent message. Now he explained why. The former CIA man warned Scargill and Heathfield – who listened in to the discussion on a conference phone – that he had reliable information that both the domestic security service, MI5, and the CIA had been closely involved in kick-starting the media campaign. They had, Copeland said, in different ways helped to frame the corruption allegations against the miners’ leadership. However, he refused to expand on his remarks and promptly disappeared into the ether. Copeland was well known to have maintained close connections with the CIA’s powerful London station after his retirement.

I wasn’t sure about it myself.” ’ Windsor’s habit of setting officials and staff against each other is attested to by almost everybody who worked with him at the NUM head office – though Windsor himself blames Scargill.23 One early example – and a taste of things to come – took place in the first couple of months of the 1984–5 strike, long before Libya, when Windsor’s star was still very much in the ascendant. Peter McNestry, leader of the pit deputies’ union NACODS, had laboriously set up a three-way exchange of letters between himself, the NUM and the Coal Board with a view to kick-starting negotiations. When a phrase from the NUM letter was quoted on a radio news broadcast, neither Scargill nor Heathfield – who were driving along different motorways at the time – recognized it. Both stopped at the nearest service station and angrily rang the union’s Sheffield head office to find out what was going on.


pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

The Chinese experience does raise several interesting questions about the future of Chinese growth and, more important, the desirability and viability of authoritarian growth. Such growth has become a popular alternative to the “Washington consensus,” which emphasizes the importance of market and trade liberalization and certain forms of institutional reform for kick-starting economic growth in many less developed parts of the world. While part of the appeal of authoritarian growth comes as a reaction to the Washington consensus, perhaps its greater charm—certainly to the rulers presiding over extractive institutions—is that it gives them free rein in maintaining and even strengthening their hold on power and legitimizes their extraction.

Instead, corrupt politics, patronage networks, and conflict persisted in Venezuela, and in part as a result, when voters went to the polls, they were even willing to support potential despots such as Hugo Chávez, most likely because they thought he alone could stand up to the established elites of Venezuela. In consequence, Venezuela still languishes under extractive institutions, while Brazil broke the mold. WHAT CAN BE DONE to kick-start or perhaps just facilitate the process of empowerment and thus the development of inclusive political institutions? The honest answer of course is that there is no recipe for building such institutions. Naturally there are some obvious factors that would make the process of empowerment more likely to get off the ground.


pages: 272 words: 71,487

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, inventory management, Kickstarter, Milgram experiment, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Robert Solow, seminal paper, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, very high income, Washington Consensus, X Prize

In tandem with these developments in economic theory, the 1980s saw the evolution of a set of development policy recommendations that came to be known as the Washington Consensus. It was “Washington” because it was spearheaded by US economists and policy wonks, and supported by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund headquartered in the American capital. And a “Consensus” because nearly everyone in Washington agreed about what the developing world should do to kick-start economic development. Among the policies linked with the consensus were devaluation, reduction of budget deficits, liberalization of prices and interest rates, and privatization. What connected these policies was a belief that governments had played an overactive role in promoting development, taking on tasks best left to the private sector and abusing powers best left unused.


pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Financially, the organization is bootstrapped with a small pool of funding from the community and is committed to forgoing traditional investment in favor of voluntary funding from the network. In May 2015, the ERS was just an idea born out of frustration with fundraising and income inequality, but under the mentorship of Gary Chou at Orbital NYC we were able to validate some early assumptions and raise money via Kickstarter to bring together a seed community for the Weird Economics Summit in NYC in November 2015. In 2016, we hope to develop a minimum viable product of the platform and pilot it in partnership with like-minded organizations. Project Name: Data Commons Cooperative Completed by: Noemi Giszpenc Location: Massachusetts URL: datacommons.coop The Data Commons Cooperative brings together cooperative, solidarity, social, generative, “new” economy organizations that are cataloging or mapping some slice of that space.


pages: 223 words: 72,425

Puzzling People: The Labyrinth of the Psychopath by Thomas Sheridan

airport security, carbon footprint, corporate governance, double helix, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, quantitative easing, Rosa Parks, Ted Kaczynski

You may want to cut your own heart out to get rid of the pain. It may feel like your thoughts are thinking you, that you are losing your mind… this is because you are detoxing. You’ve experienced a surge of dopamine rushing through your brain stimulating a cascade of shimmering pleasure. Norepinephrine kick-started the production of adrenaline that made your heart pound. The payoff of a phenethylamine-flooded nervous system was bliss. The primary sexual arousal hormone oxytocin mimicked the buildup of orgasm and subsequent feelings of emotional attachment. This chemical cocktail overcame critical faculties and left you defenceless to your emotional-high drug pusher.


pages: 243 words: 66,908

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows. Donella, Diana Wright

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, game design, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Review

It’s not that parameters aren’t important—they can be, especially in the short term and to the individual who’s standing directly in the flow. People care deeply about such variables as taxes and the minimum wage, and so fight fierce battles over them. But changing these variables rarely changes the behavior of the national economy system. If the system is chronically stagnant, parameter changes rarely kick-start it. If it’s wildly variable, they usually don’t stabilize it. If it’s growing out of control, they don’t slow it down. Whatever cap we put on campaign contributions, it doesn’t clean up politics. The Fed’s fiddling with the interest rate hasn’t made business cycles go away. (We always forget that during upturns, and are shocked, shocked by the downturns.)


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

.” – Richard Wilkinson, co-author of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better “Rutger Bregman makes a compelling case for Universal Basic Income with a wealth of data and rooted in a keen understanding of the political and intellectual history of capitalism. He shows the many ways in which human progress has turned a Utopia into a Eutopia – a positive future that we can achieve with the right policies.” – Albert Wenger, entrepreneur and partner at Union Square Ventures, early backers of Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, and Kickstarter “Learning from history and from up-to-date social science can shatter crippling illusions. It can turn allegedly utopian proposals into plain common sense. It can enable us to face the future with unprecedented enthusiasm. To see how, read this superbly written, upbeat, insightful book.” – Philippe van Parijs, Harvard University professor and cofounder of the Basic Income Earth Network “A wonderful call to utopian thinking around incomes and the workweek, and a welcome antidote to the pessimism surrounding robots taking our jobs.” – Charles Kenny, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and author of The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest is Great for the West “A bold call for utopian thinking and a world without work – something needed more than ever in an era of defeatism and lack of ambition.


pages: 202 words: 8,448

Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World by Srdja Popovic, Matthew Miller

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, British Empire, corporate governance, desegregation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Rosa Parks, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, urban sprawl

, on a wall in Belgrade, Serbia, during the autumn of 1998. 1.2 The logo of former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s TV show, Aló Presidente. 1.3 An Egyptian woman displaying the logo of the April 6th movement. (Mohamed Abd El Ghany, Reuters) 2.1 “The people of Libya are united.” 2.2 Tel Aviv Pride: A family day in Israel, 2011. (Nina Jean Grant) 3.1 Using rice pudding to kickstart a revolution. Lonuziyaaraiy Kolhu, Maldives. (Munshid Mohamed) 3.2 A child in Moscow, May 2012. (Julia Ioffe) 4.1 The pillars of Yemen’s power, 2011. (Khaled Abdullah Ali Al Mahdi, Reuters) 4.2 The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., after delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963. 5.1 “A Dime for Change”: a dilemma action organized by Otpor!


pages: 271 words: 62,538

The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter) by Golden Krishna

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, computer vision, crossover SUV, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, impulse control, Inbox Zero, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, microdosing, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, QR code, RFID, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator, Y2K

Their app didn’t thrive off PVS or addiction—it created customer satisfaction by keeping your smartphone in your pocket. * The first Lockitron did have near-field communication (NFC) capabilities, but unfortunately the market share for NFC was nearly nonexistent at the time. This second-generation Lockitron raised $2.2 million on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter from potential customers.36 An impressive amount for a door lock. There are lessons to be learned from Lockitron’s approach to its second- generation product. If we embrace our typical processes instead of graphic user interfaces, we can start to discover elegant solutions. All it takes is a little observation, empathy, and understanding.


pages: 261 words: 64,977

Pity the Billionaire: The Unexpected Resurgence of the American Right by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, bonus culture, business cycle, carbon tax, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, false flag, financial innovation, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, money market fund, Naomi Klein, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, profit maximization, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, union organizing, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Most responsible accounts of the Crash of 2008 emphasize the role of deregulation, incentives, and the free-market faith in the building of the bubble. I repeat all these well-known tales here for this reason: according to the logic of hard times—according to logic tout court—the Crash of ’08 should have kick-started the hard-times scenario in the same way the events of 1929–32 did. And for a while it seemed as though matters were moving inexorably down those Depression-era tracks. The financial heroes of previous years became objects of public wrath almost immediately. We turned on the politicians who bailed out their friends.


pages: 212 words: 65,900

Symmetry and the Monster by Ronan, Mark

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, conceptual framework, Everything should be made as simple as possible, G4S, Henri Poincaré, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, New Journalism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, V2 rocket

It is an intriguing list, but it shows there were no new surprises to be had in this direction. There was another big surprise to come – and Fischer found it – but let us first talk about Aschbacher. The ‘Classification project’ – the project to find a complete list of symmetry atoms and show that the list is complete – had been kick-started by the great theorem of Feit and Thompson, and then moved forward by Thompson’s own work. After him, the second most important contributor was Aschbacher, whose work really took off in the early 1970s. He went straight for the real problems underlying the project, churning out one result after another, and sweeping aside some of the cross-section problems that others had been planning to work on.


pages: 276 words: 64,903

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win by Chris Kuenne, John Danner

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset light, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, business climate, business logic, call centre, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, pattern recognition, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sugar pill, super pumped, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, work culture , zero-sum game

With experts in place and early demand for a better way to source parts in a fast-growing industry, Lidow told us, “iSuppli benefited from many unfair competitive advantages: my good reputation in the tech community, my direct knowledge of what was valuable yet not being done well in the market, and my personal financial ability to kick-start development.” However, these things rarely align perfectly by chance. Rather, they are evidence of this Explorer’s gifts of systematic problem solving, anchored in the confidence he can create a better way. It was a call from the company’s largest customer that galvanized iSuppli. Lidow remembers the customer’s ultimatum: “Throw out all you have been working on and deliver one million Tantalum Capacitors next month!


pages: 244 words: 69,183

Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods by Danna Staaf

3D printing, Anthropocene, colonial rule, Kickstarter, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Skype, wikimedia commons

Finally, we’ll bring ourselves up to date with the human-dominated Anthropocene, settling into the contemporary shape of the world as we look around us at the results of the past 500 million years. Return from the Deep After an initial warm spell following the end-Cretaceous extinction, continental drift and enthusiastic plant growth cooled the planet and kick-started a global ocean circulation pattern that would maintain itself up to the present day. Perhaps facilitated by these changes, deep-water coleoids reinvaded shallow water, developing and honing their eyesight, camouflage, and behavior along the way. The “warm spell” was really more of a “hot spot.”


pages: 252 words: 65,990

HWFG: Here We F**king Go by Chris McQueer

call centre, Donald Trump, Kickstarter, Nelson Mandela, sensible shoes, Social Justice Warrior

‘You can do better. He’s a bam.’ ‘He’s a fitbaw player! Plays for Rangers! Jesus Christ, Karen.’ ‘Och, calm down,’ Karen said, walking ahead. ‘You had no chance, anyway.’ ‘Aw, is that right, aye?’ Brenda muttered to herself. She would see to it she would get her own back. That night kickstarted their animosity. They remained pals to outdo each other, and were always looking for new ways to get one over. Karen got into Glasgow Uni so Brenda had to make sure she did too. In second year, Brenda took up marine biology, as did Karen. Before they knew it they were the best underwater team, not just in Scotland, but in the world.


pages: 234 words: 63,149

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Spiraling deficits became a defining feature of U.S. foreign policy. Barack Obama, who inherited both wars and an economy in free fall, spent much of his time and attention during his first year in office on the passage of health care reform rather than on much-needed changes to international financial market rules or on policies to kick-start long-term economic growth. But the problem didn’t begin with George W. Bush or Barack Obama. In 1980, the United States was the world’s largest creditor nation. By 1987, it was the world’s largest debtor nation, with a trade imbalance that soared to $170 billion. Republicans will blame the Democratic Congress of that period.


pages: 249 words: 66,383

House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again by Atif Mian, Amir Sufi

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, debt deflation, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, school choice, seminal paper, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, the scientific method, tulip mania, young professional, zero-sum game

For example, during the Great Recession and afterward, the Federal Reserve aggressively purchased mortgage-backed securities in order to push down mortgage interest rates facing households. The belief was that cheaper rates on outstanding mortgages and other loans through which households would spend would kick-start the economy. However, households that normally have the highest marginal propensity to consume out of loans either cannot or do not want to borrow more. Remember, in a levered-losses episode, borrowers experience a massive shock to their wealth. Many of them are underwater on their homes or have very low credit scores as a result of default.


pages: 262 words: 65,959

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, cognitive dissonance, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, P = NP, Paul Erdős, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Wolfskehl Prize, women in the workforce

Fortunately, a company named Pacific Data Images (PDI) volunteered its services, because it realized that The Simpsons would provide a global platform for showcasing its technology. Indeed, PDI signed a deal with DreamWorks later that year which led directly to the production of Antz and Shrek, thereby kick-starting a revolution in film animation. When Homer approaches a signpost indicating the x, y, and z axes in his new three-dimensional universe, he alludes to the fact that he is standing within the most sophisticated animated scene ever to have appeared on television: “Man, this place looks expensive.


pages: 231 words: 72,656

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, Copley Medal, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

Jean Barbot, a French trader, observed on visiting the west coast of Africa in 1679 that he found "a great alteration: the French brandy, whereof I had always had a good quantity abroad, being much less demanded, by reason that a great quantity of spirits and rum had been bought on that coast." By 1721 one English trader reported that rum had become the "chief barter" on the slave coast of Africa, even for gold. Rum also took over from brandy as the currency in which canoemen and guards were paid. Brandy helped to kick-start the transatlantic trade in sugar and slaves, but rum made it self-fueling and far more profitable. Unlike beer, which was usually produced and consumed locally, and wine, which was usually made and traded within a specific region, rum was the result of the convergence of materials, people, and technologies from around the world, and the product of several intersecting historical forces.


pages: 288 words: 66,996

Travel While You Work: The Ultimate Guide to Running a Business From Anywhere by Mish Slade

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, business process, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, content marketing, crowdsourcing, digital nomad, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Multics, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Salesforce, side project, Skype, speech recognition, turn-by-turn navigation, uber lyft, WeWork

The beauty of this solution is that it doesn't rely on any kind of data connection at all – so even with no wifi and a $5 pay-as-you-go SIM with no data plan, you can receive your calls. For outgoing calls, there's also a "web callback" feature that works out cheaper than Skype in most cases. You will need an internet connection for it, but only to kickstart the call; after that it all happens through your phone (so it still comes in handy if you have an unreliable connection that might drop in and out during Skype calls). Aaand done! The Didlogic website is a bit of a mess – and thoroughly useless in helping you get started – so Rob's recorded a quick screencast with an overview of how to set everything up.


pages: 83 words: 7,274

Buyology by Martin Lindstrom

anti-work, antiwork, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Virgin Galactic

In other words, eventually I believe sex in advertising will go underground. Sexual ads in the future will get sneakier, subtler. They’ll suggest, but they won’t complete. They’ll flirt, but take it no further than that. They’ll propose, then leave the rest up to our imaginations. In short, you could say that the future of sex in ads will be to kick-start a journey into our own heads. Now it’s time to let your brain take over. 11 08/08/2009 10:45 71 of 83 file:///D:/000004/Buy__ology.html CONCLUSION Brand New Day IN THIS BOOK, YOU’VE witnessed an historic meeting between science and marketing. A union of apparent opposites that, I hope, has shed new light on how you make decisions about what you buy—everything from food, to cell phones, to cigarettes, even to political candidates—and why.


pages: 218 words: 63,471

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

After yet another bank run Roosevelt declared an 8-day banking holiday after which confidence in banks returned and deposits flowed back in. Later in 1933, the U.S. dropped the gold standard, following England, which dropped it in 1931. Unshackled, money supply could now increase and replenish banks. After a yearlong recession in 1938, New Deal spending kick-started the economy. A world war kept it going. MODERN GOLD 167 *** Meanwhile, the Germans were stuck paying WW I reparations. In 1921, the victors presented a bill for 132 billion gold marks. With a crippled industrial base and dependency on imports for raw materials, the Germans were forced to print money to pay back debts.


pages: 244 words: 66,599

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Pepsi Challenge, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush

At the time, though, word of the performance did not spread to the world at large, to whom the revolution was directed. Engelbart's project had a single major patron: the Advanced Research Project Agency of the United States Department of Defense. Unbeknownst to Timothy Leary when he attempted to levitate the evil Pentagon in 1967, this little-known branch of Defense was quietly kick-starting the computer revolution that would result in the Macintosh. I don't want to pretty this up too much now: the interest of the Defense Department was of course the development of systems that could toast the flesh of opposing soldiers and noisome bystanders. But from the start, ARPA's leadership was enlightened: the very first person in charge of the Information Processing Techniques Office was J. c.


Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive History's Most Iconic Extinct Creature by Ben Mezrich

butterfly effect, CRISPR, Danny Hillis, double helix, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, General Motors Futurama, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, life extension, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, microbiome, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology

The harvested eggs from the dogs in the operating room were placed in a Petri dish. A pipette was used to remove the eggs’ DNA, and then the DNA from another dog—usually, from a living skin cell—was inserted, through a process called “somatic cell nuclear transfer.” The egg was then stimulated with an electrical charge, forcing it to divide, essentially kick-starting its growth into a functioning embryo. Then the sample was brought back into the operating theater and carefully placed into another dog’s healthy uterus. Life from life, Minh thought, as he moved past the implantation table and headed toward a pair of double doors in the back of the operating theater.


pages: 212 words: 69,846

The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World by Rahm Emanuel

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, carbon footprint, clean water, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lyft, megacity, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

One of LaHood’s prerogatives when he became the transportation secretary was to revive something known as the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA), which provided low-interest loans for infrastructure projects of “regional or national significance.” These loans were designed to kick-start projects and to be used as leverage to raise more investment monies. The act had been passed in 1998, but it had essentially gone dormant, as so many federal acts do. That left, in essence, billions of dollars sitting there with nowhere to go. LaHood wanted to get that money working again, and I wanted to help him do just that, but only in Chicago.


pages: 254 words: 68,133

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

Things related and not.”20 None of this is to suggest that Bush served as a mere mouthpiece or puppet. He was, by his own account, fully in charge. As he once put it, “I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best.”21 Yet had Bush chosen to look elsewhere for counsel—to his more circumspect father, for example—things might have gone differently. As it was, to kick-start his war, the decider decided to invade Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 and then Iraq in the spring of 2003. The immediate aim of the former, known as Operation Enduring Freedom, was to overthrow the Taliban, guilty of having provided sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and members of al-Qaeda. The immediate purpose of the latter, known as Operation Iraqi Freedom, was to topple Saddam Hussein, accused of possessing weapons of mass destruction and being in cahoots with bin Laden.


pages: 256 words: 67,563

Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us About Life, Love and Relationships by Camilla Pang

autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, driverless car, frictionless, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Nash equilibrium, neurotypical, phenotype, random walk, self-driving car, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

The people who don’t shout the loudest or push themselves to the front of the queue, but without whom a group can lose its balance and fall apart. Kinase proteins Once the signal hits the kinase protein (enzyme), things start to really happen. Kinases are the motivators of biochemistry. In simple terms, they catalyse the transfer of chemical energy groups to their downstream effectors and interactors, kick-starting all the necessary functions for a cell to respond to change. ‘You’re a bit of a kinase, aren’t you?’ I once said to a friend, not getting the approving reaction I had expected from a comment that was intended as complimentary and reassuring. Nor did she respond well when I followed up with a helpful explanation: ‘Kinases, they are one of the most promiscuous and popular proteins in a cell.’


pages: 249 words: 66,546

Protecting Pollinators by Jodi Helmer

Anthropocene, big-box store, clean water, Columbine, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, the scientific method, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

Exploding development means less pollinator habitat and longer distances between available habitats. By planting “pollinator patches” in Charlotte—and throughout North Carolina—Hjarding hoped to provide a network for fragile populations to congregate. She recruited fifty households in five neighborhoods to kick-start the North Carolina Butterfly Highway in 2015. The project has grown to include 1,700 patches of habitat at parks, government buildings, community centers, and residential yards. (Around the same time when Hjarding launched the North Carolina Butterfly Highway, former Charlotte mayor Jennifer Roberts signed the Mayor’s Monarch Pledge, creating a new landscape ordinance that required at least 50 percent of all new trees, shrubs, and ground cover planted as part of city projects in Charlotte to be native plants.)


pages: 237 words: 69,985

The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism by Kyle Chayka

Airbnb, Blue Bottle Coffee, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Mason jar, offshore financial centre, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, undersea cable, Whole Earth Catalog

The tactic has been adopted everywhere from Denver and Athens to Abu Dhabi, Leipzig, and the Japanese island of Naoshima. Each place tries to lure money like bees to flowers by installing an extravagant array of art in equally extravagant surroundings—part art museum, part intentional tourist trap. Marfa has either thrived or suffered under the same theory, depending on your perspective. Kickstarted by Judd, the town is now a hipster oasis. It features in lifestyle photo shoots and literary novels alike. Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel30 10:04 evoked Marfa as the locus of artist residencies, late-night parties, and accidental ketamine ingestion. While researching there I stayed at an inn that was operated entirely on Airbnb.


Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health by David Nutt

Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, carbon footprint, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, impulse control, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, microbiome, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)

NHS advice says if you stop drinking for two weeks, you can reverse fatty liver disease (after this, you need to carry on drinking within the guidelines, of course).9 But the time it takes to recover will depend on the severity of your condition, among other factors, especially being overweight. 2) Alcoholic hepatitis Most of the alcohol you drink is broken down in the liver, into energy plus acetaldehyde, which at one carbon atom longer than formaldehyde (used to preserve Damien Hirst’s sharks and cows) is even more of a toxic pickling agent than alcohol. This poison also kick-starts the process of inflammation. If you go on a significant binge – maybe half to a whole bottle of spirits or ten units in the course of an evening – you can get acute alcoholic hepatitis. Your liver will become inflamed by the vast amount of alcohol you have taken. Occasionally people die of a very fatty liver that becomes inflamed.


pages: 249 words: 66,492

The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean tech, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, connected car, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, energy transition, Fairphone, full employment, green new deal, green transition, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lyft, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Tesla Model S, Yom Kippur War

‘At equal magnetic strength, a rare-earth magnet is 100 times smaller than a ferrite magnet,’ an industry expert explained. ‘This is about miniaturisation; rare earths make objects smaller.’6 It’s also about making electric engines powerful enough to challenge the dominance of internal-combustion engines. It gave the energy transition and digitalisation a formidable kickstart. This is also precisely where the trouble started. Rewind to the 1980s. Rare-earth magnets are all the rage, and have colonised manufacturing sectors the world over — giving Japan, and its electronics company Hitachi, which holds the patent, the unassailable lead in the industry. So much so, in fact, that ‘the Japanese banned the export of this technology to China’, Chen Zhanheng told me.7 Beijing wasn’t put off in the slightest by the embargo.


pages: 200 words: 63,266

Die With Zero: Getting All You Can From Your Money and Your Life by Bill Perkins

delayed gratification, Downton Abbey, financial independence, follow your passion, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Own Your Own Home, passive income, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Stanford marshmallow experiment, time value of money, Walter Mischel

McCabe, and Kathleen Andereck, “Seniors’ Travel Constraints: Stepwise Logistic Regression Analysis,” Tourism Analysis 13 (2008): 341–54, https://asu.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/seniors-travel-constraints-stepwise-logis​tic-regression-analysis. your interests gradually narrow: Robert M. Sapolsky, “Open Season,” New Yorker, March 30, 1998, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/03/30/open-season-2. worked hard to achieve: Rachel Honeyman, “Proof That 65 Is Never Too Late to Kickstart Your Fitness Journey,” GMB Fitness, November 20, 2016, https://gmb.io/stephen-v/. before-and-after pictures on the Internet: Valerie Cross, “Jaime and Matt Staples Win $150,000 Weight Loss Bet from Bill Perkins,” PokerNews, March 23, 2018, https://www.pokernews.com/news/2018/03/jaime-staples-set-to-collect-on-150k-weight-loss-prop-bet-30300.htm.


Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais

anti-pattern, business logic, business process, call centre, cognitive load, continuous integration, Conway's law, database schema, DevOps, different worldview, Dunbar number, holacracy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kubernetes, Lean Startup, loose coupling, meta-analysis, microservices, Norbert Wiener, operational security, platform as a service, pull request, remote working, systems thinking, two-pizza team, web application

Even though many people see DevOps as fundamentally addressing technological aspects of automation and tooling, only organizations that also address fundamental misalignments between teams are able to achieve the full potential benefits from adopting DevOps. DevOps Topologies The DevOps Topologies catalog, originally created by Matthew Skelton in 2013 and later expanded by Manuel Pais, is an online collection of team design and interactions patterns and anti-patterns that work well for kick-starting conversations around team responsibilities, interfaces, and collaboration between technology teams.6 Crucially, successful patterns are strongly dependent on contextual aspects, like organization and product size, engineering maturity, and shared goals. The topologies became an effective reference of team structures for enterprise software delivery; however, they were never meant to be static structures, but rather a depiction of a moment in time influenced by multiple factors, like the type of products delivered, technical leadership, and operational experience.


pages: 234 words: 67,589

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

The act of prototyping products in a workshop could serve as a starting point for a broader conversation about what kinds of transformations would be needed to create a more equitable society. In the process of trying to solve their problems with technology, people came to realize that technology often fell short of solving their problems. Politics was needed. Along these lines, one of the Networks kick-started a campaign called “Right to Warmth” that involved organizing community energy efficiency initiatives, creating local energy cooperatives, and pressuring Margaret Thatcher’s government into putting more money toward energy conservation measures. What kind of campaigns might materialize today? If online malls are defined by their entanglements, then they can’t be dismantled without also unraveling the social phenomena they are entangled with.


pages: 295 words: 66,912

Walled Culture: How Big Content Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Keep Creators Poor by Glyn Moody

Aaron Swartz, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, connected car, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, non-fungible token, Open Library, optical character recognition, p-value, peer-to-peer, place-making, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, rent-seeking, text mining, the market place, TikTok, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

abstract_id=3639142 727 https://web.archive.org/web/20220519123413/http://ec.europa.eu/competition/publications/reports/kd0419345enn.pdf 728 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616103111/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability 729 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616103132/https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech 730 https://web.archive.org/web/20220329191619/https://tobin.yale.edu/sites/default/files/Digital%20Regulation%20Project%20Papers/Digital%20Regulation%20Project%20-%20Equitable%20Interoperability%20-%20Discussion%20Paper%20No%204.pdf 731 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616103205/https://walledculture.org/interview-cory-doctorow-part-2-new-publishing-models-for-creators-amazon-as-a-frenemy-and-the-internet-archive-court-case/ 732 https://web.archive.org/web/20220817084624/https:/scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/1393/ 733 https://web.archive.org/web/20220830085146/https://walledculture.org/interview-mike-masnick/ 734 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616103248/https://walledculture.org/interview-rebecca-giblin-reversion-rights-out-of-print-books-and-how-to-fix-copyright/ 735 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616103248/https://walledculture.org/interview-rebecca-giblin-reversion-rights-out-of-print-books-and-how-to-fix-copyright/ 736 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616110320/https://bandcamp.com/ 737 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616113457/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdfunding 738 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616110335/https://blog.bandcamp.com/2022/03/02/bandcamp-is-joining-epic/ 739 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616111850/https://get.bandcamp.help/hc/en-us/articles/360007802534-What-pricing-performs-best- 740 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616111909/https://walledculture.org/interview-evan-greer-lia-holland-rethinking-copyright-fighting-creative-monopolies-and-more/ 741 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616111928/https://kk.org/biography 742 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616111942/https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ 743 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616111942/https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ 744 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616111942/https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ 745 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616111942/https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ 746 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616113521/https://www.kickstarter.com/ 747 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616113541/https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/ 748 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616113541/https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/ 749 https://web.archive.org/web/20220701143901/https://www.atelierventures.co/team 750 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616114328/https://future.com/1000-true-fans-try-100/ 751 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616114347/https://walledculture.org/nfts-are-mostly-useless-or-worse-but-heres-one-important-way-they-could-help-creators/ 752 https://web.archive.org/web/20220830085146/https://walledculture.org/interview-mike-masnick/ 753 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616114406/https:/walledculture.org/interview-dr-andres-guadamuz-the-eu-copyright-directive-text-data-mining-web3-the-metaverse-nfts/ 754 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616114427/https://www.technollama.co.uk/can-copyright-teach-us-anything-about-nfts 755 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616114502/https://www.twitch.tv/ 756 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616114519/https://www.wired.com/story/twitch-turns-10-creator-economy/ 757 https://web.archive.org/web/20220713072402/https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitch-statistics/ 758 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616114519/https://www.wired.com/story/twitch-turns-10-creator-economy 759 https://web.archive.org/web/20220713071951/https://www.vantagemarketresearch.com/industry-report/crowdfunding-market-1484 760 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616111909/https://walledculture.org/interview-evan-greer-lia-holland-rethinking-copyright-fighting-creative-monopolies-and-more/ 761 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616115428/https://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/mdocs/en/wipo_ipr_ge_15/wipo_ipr_ge_15_t2.pdf 762 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616115440/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_design_copyright_in_the_United_States 763 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616115454/https://fashionunited.com/global-fashion-industry-statistics/ Acknowledgments As the hundreds of endnotes attest, this book builds on the work and ideas of many people.


pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

The unions weren’t about to roll over, though. Far from it. About six months after Tate’s provocation to Walmart managers, the UFCW and the Service Employees International Union both launched new campaigns against the company. Only this time, they were less about signing up workers and more about tearing down the company. The SEIU kickstarted things in late 2004 when it seeded a nonprofit called the Center for Community and Corporate Ethics, which, in turn, stood up an advocacy arm known as Five Stones—a reference to the rocks that David plucked out of a streambed to slay Goliath. The Goliath in this case was Walmart, and the campaign designed to bring the company to its knees was christened Walmart Watch.


pages: 228 words: 66,975

Will It Make the Boat Go Faster?: Olympic-Winning Strategies for Everyday Success by Ben Hunt-Davis, Harriet Beveridge

call centre, James Dyson, Kickstarter

We were to go and to keep going, never being relaxed or being satisfied with the lead. We had to extend it with every stroke that we took. We would nail every single stroke. This was to be a five and a half minute sprint! The first 500 metres was to be the hardest, fastest 500 we’d ever done. The second 500 was going to be kick-started with a 35 stroke sprint; it would be harder and faster than the first 500m. The third 500 was to be faster again. As we hit the halfway mark we would lay down another devastating 35 stroke sprint. At 1,250 metres there would be another 35 stroke sprint. The last 500 we’d be on our knees, but we knew that we’d still have to build into the line.


pages: 225 words: 65,922

A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering by Ann K. Finkbeiner

Albert Einstein, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, digital map, Galaxy Zoo, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Magellanic Cloud, Skype, slashdot

He left the mountain for good and went back to Carnegie Mellon to do his science. Besides, he said, the only nonastronomical things to do while living in Apache Point were go to bars or ride the miniature trains in Alamogordo, and he didn’t have time to do either anyway. He was proud that he and his undergraduates had gotten the spectroscopic commissioning kick-started, but he knew the spectroscopic system was still held together by string; it was creaking, it wasn’t tuned. While Nichol was still at Apache Point, he had had the sense that Princeton wasn’t quite trusting him to do the spectroscopic commissioning because Jim Gunn had sent out his postdoc David Schlegel, who had no other obvious reason to be there.


pages: 227 words: 63,186

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson

Ben Horowitz, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, data science, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, functional programming, Google Earth, hive mind, Innovator's Dilemma, iterative process, Kanban, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, loose coupling, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no silver bullet, pull request, Richard Thaler, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, statistical model, systems thinking, the long tail, web application

This is especially true early in your career, but it’s easy to work for a long time without building up a large personal network if you work in a smaller market or at a series of small companies. (One of the side benefits of working at a large company early in your career, beyond name recognition, is kickstarting your personal network.) The other issue is that folks tend to have relatively uniform networks, composed of the individuals they went to school with or worked with. By hiring within those circles, it’s easy to end up with a company whose employees think, believe, and sometimes even look similar. 6.3.1 Moving beyond your personal networks Many hiring managers freeze up when their referral network starts to dry up, or as they look to bring a wider set of backgrounds onto their teams.


pages: 708 words: 176,708

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Finance came to be understood as the true epitome of capitalism and was linked to the virtues of innovation, dynamism, and the allure of testosterone-driven aggression and risk-taking. With great risks, after all, came great rewards. And countries of the South were told that, if they opened their financial markets, the flows of “hot” cash would kick-start their slow economies. Such claims were pure myth-making: most of the movements of money in financial markets have nothing to do with kick-starting investment in the productive sector. They are bets—increasingly elaborate and risky gambling instruments, through which investors hope to make a royalty. And since that money does not materialize from nothing, by magic, it must come out of the revenues driven by productive investment.


pages: 584 words: 187,436

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite by Sebastian Mallaby

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, automated trading system, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, deal flow, do well by doing good, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, German hyperinflation, High speed trading, index fund, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine translation, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, operational security, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, the new new thing, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, uptick rule

Soros had understood that nothing more substantial than slippery perceptions had driven up the dollar, and therefore that a trigger could set off a sudden reversal. Because he had grasped the system’s instability, he had understood the Plaza accord’s meaning faster than others. Plaza was the trigger, and it didn’t even matter that the details of the new policy had yet to be filled in. A political jolt had kick-started a new trend, which would now feed on itself and become self-sustaining. The rewards from the Plaza trade were astonishing. In the four months from August, Soros’s fund jumped by 35 percent, yielding a profit of $230 million. Convinced that the act of writing his diary had contributed to his performance, Soros joked that his profit represented the highest honorarium ever received by an author.32 When the diary was published two years later, as part of Soros’s book The Alchemy of Finance, reviewers mocked its dense prose.

15 This was a better response than Swensen could possibly have wished for. He had found the integrity he sought: Fairman took her decency so seriously that she flew off the handle when you questioned it. In January 1990, Yale invested with Farallon. The university injected $300 million into Steyer’s fund, boosting his capital to a total of $900 million and kick-starting a gradual change in the social impact of hedge funds. SWENSEN’S PARTNERSHIP WITH STEYER BEGAN THE REPOSITIONING of Yale, ultimately affecting the investment style of nearly all endowments. Until the Farallon deal, Yale had a smattering of holdings in private equity and “real assets” such as real estate, but nothing in hedge funds.


Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, open borders, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, price mechanism, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, systematic bias, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

“Quantitative easing for the Â�people,” a direct lump-sum payment to all residents of the Eurozone, has been proposed by mainstream economists as a way of stimulating the economy by boosting consumer demand that could work more quickly and more effectively than the usual technique operating through interest rates and private banks.45 As a tool for kickstarting the economy, however, this egalitarian “heÂ�liÂ�copÂ�ter money” can only be of limited duration. Once the injection of purchasing power—in one go or in a short sequence of payments—Â�has done its job, it should be discontinued.46 Instead of relying on the creation of money, one could also think of funding basic income by taxing the circulation of money.

Something resembling such an EU-Â�wide basic income was proposed as early as 1975, as an efficient alternative to EuÂ�roÂ�pean regional and agricultural policy, in a report to the EuÂ�roÂ�pean Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee by Brandon Rhys-Â�Williams, a rather eccentric conservative member of the EuÂ�roÂ�pean Parliament.43 At a more abstract level, it has been defended by phiÂ�losÂ�oÂ�pher Jean-Â�Marc Ferry as a central component of 235 BASIC INCOME EuÂ�roÂ�pean citizenship.44 More recently, it surfaced in the limited form of an occasional universal payment by the EuÂ�roÂ�pean Central Bank to all EuÂ�roÂ� peÂ�ans as a way of kickstarting the EuÂ�roÂ�pean economy (as discussed in chapter 6). Our own proposal consists in a eurodividend of 200 euros on average per month and per person (representing about 7.5 Â�percent of the GDP per capita of the EuÂ�roÂ�pean Union in 2015), with a higher amount in countries with high costs of living, and a lower one in countries with low costs of living.


pages: 782 words: 187,875

Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, declining real wages, equity risk premium, European colonialism, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, global macro, housing crisis, implied volatility, intangible asset, it's over 9,000, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, refrigerator car, reserve currency, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, uptick rule, value at risk, yield curve

Investors who were burned on their investments from the last cycle are reluctant to return, so it can take some time before capital inflows become strongly positive. But the price of domestic goods and domestic labor fell with the currency, so the country is an attractive destination for foreign investment and the capital starts to come back. Together, higher exports and foreign direct investment kickstart growth. If policy makers protect and recapitalize critical financial institutions, the domestic financial pipelines are in place to support a recovery. The country is back to the early part of the cycle and starts a new virtuous cycle where productive investment opportunities attract capital, and capital drives up growth and asset prices, which attracts more capital.

Paulson Jr. that four major banks were planning to issue a new type of bond to aid the mortgage market did not stem the bank stocks’ slide. The sell-off only intensified in all three major indexes just after Mr. Paulson spoke.” –New York Times July 29, 2008 A New Tool Announced to Support Home Loans “The Treasury Department and the nation’s four biggest banks on Monday said they were ready to kick-start a market for a new tool to support home financing in the latest effort to spur a moribund housing market...The Treasury released a set of ‘best practices’ for institutions that issue so-called covered bonds, and Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo said they planned to begin issuing them.’


Lonely Planet Andalucia: Chapter From Spain Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, credit crunch, discovery of the americas, Francisco Pizarro, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, Skype, trade route, urban renewal

BAR Casa Lola Offline map Google map (Calle Granada 46; 11am-4pm & 7pm-midnight) Fronted by traditional blue-and-white tiles, this sophisticated spot specialises in vermouth on tap, served ice cold and costing just a couple of euros. Grab a pew on one of the tall stools and peruse the arty decor and clientele; an ideal spot to kickstart your night out on the town. CAFE La Tetería Offline map Google map (www.la-teteria.com; Calle San Agustín 9; speciality teas €2.50; 9am-midnight Mon-Sat) Serves heaps of aromatic and classic teas, herbal infusions, coffees and juices, with teas ranging from peppermint to ‘ antidepresivo’. Sit outside and marvel at the beautiful church opposite or stay inside to enjoy the wafting incense and background music.

Contemporary architects have struggled to emulate the glories of the Moors, although modernist structures in cities such as Seville have grabbed 21st-century headlines for their un-orthodoxy and experimentalism. Islamic Architecture The period of Islam’s architectural dominance began with the Omayyads, the Moorish invaders who kick-started eight centuries of Islamic rule in 711 and ushered in an architectural era which bequeathed the region, more than anywhere else in Europe, with a strong whiff of the exotic. Elaborate monuments on an unprecedented scale – Granada’s Alhambra and Córdoba’s Mezquita, for example, which stand like bookends to Islam’s reign – were the means through which the Islamic rulers of Al-Andalus brought architectural sophistication to Europe.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Starting in the 1100s, windmills extended the reach of mechanical power, greatly expanding milling grain for bread and ale and fulling (preparing) cloth for wool processing. Windmills boosted economic activity in flat parts of the country with rich soils, such as East Anglia. From 1000 to 1300, water mills and windmills and other advances in agricultural technology roughly doubled yields per hectare. These innovations also helped kick-start English woolen cloth textiles, which later played a pivotal role in industrialization. Although it is difficult to determine exact numbers, agricultural productivity per person is estimated to have increased by 15 percent between 1100 and 1300. You might think that these technical and productivity advances would lead to higher real incomes.

True, Chinese authorities did not encourage scientific inquiries after the Song Dynasty, and the shared vision of rigorous, empirical science that took root in Europe starting in the seventeenth century had no equivalent in China. Nevertheless, the absence of Chinese industrialization until the twentieth century shows that scientific advances by themselves were not enough to kick-start the Industrial Revolution. This assessment is not meant to downplay the role of science in industrialization. The Scientific Revolution provided three critical contributions. First, science prepared the ground for the mechanical skills of the ambitious entrepreneurs and tinkerers of the age. Some of the most important scientific breakthroughs—for example, those involving iron and steel—became part of the practical knowledge of the era and thus contributed to the base of useful facts upon which entrepreneurs built in designing new machines and production techniques.


pages: 3,002 words: 177,561

Lonely Planet Switzerland by Lonely Planet

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Eyjafjallajökull, Frank Gehry, G4S, Guggenheim Bilbao, Higgs boson, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, smart cities, starchitect, trade route

Walensee | FEDOR SELIVANOV/SHUTTERSTOCK © Central Switzerland Lucerne Lake Lucerne Lake Uri Brunnen Schwyz Einsiedeln Engelberg Zug Andermatt Central Switzerland Pop 718,400 Why Go? To the Swiss, Central Switzerland – green, mountainous and soothingly beautiful – is the essence of ‘Swissness’. It was here that the pact that kick-started a nation was signed in 1291; here that hero William Tell gave a rebel yell against Habsburg rule. Geographically, politically, spiritually, this is the heartland. Nowhere does the flag fly higher. Locals swell with pride at Lake Lucerne: enigmatic in the cold mist of morning, molten gold in the dusky half-light.

In December 2016, the environmentally friendly Gotthard Base Tunnel, the world’s longest tunnel at 57km, began operation, shifting the transport load through the Alps from road to rail, and with clever measures to ensure clean air, treat waste water and protect wildlife. Then in May 2017 plans were unveiled for 29 electric high-speed ‘Giruno’ trains, which will travel at up to 250km/h when they take to the tracks on the Basel–Milan line through the tunnel in 2019. Hot on the heels of such successes, the E-Grand Tour of Switzerland was kick-started in collaboration with Tesla in 2017 as the world’s first-ever road trip for electric vehicles, with 300 charging stations on a new 1600km route bringing together the country’s highlights. Swiss Federal Railways is piloting a new annual ‘Green Class’ rail pass that includes the use of an e-bike.


Sweden Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, G4S, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, walkable city, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

Målerås ( GOOGLE MAP ; %0481-314 00; www.maleras.se; Industrigatan 20, Malerås; h10am-6pm Mon-Fri, to 5pm Sat & Sun) About 8km northwest of Orrefors in Målerås, this brand is the collaboration of acclaimed glass-blower Mats Jonasson and four other talented artists. Try your hand blowing glass in the hot shop. Orrefors Park ( GOOGLE MAP ; %070-999 60 40; www.facebook.com/orreforspark/; Bruksområdet 1; h11am-6pm; p) Adjacent to the former factory, this kick-starter project is a first step at renewing the village. There's a museum, workshops and a garden with a dual purpose. Carlos R Pebaqué ( GOOGLE MAP ; %0481-321 17; www.carlosartglass.com; Glasblasarvärgen 8, Gullaskruv; h11am-6pm Mon-Fri, to 5pm Sat, to 4pm Sun) This Uruguayan-born artist creates extraordinary vases in his one-man studio, at Gullaskruv, located 6km northwest of Orrefors.

The Norwegians object, and Swedish troops occupy most of the country, the forced union lasting until 1905. 1921 In the interwar period, a Social Democrat–Liberal coalition government takes control and introduces reforms, including an eight-hour working day and universal suffrage for adults aged over 23. 1943 Seventeen-year-old teenager Ingvar Kamprad founds IKEA, which becomes the world's most successful mass-market retailer. 1944 Diplomat Raoul Wallenberg rescues nearly 100,000 Hungarian Jews from the SS by hiding them in Swedish 'neutral houses' in Budapest. 1953 Dag Hammarskjöld is elected Secretary-General of the UN. Under his guidance, the UN resolves the 1956 Suez Crisis. 1974 ABBA triumphs in the Eurovision Song Contest in England, kick-starting a hugely successful pop career. 1994 The ferry Estonia sinks during a storm on the Baltic Sea, killing 852 passengers, including 551 Swedes. 1995 Reluctantly, Sweden joins the European Union. 2001 Parliament votes 260 to 48 against abolition of the monarchy, even though the monarch ceased to have any political power in 1974. 2009 Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden, marries Daniel Westling, her personal trainer; she is the first Swedish royal to marry a commoner. 2011 Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, due for extradition to Sweden on sexual-assault charges, takes refuge in the Ecuador embassy in London.


pages: 252 words: 74,167

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

But if Kurzweil is wrong about some parts of the story, he’s not wrong about the bigger picture. Along with advances in Artificial Intelligence, parallel developments in nanotechnology, robotics and neuroscience is the reason why billions of dollars are currently flowing to support reverse-engineering the human brain. Like the 1956 Dartmouth conference which kick-started AI, this is resulting in some fascinating collaborations between disciplines. The Next Big Thing One such project is the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks project, also known as MICrONS. Funded by IARPA, the United States’ Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity department, the goal of MICrONS is to increase machine intelligence by building algorithms that function more like the human brain.


pages: 302 words: 74,878

A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer, Charles Fishman

4chan, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asperger Syndrome, Bonfire of the Vanities, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Chrome, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple

Rick Smolan: cocreator of the Day in the Life book series, former photographer for National Geographic, Time and Life magazines Frank Snepp: journalist, former CIA agent and analyst during the Vietnam War Scott Snyder: comic book and short-story writer Scott Andrew Snyder and Tracy Forman-Snyder: design and art direction, Arkitip Johnny Spain: one of the “San Quentin Six,” who attempted to escape from San Quentin State Prison in 1971 Gerry Spence: famed trial lawyer, never lost a criminal case as a prosecutor or a defense attorney Art Spiegelman: cartoonist, illustrator, author of Maus, winner of the Pulitzer Prize Eliot Spitzer: governor of New York, 2007–2008, former attorney general of New York Peter Stan: analyst and economic theorist at RAND Corporation Gwen Stefani: musician, fashion designer Howard Stern: radio and TV personality Cyndi Stivers: journalist, former editor in chief of Time Out New York Biz Stone: cofounder of Twitter Neil Strauss: author of The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists Yancey Strickler: cofounder and CEO of Kickstarter James Surowiecki: journalist, business and financial columnist for the New Yorker Eric Sussman: senior lecturer at UCLA School of Management, president of Amber Capital t.A.T.u.: Russian music duo André Leon Talley: contributor and former editor at large for Vogue Amy Tan: author of The Joy Luck Club Gerald Tarlow: clinical psychologist and therapist Ron Teeguarden: herbalist, explores Asian healing techniques Edward Teller: theoretical physicist, father of the hydrogen bomb Ed Templeton: professional skateboarder, founder of skateboard company Toy Machine Margaret Thatcher: prime minister of the United Kingdom, 1979–1990 Lynn Tilton: investor, businesswoman, founder and CEO of Patriarch Partners Justin Timberlake: musician, actor Jeffrey Toobin: journalist, author, lawyer, staff writer for the New Yorker, senior legal analyst for CNN Abdullah Toukan: CEO of Strategic Analysis and Global Risk Assessment (SAGRA) Center, Jordan Robert Trivers: evolutionary biologist, professor at Rutgers University Richard Turco: atmospheric scientist, professor emeritus at UCLA, MacArthur Fellowship recipient Ted Turner: media mogul, founder of CNN Richard Tyler: fashion designer Tim Uyeki: epidemiologist at U.S.


pages: 237 words: 76,486

Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account From Curiosity's Chief Engineer by Rob Manning, William L. Simon

Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong

If something runs amiss in the next few hours or so before landing, Keith has a pile of contingency procedure documents that he can pull out and begin calling orders. Each team member sits at his or her own display terminal, and I have, in addition, my own laptop containing detailed contingency plans for a bad day. If the worst should happen after landing, all eyes will turn to me, and I’ll start calling meetings and kick-starting analyses in the desperate hope that a bad situation can be corrected. This is a position I fervently did not want to find myself in. We won’t know of a problem until that 13.8 minutes after the bad has started. Any remedy I offered would take at least the same amount of time to transmit back to the lander, and by then it would probably be too late


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

As freshwater supplies dwindle, rich Persian Gulf countries pay a steep price for energy-intensive desalination plants; but, for the poor, Seattle-based World Wide Water sells a solar-powered micro-desalinator that works even with brackish saltwater and can be deployed all over desertified Africa and central Asia. The American nonprofit KickStart has sold its low-tech and low-cost water pumps to more than eighty thousand small-scale irrigation businesses from Mali to Tanzania. Water authorities in the developing world can’t control growing consumption and dwindling supplies—it’s up to innovation and activism to promote efficiency and conservation.


pages: 202 words: 72,857

The Wealth Dragon Way: The Why, the When and the How to Become Infinitely Wealthy by John Lee

8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, butterfly effect, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Donald Trump, financial independence, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, intangible asset, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Maslow's hierarchy, multilevel marketing, negative equity, passive income, payday loans, reality distortion field, self-driving car, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, Tony Hsieh, Y2K

In fact, in the wake of the global financial crisis and the bursting of the property bubble, there were more motivated sellers than ever, in desperate need of offloading their properties or relieving themselves of their mortgage commitments. We were both thoroughly inspired and excited at the prospect of teaching and helping others to become financially free like us. And thus Wealth Dragons was born. While it was John's initial idea that kick-started the business, I take credit for the name, which has proved to be more meaningful than I even realized at the time. We were brainstorming a name for the company and John came up with Property Dragons. When we researched it we found that the name had already been taken, and in any case, I believed we were teaching people more than simply how to profit from property deals: we were teaching them about the importance of passive income and financial freedom.


pages: 270 words: 75,473

Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas A.Limoncelli

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, business cycle, Debian, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, PalmPilot, Steve Jobs

Another example is automated OS installation. Setting up a system to automatically load the OS and related applications on a workstation can be complicated, but it has a huge payoff, especially if you reload machines often or purchase many new machines. Examples of this kind of thing include Microsoft RIS, Solaris JumpStart, Red Hat KickStart, and FreeBSD NetBoot. It can be much more cost efficient to pay someone to set up the system and teach you how to make maintenance modifications (adding new software, and so on) rather than struggle through the initial installation alone. This kind of consulting can be expensive and, therefore, it must be thought of during the budgeting process.


Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes From the Best Kitchens on Wheels by Shouse, Heather

fixed-gear, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, place-making, rolodex, side project, South of Market, San Francisco

He set about the first order of business: coining the name “Potato Champion” in honor of Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, an eighteenth-century French chemist who managed to convince his countrymen that potatoes didn’t cause leprosy, as was widely believed, and that the spuds should be eaten instead of just tossed to hogs. With a name like that, there was no turning back; Mike found a little trailer on Craigslist and spent his days fixing it up into a frymobile and his nights perfecting the Belgian-style frites that kick-started his obsession. With only the lingering taste from his travels and a bit of pizzeria experience, he went through months of trial and error before arriving at the perfect result. Russets are his go-to potato (“they don’t brown up too much and they have the right sugar/starch content”), and he only fries in rice bran oil (“high smoke point, awesome flavor, a little expensive but lasts longer”).


pages: 275 words: 77,017

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society by David Wolman

addicted to oil, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, fiat currency, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, German hyperinflation, greed is good, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, P = NP, Peter Thiel, place-making, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steven Levy, the payments system, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

And they’re starving their people to death.”17 It’s one thing for North Korea to hurl missiles over our ally, Japan, sink a South Korean navy vessel and its crew, shun talks to promote peace, bomb a South Korean island, and point guns at our servicemen and women stationed on the southern edge of the Demilitarized Zone. But plagiarizing our money? That is just low. Yet how different is Kim Jong Il’s counterfeiting, really, from the decision to spend $700 billion in borrowed money to kick-start economic growth, from creating more than $1 trillion out of thin air to help clean up the housing bubble crisis?18 That may sound blasphemous, but Americans have a long tradition of skepticism about money creation, forgeries or otherwise. In 1837 John Quincy Adams said that the only thing separating counterfeiters from bank directors is that the former are more skilled and modest.


pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

When we spoke, he recognized that his chances were slim, but still wanted to move the conversation forward and to influence California politics in the years to come. “I think this will be a good thing for the basic-income movement,” he told me. “I was inspired by the Swiss campaign. They got under 30 percent, but the campaign is still looked on as something that kick-started the basic-income conversation in Europe.” He noted that many established politicians were flirting with the idea of using it to establish their lefty credibility. “Part of what I’m hoping to do is normalize the idea of basic income as a political issue, and as something people can run on, and to show that people shouldn’t be scared to run on basic income,” he said.


pages: 259 words: 76,915

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith

dark pattern, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, ocean acidification, publish or perish, Rodney Brooks

Another possibility is that the dropping of the metal object coincided with the dropping of a first load of shells. This might have happened back before 1984, when scallop dredging was banned in the bay, or around 1990, when scallop collection by divers was also banned. That load of shells would have given the site a bigger kick-start. But since then, it seems likely that most of the shells were brought in over the years by the octopuses. They have, by hunting and bringing food home, transformed the site where they live. Why did this “seeding” have such large effects at one particular site? The general area where the metal object fell offers unlimited food for an octopus, as it’s a scallop bed.


pages: 278 words: 70,416

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

This was at a time when social media managers at Fortune 500 companies typically had to brave a phalanx of corporate approvers to publish anything.* While building its content backlog, Oreo managed to get its tweet approval process down to a few minutes’ time—just enough time to say, “You can still dunk in the dark” before the Superdome lights came back on—and to grow a following among consumers and press that could kick-start momentum when the company needed it. And that is what won 360i its Cannes and Clios. PAUL VASQUEZ WASN’T TRYING to make a funny viral video when he filmed “Double Rainbow.” He hadn’t intended to become famous overnight. His video backlog consisted of random home videos of things he’d seen in his yard.


Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi, Sami Tamimi

Kickstarter, place-making

NOT QUITE. — Burnt Eggplant with Garlic, Lemon & Pomegranate Seeds Burnt eggplant with garlic, lemon & pomegranate seeds SERVES 4 AS PART OF A MEZE PLATE This salad has the most wonderful smoky aroma and works well with grilled meat or fish, as well as with other dips and salads to kick-start a passionate Levantine feast. But in order to get the full smoky flavor, you really need to stick to the instructions and allow the eggplants to burn well. If you want to turn it into a “real” baba ghanoush, whatever that may be, drizzle on some light tahini paste at the end. 4 large eggplants (3¼ lb / 1.5 kg before cooking; 2½ cups / 550 g after burning and draining the flesh) 2 cloves garlic, crushed grated zest of 1 lemon and 2 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice 5 tbsp olive oil 2 tbsp chopped flat-leaf parsley 2 tbsp chopped mint seeds of ½ large pomegranate (scant ½ cup / 80 g in total) salt and freshly ground black pepper If you have a gas range, line the base with aluminum foil to protect it, keeping only the burners exposed.


pages: 296 words: 76,284

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

The automobile suddenly unhooked us from the need to keep communities compact, the freeways soon gave us unfettered access, and there was land as far as the eye could see. From 1921 to 1936, the “golden age of highway building” saw the construction of more than 420,000 miles of roads in the United States, opening up fresh stretches of land for suburbanization and kick-starting what you could call our first housing boom. Between 1923 and 1927, new homes were built at a pace of almost nine hundred thousand per year; from 1920 to 1930, according to Jackson in Crabgrass Frontier, the suburbs of the nation’s ninety-six largest cities grew twice as fast as the cities themselves.


pages: 326 words: 74,433

Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup by Brad Feld, David Cohen

An Inconvenient Truth, augmented reality, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, fail fast, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, lolcat, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business

This becomes even more critical in a crowded market, as your product's differentiation needs to clear enough to help you rise above the noise. In the midst of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009, very few people were thinking about hot new market segments. There were a few notable ones, however, including the fulfillment of the longtime promise of the smart phone. Kickstarted by the Apple iPhone and the App Store in early 2008, developers were busily creating apps for this new platform. We created Localytics to provide analytics to these mobile app developers. We initially set out to address a need we saw in this market, which was that the analytical data about usage of mobile apps was lousy.


pages: 332 words: 79,139

River Cottage Love Your Leftovers by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Kickstarter

So embrace the staunchly starchy and the deliciously dense for what they are: brilliant, belly-filling building blocks that have an unmatched ability to make meals comforting, satisfying and sustaining. Eggy bread > Eggy bread French toast, eggy bread, pain perdu, whatever you like to call it, is one of my family’s favourite ways to kick-start the morning and it’s a good way to use up slightly stale bread. Flavoured with vanilla, this sweet version is particularly delicious made with brioche, panettone and challah-style loaves. And if you have any extra egg yolks left over from making meringues, seize the chance to make a richer, more luxurious custard here.


pages: 225 words: 11,355

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, deal flow, disintermediation, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, long peace, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, mass immigration, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, pension reform, pets.com, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the new new thing, the payments system, too big to fail, value at risk, very high income, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K, yield curve

The United States, of course, could always ‘‘print dollars,’’ since the dollar had become the ‘‘new gold’’ under Bretton Woods. So, massive U.S. deficits and government borrowing could be inflated away at the expense of our trading partners and holders of U.S. bonds. The U.S. example spread to places like the U.K. that needed to kick-start sluggish economies. This was not a partisan political thing, either. Richard Nixon won power in 1968 and maintained high levels The Natural History of Financial Folly of spending on domestic programs and the Vietnam War. U.K. conservatives like Ted Heath were as addicted to spending as Labour Party governments.


pages: 216 words: 74,110

Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea by Steven Callahan

clean water, Kickstarter

After about six months ashore my weight had returned to normal and I had rebuilt most of my muscles that starvation devoured. The telltale lines of starvation across my fingernails had grown out, and I was left to face the fact that my drift's only real physical cost was that it seemed to have kick-started middle age. I ate less and for the first time found I could pretty easily add some padding around the old midriff. In the mornings, wads of hair lay on my pillow, so that now I have joined the world of the follically challenged. As for serious long-term damage, who really knows? I wasn't about to have my liver or kidneys pulled out for inspection.


pages: 250 words: 77,544

Personal Investing: The Missing Manual by Bonnie Biafore, Amy E. Buttell, Carol Fabbri

asset allocation, asset-backed security, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, fixed income, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, John Bogle, Kickstarter, low interest rates, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Rubik’s Cube, Sharpe ratio, stocks for the long run, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

For example, if an investment starts to nosedive, you want to get out before it hits the ground. Finally, you look for ways to improve your portfolio by, for example, looking for funds with lower expenses, higher returns, or less volatile performance. What’s Investment Portfolio Management? Portfolio management starts with planning. The financial goals you identified in Chapter 2 kick-start the process, because that’s where you determine how much money you need and when. After that, you figure out how you’re going to invest and keep an eye on your portfolio to make sure it stays on track. Here are the basic steps: 1. Identify your tolerance for risk, and understand the investment risks you face.


pages: 322 words: 77,341

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, value at risk

All these factors coincide to make the global bond market a huge, complicated, multiply overlapping and profoundly interwoven thing, with a colossal number of working parts and therefore immense opportunities for swapping and trading and exchanging of revenue streams. This is where, in 1981, swaps entered into the story.4 Swaps began life as a way of exchanging revenue between different types of bonds. The first deal, brokered by Salomon Brothers, was worth $210 million for ten years and kick-started a whole new field of finance. Companies would swap bonds and equivalent products, and in this way gain access to one other’s lines of business: it was a way for firms to spread their economic tentacles while not actually diverging from their own core business. In particular, swaps took off as a way of playing around with other firms’ interest rates and exposure to different currencies.


pages: 420 words: 79,867

Developing Backbone.js Applications by Addy Osmani

Airbnb, anti-pattern, business logic, create, read, update, delete, don't repeat yourself, Firefox, full text search, Google Chrome, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, loose coupling, MVC pattern, node package manager, pull request, Ruby on Rails, side project, single page application, web application

this.isCompleted()); }, isCompleted: function() { return this.get('completed'); } }); // Todo Collection // --------------- Todos.TodoList = Backbone.Collection.extend({ model: Todos.Todo, localStorage: new Backbone.LocalStorage(localStorageKey), getCompleted: function() { return this.filter(this._isCompleted); }, getActive: function() { return this.reject(this._isCompleted); }, comparator: function(todo) { return todo.get('created'); }, _isCompleted: function(todo) { return todo.isCompleted(); } }); }); We finally kick-start everything off in our application index file, by calling start on our main application object: Initialization: $(function() { // Start the TodoMVC app (defined in js/TodoMVC.js) TodoMVC.start(); }); And that’s it! Is the Marionette implementation of the Todo app more maintainable? Derick feels that maintainability largely comes down to modularity, separating responsibilities (Single Responsibility Principle and Separation of Concerns) by using patterns to keep concerns from being mixed together.


pages: 550 words: 84,515

Vue.js 2 Cookbook by Andrea Passaglia

bitcoin, business logic, cognitive load, functional programming, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loose coupling, MVC pattern, node package manager, Silicon Valley, single page application, web application, WebSocket

Since this method needs to be called every time we reach the bottom, we will watch for the bottom variable and fire the method if it's true. Add the following option to the Vue instance just after the data: watch: { bottom (bottom) { if (bottom) { this.addWord() } } } We also need to call the addWord method in the created hook to kick-start the page: created () { window.addEventListener('scroll', () => { this.bottom = this.bottomVisible() }) this.addWord() } If you launch the page now, you will have an infinite stream of random words, which is useful when you need to create a new password! How it works... In this recipe, we used an option called watch, which uses the following syntax: watch: { 'name of sate variable' (newValue, oldValue) { ... } } This is the counterpart of computed properties when we are not interested in a result after some reactive variable changes.


pages: 287 words: 80,180

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim, Renée A. Mauborgne

Asian financial crisis, Blue Ocean Strategy, borderless world, call centre, classic study, cloud computing, commoditize, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, endogenous growth, Ford Model T, haute couture, index fund, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, machine translation, market fundamentalism, NetJets, Network effects, RAND corporation, Salesforce, Skype, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

By thinking in terms of solving the major pain points in customers’ total solution, Philips saw the water problem as its opportunity. The result: Philips created a kettle having a mouth filter that effectively captured the lime scale as the water was poured. Lime scale would never again be found swimming in British home-brewed tea. The industry was again kick-started on a strong growth trajectory as people began replacing their old kettles with the new filtered kettles. There are many other examples of companies that have followed this path to create a blue ocean. Just think of Dyson, which designs its vacuum cleaners to eliminate the cost and annoyance of having to buy and change vacuum cleaner bags.


pages: 245 words: 72,893

How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, Russell Brand, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, Yogi Berra

In doing so Mishra joins the dots from nineteenth-century Italian nationalism to Trump and Modi. Jan-Werner Muller’s What is Populism? (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016; London: Penguin Books, 2017) is a short and pithy account of what makes contemporary populism a distinctive form of politics. The book that helped to kick-start the existential risk industry was Martin Rees’s Our Final Century? Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century? (London: William Heinemann, 2003). In paperback it was published without the first question mark. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) has highlighted the potentially catastrophic risks of AI for a wide audience, including in Silicon Valley.


The Fix: How Bankers Lied, Cheated and Colluded to Rig the World's Most Important Number (Bloomberg) by Liam Vaughan, Gavin Finch

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, buy low sell high, call centre, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, low interest rates, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, urban sprawl

After a grueling day dealing with other agencies and giving press interviews, Gensler and his team crammed into the dingy Irish pub two blocks from their office and celebrated with beer and nachos.4 It was a big moment in the history of the agency and the highlight of many of the investigators’ careers. For Gensler it was particularly poignant: It was the anniversary of his wife Francesca’s death. The little-agency-that-could had arrived. All the main players were there: McGonagle, the manager who’d kick-started the investigation in 2008; Lowe and Termine, the tag team that had driven it home. Other folk joined them later in the evening, when the barman cranked up the Irish music and the clientele grew boisterous and misty-eyed. One man was conspicuous by his absence. Obie, the acting head of enforcement who had played such a key part in getting the investigation off the ground, had been taken off the case at the end of 2010 and sent back to New York after he wasn’t given the role permanently.


pages: 263 words: 79,016

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists by Linda McQuaig

anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversification, Donald Trump, energy transition, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, green new deal, Kickstarter, low interest rates, megaproject, Menlo Park, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, payday loans, precautionary principle, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sidewalk Labs, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing

In her provocative book The Entrepreneurial State, economist Mariana Mazzucato argues that the state has consistently played the critical role of financing the basic research that has resulted in innovation and economic growth in the United States. “From the development of aviation, nuclear energy, computers, the Internet, biotechnology, and today’s developments in green technology, it is, and has been the State — not the private sector — that has kick-started and developed the engine of growth, because of its willingness to take risks in areas where the private sector has been too risk averse.”5 Her point is amply illustrated by Apple. The phenomenal success of the technology giant is typically attributed to the creative brilliance of its founder, Steve Jobs.


pages: 257 words: 76,785

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

8-hour work day, airport security, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Brexit referendum, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, death from overwork, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, game design, gig economy, Henri Poincaré, IKEA effect, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Johannes Kepler, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, neurotypical, PalmPilot, performance metric, race to the bottom, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, zero-sum game

“The more you invest,” he tells me, “whether it’s your business or your economy or your country, the more value there is; the more you value people, the more productive they are; the more productive you are, the more tax receipts you generate. On a very small scale, that was what we were thinking when we said, ‘We’ve got to do something to kick-start this business. Cutting it is killing it; investing in it is building it.’ So that’s what we did.” Two things in particular convinced them that they could make the transition successfully. First, a study revealed that 90 percent of employees reached their weekly sales targets by Thursday afternoon, and those who missed them by Thursday weren’t very likely to get caught up on Friday.


pages: 301 words: 77,626

Home: Why Public Housing Is the Answer by Eoin Ó Broin

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, financial deregulation, Future Shock, global macro, housing crisis, Housing First, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, low interest rates, mortgage debt, negative equity, open economy, passive investing, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, the built environment

His conclusions are worrying: It would appear that rather than addressing the root cause of the financial crisis of 2007–8 in the misallocation of credit to the housing market, in part enabled by securitisation, European authorities have instead focused on how to prop up a bloated and real-estate addicted banking sector by repositioning securitisation as an attractive and safe form of investment … in their efforts to kick-start the economy and revive the banking system post-crisis, governments and central banks have drawn capital markets and a range of other global investors into the housing-finance feedback cycle … This wall of liquidity has been good for the banking system … It has not been good news for citizens of advanced economies who have seen their wages fail to keep pace with rising land and property prices.5 There are those who would say, ‘this time is different’, ‘we won’t make the same mistakes again’ or ‘we are not experiencing a housing bubble’.


pages: 246 words: 76,561

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, dark matter, Day of the Dead, digital divide, Donald Trump, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, facts on the ground, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, mass immigration, megaproject, microcredit, Milgram experiment, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, Silicon Valley, starchitect, technoutopianism, unorthodox policies, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, Washington Consensus

In the media outcry, Mockus was forced to resign. It might have been the end of his career, but it was just the beginning. The rector with the unorthodox methods became notorious, and in his disgrace he achieved the status of a public figure. The following year, he was elected mayor of Bogotá. Mockus’s first term as mayor would kick-start a remarkable period of urban renaissance. The former philosophy professor was merely the first in a sequence of extraordinary mayors who would revive not just the capital but also Colombia’s second city, Medellín. In a country that was mired in wars against the drug cartels and paramilitary guerrillas, and plagued by rampant violence, poverty and a corrupt political class, three politically independent mayors were able to offer hope of a new reality.


Great Continental Railway Journeys by Michael Portillo

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, railway mania, Suez canal 1869, trade route

Its lack of ambition was perhaps typical of French aspirations for railways at a time when the business of trains in Britain was exploding. True, there were a few other attempts to get railway travel underway, but political instability following the Napoleonic Wars shackled progress and, between 1827 and 1842, only 569 km (354 miles) of line were built. Finally, a government bill was passed in 1842, designed to kick-start the industry. The law decreed that the state would build the necessary infrastructure, including stations, and prepare rail beds. Meanwhile, private companies would lay rail and operate rolling stock. On paper, it looked a fine ideal. In practice, the bureaucracy that plagued French governments of the era continued to hobble expansion despite monumental efforts by, among others, politician Alexis Legrand (1791–1848) to establish a national railway network.


The Jobs to Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs by Jim Kalbach

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Build a better mousetrap, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, data science, Dean Kamen, fail fast, Google Glasses, job automation, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, market design, minimum viable product, prediction markets, Quicken Loans, Salesforce, shareholder value, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Zipcar

I used the Switch interview method somewhat stealthily as the focus of the research on the evaluation of the concepts and not directly on the jobs of the target audience. But in surfacing the emotional and social jobs in the opening interviews, I hoped to be able to get a truer evaluation of the proposed designs. ADAPTING THE JTBD SWITCH INTERVIEW The usual way to kickstart a Switch interview is to begin at the “first thought,” or at a point of commitment or purchase. For Talk Londoners, we began at the point of commitment (when they signed up) and worked backward, diving deep on how they ended up using the forum and their patterns of engagement. We looked to understand their core jobs and the nuances around these needs.


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

The evidence is clear: at least in recessionary times, crowding-out (both direct and indirect) is a myth. Government can create jobs. MYTH #4: MONEY DOESN’T COME FROM NOWHERE In 2013, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, rejected calls from his Business Secretary, Vince Cable, for increased government spending to kick-start the UK’s struggling economy with the argument that ‘there is no magic money tree’.8 Of course, in the strictly literal sense that there is no tree on which money grows, what David Cameron said was true. On the assumption, however, that he was speaking figuratively, and that what he meant was that money can’t simply be created out of nothing, then his comment bore no relationship to the reality of the economy over which he presided.


pages: 269 words: 70,543

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

After Uber was overtaken by local Chinese rival Didi in 2016, the American ride-hailing leader then sold out to its chief Asian competitor, Grab, Southeast Asia’s dominant ride-share company. At Amazon, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos made a big fuss about committing $5 billion to pursue India’s tremendous potential. Indian newspapers ran front-page headlines of Bezos when he kick-started Amazon in India by parading into Mumbai on the back of a colorful truck, with a $2 billion investment check in tow. But Walmart beat him to a big prize in India by buying Indian online retailer leader Flipkart in a $16 billion deal in 2018. See table 2-1. Table 2-1 The BAT and FANGs Target Southeast Asia RIDE-HAILING Tencent Led $1.1 billion co-investment in Ola in India, 2017 Led $1.2 billion co-investment in Go-Jek in Indonesia in 2017 US Brands Uber was acquired by Grab Singapore, and Uber got a 27.5% stake in Grab in 2018 Google co-invested $1.2 billion in Go-Jek in Indonesia in 2017 E-COMMERCE Alibaba, Ant Financial Invested $4 billion in Lazada Group, Singapore, 2016–2018 Led two $1.1 billion co-investments in Tokopedia in Indonesia, 2017 and 2018 Co-Invested $1.3 billion in Paytm in India, 2015–2018 US Brands Amazon invested $5 billion in India since 2014 Walmart spent $16 billion to acquire a 77% stake in Indian e-commerce leader Flipkart in 2018 Sources: Silicon Dragon research, S&P Global Intelligence, annual reports, news releases To fortify its stronghold, Alibaba has paid big sums for chunks of Southeast Asian regional tech leaders, notably spending $4 billion for a controlling stake in Singapore-based e-commerce leader Lazada and co-investing a total of $2.2 billion in Indonesian mobile payment service Tokopedia.


pages: 265 words: 76,875

Exoplanets by Donald Goldsmith

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, megastructure, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, time dilation

A search for radio signals from the star’s vicinity 94 A Gallery of Strange New Planets that could imply the existence of a civilization roughly similar to ours also failed to yield positive results.5 For now, we may fairly say that we lack a good explanation for the remarkable be­hav­ior of Tabby’s Star.6 Further monitoring of the star, partially funded by a Kickstarter campaign that Boyajian led, may provide additional data that w ­ ill lead to a better understanding of this cosmic 7 anomaly. Kepler 10 b: An Earthlike Planet Close to Its Star Despite its number, Kepler-10 b was the first Kepler planet to be found, verified with observations made at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.


pages: 244 words: 73,700

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

Crystal runs a Peloton-themed podcast and blog called The Clip Out and is known to her few thousand followers as Clip-Out Crystal. “July 15, 2016, is the day I received my Peloton. I remember it so well,” she wrote to me sentimentally, like the beginning to her memoir. “I now have completed almost 700 rides.” Launched on Kickstarter in 2013, Peloton is a subscription-based fitness app offering all kinds of online workout classes (termed “shows” in corporate Peloton-speak). There’s dance aerobics, yoga, Pilates, and, by far its most popular offering, Spin. Thousands of participants log on from their garages and basements to ride their $2,000 Peloton-brand stationary bikes, which stream the shows from built-in touchscreen monitors.


pages: 303 words: 74,206

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change by Ehsan Masood

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, energy security, European colonialism, financial engineering, government statistician, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahbub ul Haq, mass immigration, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mohammed Bouazizi, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, zoonotic diseases

Part of the problem in knowing what to do was an almost complete lack of data on the health of the economy. This is sometimes difficult to appreciate in our age of Big Data, but before GDP the volume of data available to the public was a fraction of what it is today. The only similarity is that both then and now, governments were desperate to know how economies could be kick-started, and especially how new jobs could be created. But to create new jobs, governments needed to first know how many were employed. To raise living standards, they needed to know what people were earning. Among the lawmakers most concerned about the absence of meaningful information on the numbers of people in jobs or the value of factory goods was the Republican senator for Wisconsin, Robert La Follette Jr.


pages: 277 words: 70,506

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News by Eliot Higgins

4chan, active measures, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, anti-globalists, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Bellingcat, bitcoin, blockchain, citizen journalism, Columbine, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, fake news, false flag, gamification, George Floyd, Google Earth, hive mind, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, post-truth, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Tactical Technology Collective, the scientific method, WikiLeaks

I reached out to prospective contributors for a new hub, which would be about proof, gathered openly on the internet, and for anyone to inspect. A dozen people in my network – freelance journalists, a chemical-weapons expert, an arms-control specialist, independent researchers, analysts, tech-security pros – offered reports on Iraq, Turkey, Kurdistan, Nigeria, police corruption, jihadis, and more. I set up a Kickstarter crowdfunding appeal, pledging ambitious open-source investigations, a place to share cutting-edge techniques, with how-to guides – a collective that would invite everyone to join in the detective work while setting standards for our new field. I never worried that a bad actor could infiltrate this project.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

In addition to making the urban core more accessible to those on lower incomes, cities also need to extend the principles of mixed-use development and walkability to the suburbs. The idea of the city as a series of concentric circles with distinct functions does not have to be taken as an article of faith. Anyone who doubts that suburbs can be transformed need only look at the history of London’s Chelsea or Paris’s Montmartre, both of which were once suburban. To kickstart the process, cities could identify areas like abandoned malls or languishing high streets and offer tax breaks to hospitality and retail businesses to encourage them to set up shop. Constructing terraced houses and even mid-rise developments near to these precincts could help to provide a critical mass of customers within easy walking or cycling distance.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Jurassic Car Park I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle … Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991 Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in shapes of your choosing. George Orwell, 1984, 1949 The Terminator movie series launched in 1984 – the fateful year described in George Orwell’s novel of a rigid, managed, totalitarian, surveillance world of thoughtcrimes, doublethink, Newspeak, Room 101, and Big Brother. In fact, the 1980s kick-started neo-liberal laissez-faire; deregulation, non-unionisation, and the pre-eminence of the individual. * * * In 1984, the Macintosh 128K was the world’s first commercially successful personal computer to use a graphic interface. Ridley Scott directed the TV commercial. A female runner, pursued by the Thought Police, hurls a hammer through a giant screen featuring a Big Brother figure.


pages: 318 words: 73,713

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

Once people get into this negative shame cycle, a Florida State University study shows, they tend to gain even more weight. With their health increasingly at risk, fat people get lower-quality medical care, in large part because doctors “can’t see past the fat.” They blame most heavy patients’ symptoms on their weight, shaming them even more and kick-starting a new toxic feedback loop. Another episode of shame shock that affected me personally involved a doctor who insisted that, because I was so fat, there was no way I could possibly also exercise daily. This was when I was training for a triathlon. And it would have made some sense if I’d come to him for advice about fitness, but I had made the appointment to talk about getting pregnant.


pages: 439 words: 79,447

The Finance Book: Understand the Numbers Even if You're Not a Finance Professional by Stuart Warner, Si Hussain

AOL-Time Warner, book value, business intelligence, business process, cloud computing, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Costa Concordia, credit crunch, currency risk, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, forward guidance, intangible asset, Kickstarter, low interest rates, market bubble, Northern Rock, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, Ralph Waldo Emerson, shareholder value, supply-chain management, time value of money

* * * 1 ‘World Class Transactions: Insights into creating shareholder value through mergers and acquisitions’, KPMG Transaction Services. 29 Equity finance ‘If companies are able to raise equity from the market, then their problems for financing incomplete projects will come to end. Investment cycle in the capital market can kick-start with the money of savers and investors.’ Uday Kotak, executive vice chairman and managing director of Kotak Mahindra Bank In a nutshell Equity finance is money (‘capital’) raised by the sale of shares to investors (shareholders) who become owners with voting rights in the company, in return for their investment.


pages: 229 words: 75,606

Two and Twenty: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win by Sachin Khajuria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, blockchain, business cycle, buy and hold, carried interest, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, disintermediation, diversification, East Village, financial engineering, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, index fund, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, mass affluent, moral hazard, passive investing, race to the bottom, random walk, risk/return, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

The next steps are for Plastix to take the capital infusion in two shots, a little like a vaccine, with the first or prime shot taken within a few days of our investment committee’s approval, and the second or booster shot to be delivered within ten weeks. With a bit of luck and the addition of liquidity, the business might achieve some immunity from its cash-starved malaise, and we might kickstart it into sharp recovery. The irony was, we do not trust ourselves to be right. Our weapon of choice, investing in the company via debt rather than equity, is a backup plan in case the investment is doomed but we just cannot see it. We consider, and structure for, the possibility that we are wrong a second time.


pages: 263 words: 72,899

Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut's Journey by Fred Haise, Bill Moore

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Boeing 747, Gene Kranz, ice-free Arctic, index card, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, panic early, Strategic Defense Initiative, two and twenty, women in the workforce

I’m more like Jack Webb on Dragnet, who wanted “Just the facts, ma’am,” but the Earth was so much more beautiful than the beat up, drab Moon. The Earth is rich with color and from a certain angle it appears to have a halo. This is the Sun reflecting on the atmosphere surrounding the Earth. I can see why the environmental movement got a kick-start from those first photos of Earthrise on Apollo 8. Jim told us to knock off our picture taking and get ready to join him for the PC+2—shorthand for pericynthion—the lowest altitude behind the Moon plus two hours. We had received the maneuver pad of information to load into our computer, which would set off a four-minute, forty-second use of the Aquarius descent engine that would result in an 860-feet-per-second velocity change.


pages: 255 words: 80,190

Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story by Rachel Clarke

clockwatching, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, imposter syndrome, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, post-truth, profit motive, sensible shoes, Snapchat, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The patient herself, Mrs Bridges, a married woman in her late seventies with a known history of an irregular heartbeat, had been admitted that morning for treatment of an aggressive pneumonia with intravenous antibiotics. No one seemed to know much about her general health or her home life and, when a second shock failed to kick-start the heart, a heated discussion broke out between the two most senior doctors present: the registrar running the arrest and another registrar from Intensive Care. Were we really, the ICU registrar asked, intending to keep going when an ICU bed was clearly inappropriate for this patient? It was time to call time, to stop this well-meaning but futile activity that served only, at this point, to degrade the patient.


pages: 786 words: 195,810

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bletchley Park, crowdsourcing, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, hydroponic farming, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Larry Wall, megacity, meta-analysis, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, placebo effect, scientific mainstream, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

The lab report on his hair sample indicated that his body was shedding high levels of aluminum, which can cause a buildup of ammonia in cells, resulting in a disruption of DNA metabolism and protein synthesis. The test also showed elevated levels of boron, which is often a tip-off to the lurking presence of blatantly neurotoxic elements like mercury, cadmium, and lead. The doctor told Craig and Shannon that they should seriously consider chelation to kick-start their son’s recovery process—and sooner rather than later. In the meantime, the Rosas could make many changes to improve their son’s quality of life immediately. Step one was to eradicate even trace amounts of gluten and casein from his diet, as described in Seroussi’s book. (Leo’s tests didn’t indicate any acute reactivity to casein, but the doctor warned Craig and Shannon that not all of his sensitivities would show up on the tests.)

In countries where most children have access to good health care, PKU-induced intellectual disability is now a thing of the past. None of these breakthroughs would have happened, Rimland reflected, if Følling had written off Liv and Dag as hopeless cases of a generic disorder called mental retardation. IV Rimland’s highest hope for his book was that it would kick-start a new era of autism research. To facilitate this process, he came up with a smart idea for soliciting data from his readers by making his book interactive. In the appendix, he included a questionnaire called the “Diagnostic Check List for Behavior-Disturbed Children (Form E-1),” designed as a template for clinicians to copy and give to parents.


Bali & Lombok Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, first-past-the-post, Kickstarter, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, retail therapy, Skype, spice trade, sustainable-tourism

Top Diving & Snorkelling Spectacular Pulau Menjangan, whether you're just drifting or following a wall; Tulamben's sunken WWII freighter, and its snorkelling and diving from shore; all types of diving and snorkelling in the beautiful waters of the Gili Islands, where you may spot a sea turtle. Top Hiking Munduk's lush, spice-scented, waterfall-riven landscape; beautiful walks lasting from one hour to one day in Ubud and its rice-field surrounds; Tirta Gangg's emerald rice terraces, gorgeous views and temples. Surfing Surfing kick-started Bali tourism in the 1960s and it's never looked back. Many Balinese have taken to surfing, and the grace of traditional dancing is said to influence their style. Where to Surf: Bali Swells come from the Indian Ocean, so the surf is on the southern side of the island and, strangely, on the northwest coast of Nusa Lembongan, where the swell funnels into the strait between there and the Bali coast.

Sambal plecing Another Lombok sambal, this one takes hot chillies and puts them in a tomato base, letting the heat sneak up on you. Sambal taliwang A Lombok sambal made with special peppers, garlic and shrimp paste. One of the few true culinary highlights of Bali's neighbour. Breakfast Many Balinese save their appetite for lunch. They might kick-start the day with a cup of rich, sweet black coffee and a few sweet jaja at the market: colourful temple cakes, glutinous rice cakes, boiled bananas in their peels, fried banana fritters and kelopon (sweet-centred rice balls). Popular fresh fruits include snake fruit, named after its scaly skin, and jackfruit, which is also delicious stewed with vegetables.


Switzerland by Damien Simonis, Sarah Johnstone, Nicola Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, bank run, car-free, clean water, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, the market place, trade route, young professional

Le Pain Quotidien (Map p62; %022 736 36 90; Blvd Helvétique; breakfast/brunch from Sfr15/32; h7am-6pm Mon-Fri, 8am-6pm Sat & Sun; n) Choose from a whole heap of breakfasts (continental, English etc) and brunches (classic, countryside etc) at this twin-set of rustic daytime spots. GENE VA 70 G E N E VA • • E a t i n g B&B A culinary kick-start to the day is what Geneva trendies do: CALM (p71), Buvette des Bains (p71), Soupçon (p70), Les 5 Portes (p71), Le Pain Quotidien (p71), Arthur’s (right) and Alhambar (right) are breakfast and/or brunch favourites. There’s also a branch situated on Blvd Georges-Favon. Quick Eats Rue de Fribourg, Rue de Neuchâtel, Rue de Berne and the northern end of Rue des Alpes (all Map p65) are loaded with kebab, falafel and quick-eat joints.

N1 ss CENTRAL SWITZERLAND N1 Interesting stories attach themselves to many places, from the Christian miracle that made Einsiedeln a place of pilgrimage to the pagan superstitions surrounding several peaks. According to legend, the ghost of Pontius Pilate haunts Mt Pilatus, while mischievous elves inhabit the sides of Mt Rigi. 0 0 To Zürich (7km) Reu The pact that kick-started the Swiss nation was signed here more than 700 years ago on the shores of Lake Uri, and Central Switzerland is the guardian of many Swiss founding tales and myths. Its far-east corner is William Tell country, where the legendary patriot is said to have shot an apple from his son’s head and gone on the run.


pages: 306 words: 79,537

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place) by Tim Marshall

9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, Charlie Hebdo massacre, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Hans Island, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, market fragmentation, megacity, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transcontinental railway, Transnistria, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, zero-sum game

In China we see the limitations of power without a global navy. The chapter on the United States illustrates how shrewd decisions to expand its territory in key regions allowed it to achieve its modern destiny as a two-ocean superpower. Europe shows us the value of flatland and navigable rivers in connecting regions and producing a culture able to kick-start the modern world, while Africa is a prime example of the effects of isolation. The chapter on the Middle East demonstrates why drawing lines on maps while disregarding the topography and, equally important, the geographical cultures in a given area is a recipe for trouble. We will continue to witness that trouble this century.


pages: 297 words: 83,563

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer

crowdsourcing, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, no-fly zone, pre–internet, trade route, unemployed young men, WikiLeaks

After hesitating in the initial stage of the rescue, donors had seen what the jihadis were capable of doing and many rushed to contribute. Haidara secured $100,000 from one of his most generous benefactors: Dubai’s Juma Al Majid Center. The rescuers appealed to other longtime supporters, including the Prince Claus Fund in the Netherlands. “We’re desperate,” Brady said. A grant of $135,000 came through. A Kickstarter campaign raised another $60,000. The Dutch National Lottery, one of the richest cultural foundations in the Netherlands, wired $255,000 to Bamako. Brady turned next to the director of a Dutch government development agency in Bamako. European missions in Mali had plenty of unspent money in their coffers, because of a European Union embargo on bilateral aid to the Mali government since the military coup; the Dutch came up with another $100,000.


pages: 282 words: 82,107

An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage

agricultural Revolution, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, carbon footprint, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, food miles, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mikhail Gorbachev, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

This is what happened in Britain in the eighteenth century, as a series of improvements in agriculture liberated workers from the land and allowed industry to take root. Industrial goods could then be traded for food imports, further accelerating the switch from agriculture to industry. For all this to happen, the right infrastructure and market conditions must be in place. But a surge in agricultural productivity is essential to kick-start the process; no country has been able to industrialize without one. (The two exceptions are Singapore and Hong Kong, city-states that did not have significant agricultural sectors in the first place.) Another notable feature of world economic history is that for most of human history, Asia was the wealthiest region on earth.


pages: 288 words: 83,690

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The images I saw and stories I heard both first- and secondhand started to form a coherent picture: friends moving out of the city and heading to Austin or Philly or Los Angeles, shuttered bodegas and laundromats in every neighborhood, the new banks that replaced them, the new neighbors, and the Kickstarter campaigns by people seeking the assistance of housing lawyers and a little help with rent were all part of the phenomenon described by the word. I was in some ways a victim of the process, priced out of the neighborhood I grew up in, but I also knew I was relatively privileged, and a walk through Bushwick or Bed-Stuy confirmed that—seeing the old, dilapidated apartment buildings under renovation, with windows boarded up and signs out front proclaiming the building’s new owners, on block after block.


pages: 260 words: 84,847

P53: The Gene That Cracked the Cancer Code by Sue Armstrong

Asilomar, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Kickstarter, mouse model, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, stem cell, trade route

However, the propensity of the viral vector to be detected and wiped out by the patient’s immune system before it can deliver its cargo to the cancer cells remains a major challenge for scientists working to refine gene therapy. Another challenge is to find ways of reaching the scattered metastases with these drugs, for it is these secondary tumours that tend to kill the patient with cancer. SMALL MOLECULES KICK-START STRESS RESPONSE Other new strategies for treatment being explored start with the fact that in very many cancers p53 is not mutant, but the normal protein is inactivated by some other mechanism. In cervical cancer, for example, around 90 per cent of cases are caused by infection with human papilloma virus (HPV), a sexually transmitted disease that can also cause genital warts.


pages: 394 words: 85,734

The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Mason

active measures, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Easter island, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, planetary scale, post-oil, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, systematic trading, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

The New Dealers, however respectful they might have been of John Maynard Keynes, had another plan: a Global Plan, according to which the dollar would effectively become the world currency and the United States would export goods and capital to Europe and Japan in return for direct investment and political patronage – a hegemony based on the direct financing of foreign capitalist centres in return for an American trade surplus with them.5 The rise of the fallen The Global Plan started life as an attempt to kick-start international trade, create markets for US exports, and address the dearth of international investment by private US companies. But before long it had developed into something bigger and supposedly better. To give Bretton Woods a strong backbone, the New Dealers were determined to support the dollar by creating, within the Bretton Woods fixed exchange system, at least two additional strong currencies that would act as shock absorbers in case the American economy took one of its many periodic downturns.


Pearls of Functional Algorithm Design by Richard Bird

bioinformatics, data science, functional programming, Kickstarter, Menlo Park, sorting algorithm

In turn, moves in pms may require further preparatory moves, so we have to form new, extended plans by iterating premoves: newplans :: State → Plan → [Plan] newplans q ms = mkplans ms where mkplans ms | null ms = [] | m ∈ qms = [ms] | otherwise = concat [mkplans (pms ++ ms) | pms ← premoves q m, all (∈ / ms) pms] where m = head ms; qms = moves q The result of newplans q ms is a possibly empty list of nonempty plans, the first move of each of which can be made in state q. To kick-start the planning process we assume that a puzzle in state q can be solved by making the moves in goalmoves q, where goalmoves :: State → Plan. Using just the two new functions goalmoves and premoves we can now formulate an alternative search process based on the idea of an augmented path and frontier: type APath type AFrontier = ([Move], State, Plan) = [APath] An augmented path consists of moves already made from some starting state, the state that results and a plan for the remaining moves.


pages: 294 words: 87,986

4th Rock From the Sun: The Story of Mars by Nicky Jenner

3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Astronomia nova, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, Golden age of television, hive mind, invention of the telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, overview effect, placebo effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, retrograde motion, selection bias, silicon-based life, Skype, Stephen Hawking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Virgin Galactic

Following the initial cards, the ‘Mars Attacks’ franchise continued with a series of comic books, numerous re-issues and developments of the original trading card series (most recently in 2015), plush toys, table-top games, costumes, books, clothing and other merchandise. In May 2015, Topps announced their plans to re-release a new 72-card series called ‘Mars Attacks: Occupation’. They went about this in a distinctly modern way, asking for funds on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and promising ‘amazing pulpy art … horrific scenes of alien mayhem, terrifying atrocities, over-the-top madness, and of course a healthy dose of blood and babes’. The project received nearly US$200,000 of funding, far surpassing the original goal of $50,000, proving that ‘Mars Attacks’ fever is still alive and well over half a century later.


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Public media policy will need to address infrastructure and information, conduit and content, thus spanning a broad array of issues including Net neutrality, antitrust, user privacy, copyright reform, software production, the development of new platforms for engagement and discovery, and subsidy and promotion of cultural products, whether they are classically crafted novels or avant-garde apps. While some have suggested that crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter can replace government agencies to do much of this work, such a view is shortsighted. Crowdfunding allows individual creators to raise money from their contacts, which gives well-known and often well-resourced individuals a significant advantage. In contrast, a government agency must concern itself with the larger public good, paying special attention to underserved geographic regions and communities (taxation, in a sense, is a form of crowdfunding, but with far wider obligations).20 Public agencies, in other words, have to consider the whole cultural ecology.


pages: 254 words: 14,795

Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the Tactics Behind China's Production Game by Paul Midler

barriers to entry, corporate social responsibility, currency peg, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, full employment, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, language acquisition, new economy, out of africa, price discrimination, unpaid internship, urban planning

They then contacted competitors and requested product samples. These were then shipped back to China where they were placed in a showroom. A factory had to appear skilled to catch customers, and it was too expensive to make a product line before an order actually came in. Manufacturers all suffered from this chicken-and-egg problem: to kick-start their businesses, they had to fool customers into thinking they were already in motion. The easiest way to do this was by throwing samples—anyone’s samples—into a showroom. If pressed for the truth, a factory owner might admit that his factory did not actually produce all of the items that were on display, but there was nothing to stop an importer from jumping to certain conclusions on its own.


pages: 287 words: 86,919

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

My six years at Rhizome allowed me to learn the pleasures of relational databases, Web-based software applications, general Linux system administration—and of course new media art—in an exciting, creative environment. Thanks to Mark Amerika who organized the exhibition Digital Studies with me in 1997. The short text I wrote for that show—“What Is Digital Studies?”—became the germ of inspiration for this entire book. Likewise, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker at CTHEORY helped kick-start this book by publishing a very early piece of mine. Last but not least I am indebted to the new media communities and organizations that exist in various areas of virtual and real space: Rhizome, Nettime, 7-11/American Express, CTHEORY, Ars Electronica, Next 5 Minutes (Society for Old and New Media), Eyebeam, ZKM, V2, and many, many others.


pages: 264 words: 79,589

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulsen

Apple II, Brian Krebs, Burning Man, corporate governance, dumpster diving, Exxon Valdez, fake news, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, index card, Kickstarter, McMansion, Mercator projection, offshore financial centre, packet switching, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, traffic fines, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zipcar

In 2001, he helped bring down Robert Hanssen, a fellow counterespionage agent who’d been secretly spying for the KGB and its successor agency for twenty years. It was heady work, but the secrecy chafed Mularski: He held a top-secret clearance and couldn’t talk about his job with outsiders—even his wife. So when headquarters announced openings for two experienced agents to kick-start an ambitious cybercrime initiative in Pittsburgh, he saw a chance to go home and step out of the shadows at the same time. His new job wouldn’t be in an FBI office. He was assigned to the civilian office of an industry nonprofit group in Pittsburgh called the National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance.


Culture Shock! Costa Rica 30th Anniversary Edition by Claire Wallerstein

anti-communist, bilateral investment treaty, call centre, card file, Day of the Dead, Easter island, fixed income, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, out of africa, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban sprawl

Great guide to the country, particularly for the eco-minded, with a ‘sustainability rating’ for resorts and businesses supporting the country’s environmental, economic and cultural balance. The Essential Road Guide for Costa Rica. Bill Blaker. Los Angeles, CA: International Marketing Partners, Inc., 1995. Costa Rica: A Kick-Start Guide for Business Travelers. Guy Brooks. Brampton, ON: Self Counsel Press, 1996. The New Golden Door to Retirement and Living in Costa Rica. Christopher Howard. Costa Rica: Editora de Turismo Nacional, SA, 2000-2001. Chockfull of contacts and tips, especially on visas, housebuying, investing and setting up businesses both on and off-shore.


pages: 250 words: 83,367

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding

Alfred Russel Wallace, call centre, crack epidemic, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Multics, trade route, union organizing

It killed Murphy, he said, that there was no money to help the kids of addicts or their parents, beyond visits by underpaid and overworked DHS in-home caseworkers. That, or the Northeast Iowa Behavioral Health Clinic, which had but one addiction specialist to minister to the needs of a town of over six thousand people. If Oelwein could just kick-start itself, said Murphy—if it could just get some decent business into the IP—there’d be time to consider more sides of the equation. Maybe Murphy, given his extensive connections in state government, could create some momentum for Nathan Lein’s idea that meth addicts serve five-year probationary periods, during which they have to hold jobs and attend mandatory meetings with a counselor.


River Cottage Every Day by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Community Supported Agriculture, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Kickstarter, Mason jar

Luckily there are all kinds of other catalysts that bring about a change for good in people’s relationship with food, and many of them can’t be marshaled or predicted: a meal at a friend’s house; a great dish encountered on holiday; a child coming home with something they’ve cooked at school; an unexpected gift of a fruit bush or vegetable plant. These can all kick-start a new and exciting future with food – one that turns out to be more accessible than you might have imagined. Buying your food becomes less of a chore, more of a pleasure, an adventure even, as you steer your grocery cart away from the frozen-dinner aisle and over toward fresh produce. Or perhaps start heading for the nearest farmers’ market rather than the supermarket.


pages: 292 words: 85,381

The Story of Crossrail by Christian Wolmar

Ada Lovelace, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Crossrail, data acquisition, driverless car, Kickstarter, megacity, megaproject

Launched in 1981, the Development Corporation had an Enterprise Zone that included the site for Canary Wharf, which gave business a ten-year council rates holiday and generous capital allowances. The Development Corporation was additionally able to invest hundreds of millions of pounds of government funding in order to kick-start the process, much of which was eventually spent on transport infrastructure. Initially, expectations were low and the new buildings were all warehouses and low-rise back offices. They were connected by redbrick roads, clearly designed for light use rather than the hurly-burly of today’s Docklands.


pages: 336 words: 83,903

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

Whilst there is undoubtedly still a puritanical streak to the modern commitment to work, this is not to suggest that puritanical values remain a conscious source of motivation for today’s workers. Presenting a story familiar to students of social theory, Weber argued that the ascetic compulsion to work kick-started a legacy of rational organisation. In their dedication to work, business owners became more efficient and productive in their labours, installing bureaucracies and standardising working procedures. As capitalism developed, entrepreneurs who failed to run an effective and competitive business went bust, and the ‘idyllic state’, where work was performed as a spiritual vocation, eventually gave way to a ‘bitter, competitive struggle’ (Weber, 2002: 68).


pages: 277 words: 87,082

Beyond Weird by Philip Ball

Albert Einstein, Bayesian statistics, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, dark pattern, dematerialisation, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes

We shouldn’t confuse the clue with the answer. Although both Planck and Einstein were rightly rewarded with Nobel Prizes for introducing the ‘quantum’, that step was simply a historical contingency that set the ball rolling.fn3 Several other experiments in the 1920s and 30s could equally have kick-started quantum theory, had it not already been launched. Put it this way: grant the rules of quantum mechanics and you must get quantization, but the reverse is not true. Quantization of energy could, in itself, conceivably be a phenomenon of classical physics. Suppose that nature just happens to be constructed in such a way that, at the smallest scales, energies have to be quantized: restricted to discrete values in a staircase of possibilities.


pages: 259 words: 85,514

The Knife's Edge by Stephen Westaby

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, dark triade / dark tetrad, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, presumed consent, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

Hearing about this, I decided that the unit should stop operating until the circumstances of the deaths were understood and the new surgeon exonerated from blame. But I already knew that this was the chance the authorities were waiting for. They would use it to reinforce their case that smaller centres should close. Yet another inquiry was what they needed to kick-start the Safe and Sustainable process. The committee were keen to rake through my results too, undoubtedly in an attempt to discredit the whole unit as in Bristol. But they could not fault my results, nor did they criticise the other surgeon; he subsequently left Oxford, as we knew he had planned to do, becoming a successful surgeon elsewhere.


pages: 348 words: 82,499

DIY Investor: How to Take Control of Your Investments & Plan for a Financially Secure Future by Andy Bell

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, eurozone crisis, fixed income, high net worth, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, low interest rates, money market fund, Northern Rock, passive investing, place-making, quantitative easing, selection bias, short selling, South Sea Bubble, technology bubble, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

You may have accumulated one or more old pensions or savings policies. The policy documents may be getting mouldy in your filing cabinet and at some stage, as part of this process, you will have to dust these down and consider consolidating them all onto your investment platform. These will give your portfolio a decent kick-start, but more on this later. Being a DIY investor does require some commitment on your part. Because you are not paying for advice, you are buying on a caveat emptor, or ‘buyer beware’, basis. This means that you will be the person responsible if things go wrong; for example, if you make a mistake and buy a share or fund that you thought was something entirely different, or if you misunderstand a tax planning strategy, then you will have no one to blame but yourself.


pages: 315 words: 81,433

A Life Less Throwaway: The Lost Art of Buying for Life by Tara Button

behavioural economics, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, Downton Abbey, Fairphone, gamification, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, Internet of things, Kickstarter, life extension, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, meta-analysis, period drama, planned obsolescence, Rana Plaza, retail therapy, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, thinkpad

•Support innovative companies that want to do better. If you see a gap in the market, either consider filling it yourself, if you’re feeling inventive, or tell BuyMeOnce about it and we’ll put it out as a challenge. •Support the makers and craftspeople who have a real connection to their products. Crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter help us because they allow engineers and makers to go straight to the customer without retailers or marketers in between. This means engineers who want to make longer-lasting products can offer them to the public, and if we like the idea, it may well get funded. When they make their products unfixable •Vote with your wallet and look for fixable modular versions of products.


pages: 315 words: 85,791

Technical Blogging: Turn Your Expertise Into a Remarkable Online Presence by Antonio Cangiano

23andMe, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, bitcoin, bounce rate, cloud computing, content marketing, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, revision control, Ruby on Rails, search engine result page, slashdot, software as a service, web application

Footnotes [61] http://rescuetime.com [62] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done [63] http://pomodoro.ugolandini.com [64] http://programmingzen.com/2009/04/13/startup-interviews-balsamiq-studio-llc Copyright © 2012, The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Part 3 Promote It Chapter 7 Promoting Your Blog Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department. David Packard This chapter kick-starts the third part of the book, which is dedicated to the marketing side of your life as a blogger. Self-promotion and marketing can be touchy subjects among technical audiences, so we’ll start by considering why these activities matter, then we’ll delve into what you need to do to promote your blog. 7.1 Market It and They Will Come The 1989 dramatic film Field of Dreams popularized the expression “If you build it, he will come” and its variations.


pages: 207 words: 86,639

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

The resources raised would then be invested in a massive environmental transformation programme that could insulate the economy from recession, create countless new jobs and allow the UK to play its part in meeting the climate change challenge. A key test is how, in economically stressed times, affordable finance can be made available in a targeted way to kick-start new, low-carbon, energy, transport, food and housing sectors. One useful precedent is the example of South Korea. Over years it channelled lines of low-cost credit to key parts of its economy. The success of this, policy can be measured in the fact that the sections of South Korea’s industry that benefited are now ‘world leaders’. 17 Pay for energy transition and fuel poverty: a windfall tax on the unearned profits of the fossil fuel companies to provide a safety net for those in fuel poverty, and to help finance the UK’s transition to clean energy Fossil fuels are an unrepeatable windfall from nature, yet the UK government has so far failed adequately to take advantage of its income from oil to prepare for a lowcarbon future.


pages: 241 words: 83,523

A Swamp Full of Dollars: Pipelines and Paramilitaries at Nigeria's Oil Frontier by Michael Peel

banking crisis, blood diamond, British Empire, colonial rule, energy security, Golden arches theory, informal economy, Kickstarter, megacity, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, trade route, UNCLOS, wage slave

The Alamieyeseigha case shows how, for all the euphoria surrounding Abacha’s death and the recovery of some of the money he stole, Nigeria’s circumstances were never likely to allow the fresh start its people desperately hoped for after dictatorship ended. Nor was it ever likely that the subsequent transition to civilian rule would magically kickstart a period of progressive government in which the country’s oil resources would finally be harnessed for the wider public good. The government elected in 1999 did promise reforms that it said would, over time, help turn the country around. What happened proved a more nuanced and darker tale that left many observers of Nigeria more fearful than ever before for the future of the country, its crude and its relationship with the rest of the world.


pages: 432 words: 85,707

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance) by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Boris Johnson, British Empire, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

Frogs were a nutritious snack for Stone Age Britons – easy to cook and with lots of protein. They had long been eaten in China and were independently popular in the Aztec Empire too. It wasn’t until the twelfth century that French monks, banned from eating meat, managed to get frogs designated as fish, thus kick-starting a national delicacy. Edible frogs are now a protected species in France after the frog population plummeted: so they’re imported, mainly from Indonesia and Bangladesh. The French get through three to four thousand tons of legs a year, which is about 70 million frogs’ worth. In Asia they’re even more popular.


pages: 291 words: 86,705

Hogg by Samuel R. Delany

Kickstarter, pink-collar

He looked like he was drunk. But I knew he hadn't drunk very much. His head moved around like a blind man's, sniffing for smoke. Only his eyes, a crazy, bright blue, were wide. His hands sort of jerked and fell and jerked again at his sides. Hawk rose up in front of me, bounced down, stamping the kickstart— I thought we were going to fall. But the engine slugged over and roared. "Y'on tight?" Hawk called. "Move your damn ass!" the nigger said. "That crazy bastard's comin' out here. I don't want him seein' which way we go." "Shit," Hawk drawled. We jerked forward. "That kid, the shape he's in, he couldn't see a fuckin' fist comin' at his goddamn jaw!"


pages: 304 words: 80,965

What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us, and How to Fix It by Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik, David Pitt-Watson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Admiral Zheng, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, compensation consultant, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Northern Rock, passive investing, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payment for order flow, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, post-work, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, WikiLeaks

Because ESG factors can have a “major” impact on financial performance, the council asserted that monitoring them “is an important aspect of trustees’ discharging their duties [to] members.” Such a policy “should document processes regarding engagement with companies on environmental, social and corporate governance activities and ensuring that voting rights are managed with due care and diligence.”25 The FSC stance echoes the Australian Treasury, which helped funds kick-start attention to ESG risks by investing public money in a Responsible Investment Academy. Now part of the UN PRI, it offers online training for asset managers in ownership skills.26 Finally, regulators should make sure that those who sell financial services do not abuse the word “fiduciary.” The word has a pleasant ring to it, and so in the United Kingdom, for instance, it is now common for financial agents to call themselves “fiduciaries” when they owe no greater obligations than the letter of the contract they sign with you.


pages: 269 words: 78,468

Kill Your Friends by John Niven

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Etonian, gentrification, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, nuclear winter, sensible shoes, Stephen Hawking

Over salads and Diet Cokes, around photocopiers and water coolers, across wine-bar tables littered with Chardonnay bottles and packs of Marlboro Lights, they talk and they rant and they dissect the shit that we do to them. If you removed the phrase ‘and then he said’ from the language every one of these fucking sows would have a hard time kick-starting a conversation. And then—I guarantee it—the ones who have boyfriends go home at night and some poor bastard will have to hear the whole thing again, with whatever refinements and embellishments they’ve dreamed up on the tube thrown in. I mean, the sheer fucking arrogance of it, to think that anyone wants to hear about your miserable day.


pages: 247 words: 81,135

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

It’s just that the displaced, industrialised nature of our lives allowed us to forget this fact. While there are still many jurisdictions with outdated legal restrictions to crowdfunding, we’re already seeing it being employed in every arena in which money-raising is required. It’s not just something that exists in the ‘money for goods’ realm (think Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Pozible); it’s also a fixture in the money-for-business world. Let’s take a look at a couple of crowdfunding models. Money for goods and services In this model, the people funding the project are essentially placing an early order for some kind of output (product or service) that’s to be delivered at a later date.


pages: 249 words: 81,217

The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age by Claudia Hammond

Abraham Maslow, Anton Chekhov, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, iterative process, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, overview effect, Stephen Hawking, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen

Some researchers believe green vegetation is essential, others that it’s all about the contrast with a busy, urban environment or that the crucial factor in a landscape’s power to relax us is the absence of any signs of human intervention. A Room With a View In a hospital in Pennsylvania an architecture professor called Roger Ulrich conducted a famous study which kick-started this field of research. He discovered you don’t even have to be out among nature in order to feel its benefits. Simply looking at it will do. In a study entitled ‘View through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery’ published in 1984 he found that patients who had undergone gallbladder surgery needed fewer painkillers and left hospital almost a day earlier if they recovered in a hospital room overlooking trees, compared with similar patients accommodated in rooms with a view of a brick wall.5 More than thirty years later this study is still quoted frequently.


pages: 324 words: 80,217

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

The Return of the Future Let’s start with the technological solution to decadence, because it’s the one that our culture, and particularly our elite culture, is conditioned to expect. This solution would involve the end of the technological lull or slowdown or stagnation and the arrival of some set of major breakthroughs, either just around the corner or possibly in development right now, that kick-starts economic growth, leads to sweeping cultural change, and creates an entirely new set of political and ideological debates. The examples are easy to imagine because they’ve been confidently prophecied for as long as I’ve been alive. An energy revolution that both radically cheapens transportation and radically scrambles the politics of the world’s energy-producing regions (and everywhere else, eventually).


pages: 268 words: 81,811

Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History by Liam Vaughan

algorithmic trading, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, data science, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, eurozone crisis, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, Great Grain Robbery, high net worth, High speed trading, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, land bank, margin call, market design, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Navinder Sarao, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ronald Reagan, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, Stephen Hawking, the market place, Timothy McVeigh, Tobin tax, tulip mania, yield curve, zero-sum game

There’s a danger for the civil authorities in any multiagency investigation that they get steamrolled by their criminal counterparts, and the CFTC had been somewhat blindsided to discover that the DOJ had provisionally agreed to a plea deal. Deprived of a trial, Le Riche and his colleagues—the ones who had kick-started the investigation—wanted to at least make sure they had a settlement of their own to announce when Sarao pleaded guilty. When Burlingame, Sarao, and Le Riche eventually sat down over coffee, the focus of the conversation was money, or more specifically, how much Nav would have to cough up. CFTC penalties are made up of disgorgement, which is a defendant’s ill-gotten gains, and a civil monetary penalty, which can be up to three times that amount again.


pages: 438 words: 84,256

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival by Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan

asset-backed security, banks create money, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, deglobalization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, job automation, Kickstarter, long term incentive plan, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, middle-income trap, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, rent control, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, special economic zone, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

., the return on equity, by leveraged buy-backs of shares and to increase output by employing more. If wage growth eats into corporate profits as it has recently begun to, then there should develop a greater willingness to invest in order to raise labour productivity and protect corporate profitability. Whether that bit of economic logic will be enough to kick-start investment remains to be seen. On the other hand, non-financial corporate debt ratios have now climbed so high that any rise in interest rates, or fall in profitability, could put the solvency of many highly leveraged companies under pressure. Should this happen, they would have to cut back new investment severely for short-term self-protection, thereby worsening the macro-economy still further.


pages: 627 words: 89,295

The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy by Katherine M. Gehl, Michael E. Porter

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disintermediation, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, future of work, guest worker program, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, new economy, obamacare, pension reform, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, zero-sum game

Senators were chosen in popular elections, not by party caucuses. Progressive reforms placed limits on money in politics and vested more power in citizens to influence policy through direct democracy. And the legislative machinery was reengineered through a revolt in Congress. Ballot Reform Innovation was kick-started in 1888, when a band of reformers from an elite Boston social club toppled the anticompetitive partisan-ballot system.61 Massachusetts became the first state to adopt the so-called Australian ballot, which was modeled after a system pioneered in Australia and replicated in several European countries.62 Government, not the parties, provided a single ballot that listed all candidates regardless of party—voters could select their favorite candidates in secret, without fear of coercion.63 Other states soon followed, and in just five years, the Australian ballot had spread across the country.64 Ballot reform was what energized the Progressive movement.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Periods of overexuberance follow periods of underconsumption, which is the dynamic that characterises the rise and fall of the business cycle. Consumers often over- or under-spend and businesses often over- or under-invest — Keynes believed that the state’s role was to mute these ups and downs. An expansion in government spending or a reduction in interest rates during a period of underconsumption increases business’ profits, kick-starting confidence, and encouraging economic actors to start spending again. Understanding the politics of austerity requires looking at more than its alleged economic rationale: it requires looking at who benefits. As we saw from Kalecki’s analysis, a capitalist state that commits too much of its power to supporting working people threatens to upset the delicate balance between the power of capital and labour.


pages: 297 words: 84,447

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet by Arthur Turrell

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, Donald Trump, Eddington experiment, energy security, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, New Journalism, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tunguska event

The MagLIF experiment at Sandia National Laboratory has generated substantial numbers of neutrons using deuterium-deuterium reactions, but it isn’t running with tritium.16 Excitingly, First Light Fusion just started running with deuterium and tritium in 2020—but it hasn’t yet published results on yield or the conditions it’s reaching. All of which means NIF still tops the scoreboard for energy gain from inertial fusion. While NIF has made great strides, to get that bit further requires more energy getting into the capsule’s hotspot and kick-starting the fusion reactions. Each doubling of the energy dumped into the hotspot gives, roughly, ten times as much energy out. From the secret Halite-Centurion experiments, inertial star builders know that it is physically possible to get net energy gain if only they can build a laser big enough. Those experiments suggest that slamming a fusion fuel capsule with five to ten megajoules will result in net energy gain.


pages: 278 words: 82,771

Built on a Lie: The Rise and Fall of Neil Woodford and the Fate of Middle England’s Money by Owen Walker

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Brexit referendum, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, fixed income, G4S, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, liquidity trap, lockdown, mass affluent, popular capitalism, profit motive, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Winter of Discontent

After the company carried out an investigation, it informed Newman he could resign and leave the business immediately or face disciplinary action, which would tarnish his reputation for future employers. Newman chose the former. He signed a non-disclosure agreement and was frogmarched out of the office to the car park, without having the chance to return to his desk to pick up his personal belongings. Out of work, and facing mounting bills to keep his property projects going, Newman kick-started a plan he had been working on for some time. Having ingratiated himself with Woodford, Newman hoped to use his close connection to Britain’s best-known fund manager to his advantage. ‘Craig smelled blood in the water,’ says a former colleague. Newman knew how embittered Woodford had grown with his bosses.


pages: 289 words: 80,763

User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product by Jeff Patton, Peter Economy

anti-pattern, Ben Horowitz, business logic, business process, card file, index card, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, mail merge, minimum viable product, performance metric, software as a service, tacit knowledge

To everyone’s surprise, several stories were deemed postpone-worthy or unnecessary. Rough calculations revealed several hundred thousand dollars in savings before one line of code was written. When asked about using story mapping to kick off the project, Doug True, FORUM’s CEO, said, “When we first kick-started this project with a story mapping process including the use of personas, I was skeptical. Specifically, I was concerned with the time invested to this softer side of the project. On the second day it clicked and the worthiness of the time materialized. In fact, now, I couldn’t imagine pursuing a project of this scope and member-facing impact without such a process.”


pages: 269 words: 83,959

The Hostage's Daughter by Sulome Anderson

Ayatollah Khomeini, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, failed state, false flag, Kickstarter, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Skype

I wasn’t aware I had the power to do that. I was packed off to my first rehab in Arizona. I phoned in my entire experience there, until I tore the cartilage in my knee playing volleyball, ending my stint at rehab in a wheelchair on Vicodin. I had surgery right after I got out, and all the Percocet the doctors threw at me kick-started a three-year opiate addiction. Despite all this, I managed to graduate NYU with a 3.7 GPA. Don’t ask me how. The best explanation I have is that my education was the only thing holding me together. Learning had been my lifeline throughout the destruction of my childhood and adolescence, and old habits die hard.


pages: 300 words: 87,374

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

He also comparted ‘bourgeois liberalization’ to ‘spiritual pollution’.5 In other words, he justified the 4 June crackdown by citing the Party’s moral duty to crush a mass movement of students and workers who hoped to drag China into the Age of Imitation.6 This violent repression, precisely in 1989, of a movement aimed at imitating Western-style freedoms raises the question: Why didn’t the Tiananmen events lead more Western commentators to doubt that the end of Eastern European and eventually Soviet communism had in fact established liberal democracy as the only viable model for political reform? One reason is that, coincidentally, June 1989 also witnessed Solidarity’s victory in the first free elections in Poland. This small triumph of the Polish opposition kick-started a process that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in December 1991. The dramatic cascade of events unfolding on Europe’s eastern frontier contributed significantly to the impression that, while it was a tragedy and a political setback, Tiananmen was of negligible importance to world history.


Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

Theories about worldwide domination schemes—be they on a globe or a flat plane—fall so frequently into antisemitic tropes that unless believers explicitly reject these old prejudices, they risk accidentally supporting them. And some Flat Earthers skip right past the accidental antisemitism and lean all the way into its most overt forms. Such is the case with Eric Dubay, the video maker who kick-started the Flat Earth theory’s YouTube renaissance in 2014. Though Dubay is no longer the type to show up to a Flat Earth International Conference (having become “one of our more fringe figures,” as Mark Sargent put it to me delicately), his books and videos have achieved massive reach since he emerged on the scene.


pages: 300 words: 81,293

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

Even though the building wasn’t in any of the protected view corridors, it required the deputy prime minister’s approval to allow for a building much taller than the old Exchange. 30 St Mary Axe, London, Foster and Partners, 2003 Where city officials for decades had blocked tall buildings, a new administration had more favorable opinions on high-rise construction. Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, kick-started a new London plan. “For London to remain a competitive world city,” he wrote, the city “must respond to the drivers of growth . . . without inappropriate restraint.”23 Livingstone would eventually green-light fifteen skyscrapers. The Gherkin, lauded by architects and the public alike, changed Londoners’ minds about tall buildings.


pages: 453 words: 79,218

Lonely Planet Best of Hawaii by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, G4S, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, low cost airline, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation

He starts a pineapple plantation that becomes the world’s largest. 1925 The first US military seaplane lands safely in Hawaii. 1941 On December 7, Pearl Harbor is attacked by Japanese forces, catapulting the US into WWII. 1946 On April 1, the most destructive tsunami in Hawaii history kills 159 people across the islands. 1959 On August 21, Hawaii becomes the 50th US State. Hawaii’s Daniel Inouye is the first Japanese American elected to the US Congress. 1961 Elvis Presley stars in the musical Blue Hawaii, kick-starting the mood for Hawaii’s post-statehood tourism boom. 1971 The Merrie Monarch hula festival, begun in 1964, holds its first hula competition, starting part of a Hawaiian cultural renaissance. 1976 Native Hawaiian sovereignty activists occupy the island of Kahoʻolawe. 1983 Kilauea volcano begins its current eruption cycle, now the longest in recorded history. 1993 President Clinton signs the ‘Apology Resolution,’ acknowledging the US government’s role in the kingdom’s illegal takeover. 2002 US mainland-born Linda Lingle is elected Hawaii’s first Republican governor in 40 years.


Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, means of production, Multics, packet switching, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, trade route, wikimedia commons

Writing was, however, about to be well and truly shaken up by the biggest upheaval since Rome’s fall from Republic to Empire. The emergence of Christianity a scant few decades after Jesus’s death would change the face of written language on a grand scale, and almost as an afterthought, it would kick-start the pilcrow’s journey from K for kaput to a fully formed mark in its own right. Figure 1.3 Third line at left: K for kaput, set off by a dot on either side, signaling the “head” of an argument, in a copy of Cicero’s In Verrem from the first century BC/AD. * * * Compared to Rome’s traditional pagan religion, Christianity was a different beast altogether.


pages: 279 words: 88,538

The Lost Art of Running: A Journey to Rediscover the Forgotten Essence of Human Movement by Shane Benzie, Tim Major

Buckminster Fuller, do what you love, Kickstarter

To be able to cope and deal with unpredictable factors on the way to increase my chances of breaking the record. All of that came into play on that mountain as the voice in my head screamed more loudly than the tiredness, exhaustion and lack of strength could muster. It overwhelmed the physical and kick-started my body into a run as I moved on the crater side towards the top.’ Just like Edwina had done in New York, Kristina used a mental checklist to focus on her movement, bringing positive reinforcement into her self-talk. ‘Come on, Kristina – you can do this! Keep your cadence high and posture straight.


pages: 242 words: 81,001

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: The Highs and Lows of an Air Ambulance Doctor by Tony Bleetman

airport security, crew resource management, Kickstarter, low earth orbit

We took our pre-flight preparation and medicine checks and helicopter service duties deadly seriously. Air Ambulance shifts started at least an hour before we were ready to fly. We assembled at the base at seven in the morning and started with a cup of coffee and a chat. It was very important for us to gel as a team for the entire shift. Ten minutes with a hot drink and a friendly chat kick-started that process. The day’s pilot would check the crewmembers’ weights and enter the figures into a spreadsheet used to calculate how much fuel we could carry. After the hot drink, we would get into one of the rapid response vehicles and call Air Traffic Control on a handheld radio to get permission to drive along the taxiways to the hangar where the Agusta spent the night.


Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Pescadou ( 01841-532359; South Quay; mains £14-18; lunch & dinner) Mr Stein isn’t the only one around town who can turn out top-notch seafood, as this brightly toned brasserie next to the Old Custom House pub proves. Our tip? Try the rosemary-roasted turbot. Seafood Restaurant ( 01841-532700; www.rickstein.com; Riverside; mains £18-45; lunch & dinner) The place that kick-started the Stein empire, and still the best of the bunch. Unsurprisingly, superb seafood is the menu’s cornerstone, and huge swathes of the ingredients are certified Cornish. You’ll need friends in high places to get a table, but this is one eatery that lives up to the hype. GETTING THERE & AWAY Bus 555 goes to Bodmin Parkway (50 minutes, hourly, six on summer Sundays) via Wadebridge.

It’s one of the prettiest of the Lakeland hamlets, huddled at the base of a sweeping valley dotted with woods, pastures and slate-coloured hills, but most of the thousands of trippers come in search of its famous former residents: opium-eating Thomas de Quincey, unruly Coleridge and grand old man William Wordsworth. With such a rich literary heritage, Grasmere unsurprisingly gets crammed; avoid high summer if you can. Sights First stop is Dove Cottage ( 015394-35544; www.wordsworth.org.uk; adult/child £7.50/4.50; 9.30am-5.30pm), where Wordsworth penned some of his great early poems and kick-started the Romantic movement. The tiny cottage was a cramped but happy home for the growing family until 1808, when the cottage was leased by Wordsworth’s opium-eating young friend Thomas de Quincey. Covered with climbing roses, honeysuckle and latticed windows, the cottage contains some fascinating artefacts – keep your eyes peeled for a pair of William’s ice skates and a set of scales used by de Quincey to weigh out his opium.

Following the Norman Conquest of 1066 Robert Fitzhamon, conqueror of Glamorgan, built a castle (the remains of which stand in the grounds of Cardiff Castle) and a small town soon developed. Further Norman conflict followed, in 1183 and 1404 – the latter inspired by Owain Glyndŵr, leader of the ill-fated rebellion against the English. Suffering severe damage during the fighting, Cardiff stagnated for centuries. When the southern Welsh valleys kick-started the iron-making and coal-mining boom in the 19th century, Cardiff started to flourish under the aristocratic Bute family of Scotland. They inherited Cardiff Castle in the 18th century and, with wealth derived from their coalfields and docks, set about commissioning further fine buildings. Edward VII declared Cardiff a city in 1905 and by 1913 Cardiff was the world’s biggest coal port, with a colourful multiethnic community established in dockside Butetown.


Lonely Planet Iceland by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, banking crisis, capital controls, car-free, carbon footprint, cashless society, centre right, DeepMind, European colonialism, Eyjafjallajökull, food miles, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, presumed consent, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

A second branch can be found on Skólavörðustígur ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; www.eymundsson.is; Skólavörðustígur 11; h9am-10pm Mon-Fri, 10am-10pm Sat & Sun). KoggaCERAMICS ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %552 6036; www.kogga.is; Vesturgata 5; h9am-6pm Mon-Fri, 11am-3pm Sat) This tiny ceramics studio in the lower level of an old Reykjavík house offers imaginative pottery. KickstartCLOTHING ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %568 0809; www.kickstart.is; Vesturgata 12; hnoon-6pm Mon-Fri) This tiny but inviting men's store stocks ties, gloves, motorcycle gear and other manly accoutrements. Vínbúðin - AusturstrætiALCOHOL ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; www.vinbudin.is; Austurstræti 10a; h11am-6pm Mon-Thu & Sat, to 7pm Fri) The most central branch of the national liquor-store chain.

Skjálfandi’s bowl-shaped topography and fresh water flowing in from two river estuaries means that there is a great deal of nutrients collecting in the bay. The nutrient deposits accumulate during the winter months, and when early summer arrives – with its long sunlit days – the cool waters of Skjálfandi bay come alive with plankton blooms. These rich deposits act like a beacon, kick-starting each year’s feeding season. This is when the whales start appearing in greater numbers. The first creatures to arrive are the humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) and the minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata). The humpback whale is known for its curious nature, equanimity and spectacular surface displays, whereas the minke whale is famous for its elegant features: a streamlined and slender black body and white-striped pectoral fin.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

From Theory to Policy Having looked at some case studies and briefly formulating an analytic framework to understand how and why globalization’s im pact on industrialization changed, it is time to turn to the policy implications and rethink industrialization policy. As illustrated by the auto case, the sales-scale problem molded industrialization thinking for generations. It was why developing nations pursued activist policies aimed at kick-starting virtuous cycles of spreading industrialization and rising competitiveness. But given limited human resources, it was clear that not every industry could be pushed at the same time. This raised the key issue of the proper sequencing of sector-specific pushes. The Traditional Development Ladder: Putting Sectors in Order To make the big push easier, industrialization before the second unbundling was done in discrete steps.


pages: 262 words: 73,439

Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge) by Penny Harvey, Hannah Knox

BRICs, centre right, classic study, dematerialisation, informal economy, Kickstarter, land reform, new economy, the built environment, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, urban renewal

As we explore in chapter 6, engineering consortia not only have an incidental relationship to the social worlds that confront them, but they have also taken on some degree of responsibility for improving the livelihoods they find there by integrating local places into the road construction process. This includes a commitment to employing local labourers, using local materials, sourcing food from local suppliers, and using local restaurants. The hope is that by stimulating a local economy in this way road construction might kickstart a development process that will allow people living alongside the new road to gain some of the benefits it appears to promise. This promise is, however, continually set alongside the visible social and economic divisions that the construction project participates in producing. By drawing attention in this chapter to the various integrative promises and distintegrative threats associated with the two roads we have been studying, our aim has been to complicate our understanding of the politics of differentiation that inheres in road construction programs and in infrastructure projects more generally.


pages: 285 words: 86,853

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

At its dystopian extreme, this new financial public sphere makes bank accounts into citizens: SuperPACs and venture capitalists have the important conversations about events of the day, joined by those individuals wealthy enough to speak and be heard: not just Thiel but Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, for example. On a more positive note, we can see the public sphere of cash transforming the arts through fundraising sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which allow for the collective approval of new projects through crowdfunding, or a kind of financial voting. The algorithmic process of crowdfunding rewards those who master the methods of privatized publicity: a strong introductory video, frequent updates, tiered reward structures, and effective use of social media to raise awareness.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

It is hard to think of a major developed country whose government has not spent taxpayers’ money in an attempt to build or grow its VC sector. Most developed countries have put in place coinvestment schemes or tax breaks to try and stimulate a venture capital sector like that of the United States. Some of these schemes, such as Israel’s Yozma program, have even worked—indeed, the US venture capital sector itself was kick-started by the SBA’s Small Business Investment Companies program. Some governments invest directly in company equity (such as Germany’s High-Tech Gruenderfonds or Finland’s TEKES Venture Capital), and some innovation scholars like Mariana Mazzucato (2015) argue they should do this far more often. There have also been periodic government-backed attempts to start new stock exchanges for earlier-stage companies, making it easier for businesses to access public (in the sense of publicly traded), rather than public sector equity.


pages: 310 words: 89,838

Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

On one occasion, he identified a potential disaster scenario none of them had considered. Both safety panels argued that positively charged strangelets were safe because they would repel atomic nuclei around them rather than consuming them. But what if one managed, by some deeply contrived means, to find its way to the sun? Once inside, it could possibly kick-start a catastrophic scenario that destroyed the sun. Kent argues that detector components from particle colliders could, without anyone knowing, become contaminated with positive strangelets. They might then end up being recycled into spacecraft that one day could be flung out to survey and ultimately fall into the sun.


Comedy Writing Secrets by Mel Helitzer, Mark Shatz

Albert Einstein, built by the lowest bidder, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, elephant in my pajamas, fake news, fear of failure, index card, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the scientific method, Yogi Berra

Put down the pen and start talking out loud. Use a voice recorder to capture ideas, which may come faster than you can write. 4. IMAGINE INSTEAD OF WRITING. Albert Einstein recognized that the mind's visual powers greatly exceed its verbal abilities, and he used visualization to discover many of his famous theories. Whenever you need to kick-start your imagination, close your eyes and let your mind create a mental movie of you telling jokes to a receptive audience. SHOWTIME Aggressive editing is important. Remember that a good joke: 1. uses as few words as possible 2. preserves the funniest part of the joke until the end 3. does not reveal key words in the setup, and does not contain words after the funniest part of the punchline POW Brainstorming Techniques 123 If the three criteria for a good joke are not met, a potentially good joke will become lame.


pages: 304 words: 93,494

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

4chan, Airbus A320, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, friendly fire, index card, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, messenger bag, PalmPilot, pets.com, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technology bubble, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks

Noah had since taken his pirate-radio project and refocused it to work with Blogger, writing an application called AudBlog, or audio blogger, that allowed anyone to post voice-based posts to blogs from a phone. Google’s acquisition meant more attention for Noah’s project too. Before long, through discussions with friends, Noah decided to turn AudBlog into a start-up, and as soon as Ev started cashing out his Google stock, Noah asked if he would invest a few thousand dollars to help kick-start the idea. “I’m happy to,” Ev said sincerely, “but I really appreciate our friendship and don’t want me investing, or us working together, to affect us being friends.” After all, Ev had been down this road before, losing all of his friends when Pyra and Blogger had imploded a few years earlier.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

In the 1970s, socialist and even communist political parties were gradually able to gain increasing ground in elections in Western Europe; but the old left simply tried to resolve the crisis by doubling down on the traditional corporatist agenda.46 But the old Keynesian policy formulations were unable to kick-start growth, restrain unemployment or reduce inflation under these new economic conditions. As a result, left-wing governments coming to power in the 1970s, such as the British Labour Party, often ended up having to implement proto-neoliberal policies in frustrated attempts to foster a recovery.47 The traditional labour movement, decrepit and stagnant, was by now being bested and co-opted by the forces of the right.


pages: 282 words: 88,320

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David Robertson, Bill Breen

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, business logic, business process, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disruptive innovation, financial independence, game design, global supply chain, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, Wall-E, work culture

But the company’s senior managers also knew that before there can be productivity, there must be creativity. And creativity takes time. LEGO hedged against expediency by sometimes adding more lead time, in the form of an idea generation phase, to its product development process. When senior managers meet with project teams to refine an existing product line, they typically kick-start the effort at the LEGO Development Process’s P0 review stage. That’s when market opportunities are identified and business objectives are defined. But concept teams that are charged with developing new themes, such as the Ninjago team, are allowed an extra “exploration and inspiration” stage that runs prior to the LDP’s P0.


pages: 255 words: 88,987

An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield

Apollo 13, dark matter, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Skype, éminence grise

We’re quarantined longer in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, than we were at the Cape—12 full days—but you get the sense that Roscosmos doesn’t think that’s quite long enough. Before my last flight, my crewmate Roman was sent with his family to a health retreat in the country for five days before quarantine, to kick-start the unwinding process. (Post-flight, too, cosmonauts get months off work, while astronauts go back to the office just a few weeks after returning to Earth, though we’re certainly not expected to take on a full slate of responsibilities the moment we walk through the door.) These days, the purpose of quarantine is as much psychological as it is medical: an enforced time-out ensures we pause, consider what we are about to do and deliberately begin to transition to a new kind of existence.


pages: 351 words: 93,982

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaufer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Fractional reserve banking, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor, Zipcar

Over the same period, entrepreneurial activity and self-employment went up by 300 percent.22 The ideas behind cash transfers are simple: Basic income is a human right, and if you give it to people without conditions, you reduce government bureaucracy and create demand on a local level that in turn fuels micro-entrepreneurial opportunities and new ventures. In this instance, cash transfers to the poor kickstarted and strengthened the economy at the level of the micro-entrepreneur. The cost of creating such a cash transfer for the entire population in Namibia would be 2.2 to 3 percent of the country’s GDP.23 Is this amazing example spreading like wildfire and sparking other, similar efforts around the world?


pages: 366 words: 87,916

Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It by Gabriel Wyner

card file, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, index card, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, machine translation, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Skype, spaced repetition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Yogi Berra

Her patience and keen sense of structure made this book a lot more sensible to people who don’t live inside of my head. Additional thanks to Colette Ballew and Meghen Miles Tuttle. Your input was invaluable. Last but not least, to friend and video editor extraordinaire Nick Martin, and to my dear Kickstarter backers: I love you all. I’d like to especially thank Joel Mullins, Marc Levin, Mike Forster, Mike Wells, Nikhil Srinivasan, and Xavier Mercier for their extraordinary support. Together, you’ve allowed me to take a book and a few ideas, and turn them into a system with all the bells and whistles I could have hoped for.


words: 49,604

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

The kinds of projects involved, such as community theatre or voluntary environmental work, are typical third sector activities. They differ from the compulsory ‘workfare’ projects US and British politicians are so keen on by being devised and motivated by the unemployed themselves rather than thought up by a bureaucrat — surely a more productive and sensible approach. What the process needs as much as funding is a kick-start from government, but few politicians even acknowledge that the third sector exists. They even tend to grumble when key players in the social economy such as church leaders or community leaders ‘interfere’ in politics. It is an issue that has not appeared on the conventional political radar. This shows incredible myopia.


pages: 338 words: 92,385

NeoAddix by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

8-hour work day, double helix, Kickstarter, pirate software, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, stem cell

A hatred made deep by being forced for three years to keep guard each afternoon while Balthus sat warm and refreshed in a cafe, drooling over the shadow of an pudgy local schoolgirl. But if Balthus didn’t see Bruin then Pierre Bruin, bored and irritated in the slick bucket seat of his silver-grey, all terrain Peugeot didn’t see death. In the shape of a blond teenager with an angel’s open face and a thug’s speedwell blue eyes. The kamikaze assassin kickstarted a black Suzuki 750 rotary into life the moment Bruin fired the Peugeot’s ignition. All three had their vehicles switched to manual. The black Suzuki bike began trail the Peugeot as Bruin pulled out of the church carpark and began to shadow Dr Balthus’s tatty Brazilian-made Ford 4x4 on its way back to Marne.


pages: 276 words: 93,430

Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body by Sara Pascoe

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, meta-analysis, presumed consent, rolodex, selection bias, Stephen Fry, TED Talk, WikiLeaks

This is the difficulty with being an interested person with only secondary sources to rely upon; you can read one book and believe one thing and then read another that entirely contradicts the first. I need my own lab, a pipette and a gallon of fresh semen in order to find the truth – I’ll set up a Kickstarter page. Lots of animals do demonstrate versions of sperm competition. Sometimes this involves speedy sperm or congealing fluid or even the volume of sperm produced. It does seem that human males ejaculate more sperm into partners they really like. (Sara fans her face and acts coy: ‘Oh my, with that extra 0.2 of a millilitre you’re spoiling me.’)


pages: 362 words: 95,782

Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, intermodal, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

She is frantic to be milked but cannot recall that the metal suction cups, far from being her enemy, are her friend and will bring her and her swollen udder nothing but relief. Such are the trials of being a Left Bank intellectual. Either that or she is very, very, very stupid. As a reward for my efforts, Brenda takes me to the outbuildings where the cheese-making takes place. Stirring the cream and adding the animal rennet that kickstarts the fermentation, that I can manage. I am even allowed a taste of their excellent cheese. Brenda’s farm does not use tractors or much modern machinery. She prefers carthorses and sledges to motorised transport and there is much to be said for it. I notice a pair of donkeys in the field. ‘They work too?’


pages: 273 words: 93,419

Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity by Robert Albritton

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bretton Woods, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Food sovereignty, Haber-Bosch Process, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, the built environment, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile

For example, frozen French fries can be bought at 30 cents a pound and then sold at $6 per pound.262 And Burger King has shown that even supersizing hamburgers can increase profits with its recent announcement that its already large “Whopper” will be accompanied by the he-man’s “Triple Whopper”. It cannot be too surprising, then, that Americans today are eating on average 12 percent more calories per day than they were in the mid-1980s, when the trend towards larger portions got kick-started in Texas “where everything is bigger”.263 It is interesting to consider the extent to which fast food restaurants are typically subsidized by the government. Restaurant lobbies have played a major role in successfully opposing increases in the minimum wage, and this has kept their costs down. But more importantly their food inputs are significantly cheapened by government subsidies.


pages: 302 words: 91,517

Baghdad Without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia by Tony Horwitz

Ayatollah Khomeini, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cotton gin, Donald Trump, Farzad Bazoft, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mercator projection, trade route

Traffic was bumper to bumper, the buffalo backed up behind a donkey cart whose rear wheel was stuck in the mud. The donkey brayed, the buffalo bellowed, the chickens cackled madly. We'd escaped the snarled streets of downtown Cairo for a gridlocked barnyard instead. Sayed glanced over his shoulder and flashed me a loopy grin. “Home, sweet home,” he said. His goggles were spattered with mud. He kick-started the motorbike and roared off through the animal jam, and into the tangled back alleys of Shubra. I had met Sayed a few months before, in Australia, where he'd tutored me in Arabic. Our lessons foundered on the gagging “ah” sound that has no equivalent in English—or in any other language. “You sound as if you're choking on spaghetti,” Sayed would say, correcting me.


pages: 323 words: 89,795

Food and Fuel: Solutions for the Future by Andrew Heintzman, Evan Solomon, Eric Schlosser

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, big-box store, California energy crisis, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, deindustrialization, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, full employment, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, hydrogen economy, Kickstarter, land reform, megaproject, microcredit, Negawatt, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social contagion, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

Governments around the world have followed suit, aggressively setting targets for increasing the percentage of ethanol mixtures in automotive fuel. (In Brazil, 30 percent of the cars run on a sugar cane–based ethanol, which is actually more efficient than corn-based ethanol.) These targets come with huge subsidies. In the U.S. the biofuel industry received government subsidies of over $8 billion a year, which has kick-started the ethanol industry explosion. Private investment in ethanol is expected to reach $100 billion by 2010 in the U.S. alone. But there are serious questions about using food as fuel, especially the so-called yellow gold. It turns out it requires almost as much energy to produce a barrel of corn-based ethanol as one can derive from it.


pages: 713 words: 93,944

Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement by Eric Redmond, Jim Wilson, Jim R. Wilson

AGPL, Amazon Web Services, business logic, create, read, update, delete, data is the new oil, database schema, Debian, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, full text search, general-purpose programming language, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, MVC pattern, natural language processing, node package manager, random walk, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Skype, social graph, sparse data, web application

As we’ve done with other databases, we’ll import some structured data and then use it to explore some advanced concepts. Finally, we’ll develop some simple event-driven client-side applications using Node.js and learn how CouchDB’s master-master replication strategy deals with conflicting updates. Let’s get to it! 6.2 Day 1: CRUD, Futon, and cURL Redux Today we’re going to kick-start our CouchDB exploration by using CouchDB’s friendly Futon web interface to perform basic CRUD operations. After that, we’ll revisit cURL—which we used to communicate with Riak in Chapter 3, ​Riak​—to make REST calls. All libraries and drivers for CouchDB end up sending REST requests under the hood, so it makes sense to start by understanding how they work.


pages: 334 words: 93,162

This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim

airport security, Alexander Shulgin, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Burning Man, crack epidemic, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, failed state, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, global supply chain, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, new economy, New Urbanism, Parents Music Resource Center, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, women in the workforce

Acid is perfect as a rite-of-passage drug, something to help a person transition from one stage of life to another, which explains why so many traditional cultures have used psychedelics in initiation ceremonies. Researchers in Europe are studying whether psychedelics can ease the fear of death in the terminally ill. Just as it can help kick-start one’s life, so the thinking goes, it can help ease a person’s departure from it. The disappearance of LSD didn’t mean an absence of melting walls in America. Head-trippers in the first decade of the twenty-first century turned to a variety of other psychedelics, from plant-based drugs such as ayahuasca and salvia to a host of lab-synthesized “research chemicals.”


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

“We can generate a return participating in that,” he said in 2015, “and we think that’s what we should be doing.”22 Still, he can’t imagine investing directly in co-ops. There need to be other ways. Co-ops were the original crowdfunding. They were how people got together and financed a business to do things nobody else would do for them. Online crowdfunding borrows this idea, but platforms such as Kickstarter and GoFundMe subtract the co-ownership and mutual accountability of their cooperative predecessors. Platform co-ops are trying to bring this back. One of the earliest platform co-ops of all, Snowdrift.coop, is honing a model for helping its co-owners crowdfund free-and-open projects for the commons that nobody will own.


pages: 293 words: 90,714

Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism by Mikael Colville-Andersen

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, business cycle, car-free, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Enrique Peñalosa, functional fixedness, gamification, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, self-driving car, sharing economy, smart cities, starchitect, transcontinental railway, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

He was instrumental in creating the first cykelpakke—“bicycle package”—which earmarked €4 million (US$4.7 million) for improving the development, quality, comfort, and connectivity of the Copenhagen bicycle network. While the City had a budget for maintaining the infrastructure and adding to it, this extra injection of funds was exciting and it kickstarted many of the projects I’ll explore in the chapter, “Design and Innovation.” Because of his work in his own city for his own fellow citizens, Bondam is invited to speak around the world about his work and legacy. Elsewhere, Enrique Peñalosa had a massive impact on improving the quality of life in Bogotá, Colombia, when he was mayor between 1998 and 2000.


pages: 340 words: 94,464

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World by Andrew Leigh

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, Atul Gawande, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Indoor air pollution, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microcredit, Netflix Prize, nudge unit, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, price mechanism, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, statistical model, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty

Unlike Peirce, Jastrow was held in high regard by the profession; he served as president of the American Psychological Association and enjoyed fame through his regular psychology columns in popular magazines. Today, experimental psychology continues to blossom, its findings published in dozens of academic journals and eagerly reported in the media.5 But Charles Peirce, the brilliant randomista who helped kickstart the field, would spend his final two decades unable to afford to heat his house, subsisting on bread donated by the local baker, and writing on the back of old manuscripts because he was too poor to buy paper. Peirce is one of four pioneers of randomised trials whose lives I explore in this chapter.


pages: 372 words: 92,477

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

The headquarters of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation resembles an oil tanker emerging from a shimmering sea and sits directly opposite China’s ministry of foreign affairs. All over Beijing state companies are erecting giant monuments to their new power. The idea of Leviathan guiding business is hardly new. In 1791 America’s first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, presented Congress with a “Report on Manufactures,” his plan to kick-start the young country’s economy. Hamilton had no time for Adam Smith’s ideas about the hidden hand. America needed to protect its infant industries with tariffs if it wanted to see them grow up. For better or worse, pretty much every rising economic power has relied on the state to ignite growth. From the East India Company to the Korean chaebol, countries have taken what might be described as a team mentality to business.


The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021 by Greg Clark

Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, congestion charging, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, global value chain, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, industrial cluster, intangible asset, job polarisation, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rent control, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

In particular, Southern riverside stretches of the Thames, including Bankside, Bermondsey, Rotherhithe, and the Greenwich Peninsula, exemplify London’s cultural provision accomplishments around its waterfronts in the 1990s. As part of the wholesale revival of the post-industrial and depopulated South Bank, kick-started by the 1951 Festival of Britain which produced the South Bank Arts Centre and resuming in earnest in the 1980s, the regeneration established a new and integrated role for the area within an expanded central London. The spillover of the City’s finance and business services geography into immediate surrounding areas thereby stimulated an era of cultural investments and political compromise.


pages: 315 words: 89,861

The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk

3D printing, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, butterfly effect, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DeepMind, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, game design, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Minecraft, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological singularity, TED Talk, time dilation, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Zeno's paradox

The result was consistent with Wheeler’s original conclusion that the observation of a particle, even if it happened clearly in the future (in this case, the time it took the particle to travel thousands of miles), actually influenced the choice of what the particle did in the past. Meanwhile, NASA physicist Tom Campbell and Caltech physicists Houman Owhadi, Joe Sauvageau, along with David Watkinson raised money via a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to conduct and document experiments to test the simulation hypothesis. In 2017, they published a paper in which they stated that the simulation hypothesis could certainly be tested. They speculated that they could show that a simulated universe was a system that would “… as in a video game, render content (reality) only at the moment the information becomes available for observation by a player (and not at the moment of detection by a machine).” 72 Campbell and his colleagues proposed experiments that are related to the particle-wave duality—involving a quantum “eraser” or a quantum “inserter” after the particle has gone through the double slits.


pages: 299 words: 88,375

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy by Eric O'Neill

active measures, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, computer age, cryptocurrency, deep learning, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, fear of failure, full text search, index card, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, PalmPilot, ransomware, rent control, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, thinkpad, Timothy McVeigh, web application, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, young professional

Before I could blink, he had the lapels of my sport coat twisted in his fists and curled me up to eye level, leaving my toes tapping for balance on the floor. Blood rushed to his face. One eye twitched. “Why is it so important to take Garcia’s car?” I blinked away his stale coffee breath and kick-started my scrambled brain. Observe. I’d made Hanssen angry. Too angry. Orient. In my earnest pursuit of the case, I might have pushed Hanssen over the line from suspicion to paranoia—just a smidge. Decision. What the hell should I do next? Osotogari? I discarded that thought—a judo major outer reaping throw—and focused on my breath.


pages: 317 words: 98,745

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Adding to the intrigue was the fact that the majority of the victims targeted by the Flame virus were in the Middle East, with most of them in Iran, and that later Kaspersky Lab claimed to have found an authorship link between a 2009 version of Stuxnet and Flame, a claim independently backed up by the security firm Symantec, and then by a supposed U.S. intelligence insider, who leaked the story to the Washington Post. As Roel Schouwenberg of Kaspersky Lab theorized: “I think this new discovery shows that the Stuxnet team used Flame code to effectively kick-start their project. I definitely think they are two separate teams, but we do believe they are two parallel projects commissioned by the same entities.” At the very moment that Russia, China, and their allies are pushing for greater international controls over cyberspace, their primary adversary, the U.S. and its ally Israel not only engage in but appear to tacitly acknowledge their responsibility for the world’s first act of cyber sabotage against a critical infrastructure facility.


Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life by David Allen

Abraham Maslow, cognitive dissonance, index card, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, shareholder value, Skype, telemarketer

., a project) that would greatly assist in getting you more dependably engaged. In other words, what project, if implemented or completed, would automatically get you doing more of what you want to be doing? If you want to start doing more painting, perhaps a commitment to research water-color classes in your area would give that motivation a good kick-start. To some degree the twenty-thousand-feet horizon is similar to the fifty-thousand-feet one—it identifies areas that you consider especially important, not so much as a goal or direction, but rather as a definable sphere of experience. For instance, “family” could be viewed either as an area of responsibility and interest or as a fundamental core value.


Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages by Derek Bickerton

colonial rule, dark matter, European colonialism, experimental subject, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, rent control, Suez crisis 1956

They carried the system to Brazil, where the Dutch discovered it during their ill~fated attempt to take over that country, and their engineers took the ingenho, the Portuguese~invented sugar mill, north to the Caribbean. In the opinion of many economic historians, it was the sugar mill, with its unprecedented demand for heavy machinery-gears, levers, axles, and huge cast~iron wheels-that kick~started the Industrial Revo~ 154 BASTARD TONGUES lution, ultimately giving birth to the technological society we know today. What I had not previously realized about Creole colonies was the shift over time in the balance of whites and nonwhites. If there is one crucially important factor in the formation of Creoles, it is this shift.


pages: 374 words: 89,725

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

And if/when I find it’s not working, how do I figure out what’s wrong and fix it? Today, most of us are in a better position to build on our ideas and questions than ever before. We can use computer sketch programs, create YouTube videos of what we’re doing, set up beta websites, tap into social networks for help—or even launch a Kickstarter project to fund our efforts to solve a problem or create something new. Phillips didn’t have any of those resources at the time he was working on his foot. He sketched by hand, then built clay prototypes in his basement lab. He would trek up to the kitchen to bake in his oven the ingredients that would go into his superfoot.


pages: 372 words: 96,474

Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States (P.S.) by Pete Jordan

big-box store, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Kickstarter, Mason jar, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, wage slave

The afternoon shift followed the morning shift’s lead; later, the evening shift did the same. Nobody punched in. Nobody worked. 234 Dishwasher The entire dish staff met that evening. They agreed to remain on strike until Koplow was reinstated to her job. The dishwashers had another agenda in mind as well: to kickstart the stalled negotiations for a labor contract between MULO and the university. After picketing for a couple days in front of the Memorial Union—carrying signs like “Your Dishes Are Washed by Scabs!”—the pearl divers then called for a boycott. Students and faculty were asked to not patronize any of the building’s units.


pages: 349 words: 27,507

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, British Empire, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Mercator projection, Nelson Mandela, pre–internet, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Thorstein Veblen, time dilation

Despite the less-than-ingenious title, Rutherford by Mark Oliphant (New York: Elsevier, 1972) is an original and intense work, getting across Rutherford’s fury—and then embarrassed half-apologies—as he saw the world-dominating research unit he’d created slowly start to break, not least through character flaws of his own. Oliphant was one of the last of Rutherford’s promising young students, and the individual who kick-started Briggs to get the U.S. atomic bomb project going; after a distinguished post-war career that included decades of working against nuclear weapons, he died shortly before his ninety-ninth birthday, just weeks before this book was going to press. The Neutron and the Bomb: A Biography of Sir James Chadwick, by Andrew Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), is suitably neutral to match the discoverer of the neutron.


pages: 382 words: 92,138

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

In contrast, it describes scenarios where the State has provided the main source of dynamism and innovation in advanced industrial economies, by pointing out that the public sector has been the lead player in what is often referred to as the ‘knowledge economy’ – an economy driven by technological change and knowledge production and diffusion. From the development of aviation, nuclear energy, computers, the Internet, biotechnology, and today’s developments in green technology, it is, and has been, the State – not the private sector – that has kick-started and developed the engine of growth, because of its willingness to take risks in areas where the private sector has been too risk averse. In a political environment where the policy frontiers of the State are now being deliberately rolled back, the contributions of the State need to be understood more than ever.


pages: 323 words: 94,406

To the Edge of the World: The Story of the Trans-Siberian Express, the World's Greatest Railroad by Christian Wolmar

anti-communist, Cape to Cairo, Crossrail, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, railway mania, refrigerator car, stakhanovite, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban planning

It was, in short, ‘a quest to satisfy the amour propre of his nation’.11 Witte promoted the railway to foreign leaders, both to demonstrate its commercial potential once completed, but also simply because it showed that Russia was the equal of – or even better than – its European counterparts. It was not just Witte’s direct influence on the railway which allowed its construction. As Finance Minister he brought stability and growth to the Russian economy, and in many ways was responsible for kick-starting its development as a major economy. He restored confidence in the rouble by linking it to gold, allowing Russia to make large foreign loans to stimulate growth. He promoted the long-delayed industrialization of the country by encouraging manufacturing through reduced tariffs on imported machine tools, while raising tariff barriers on domestic goods in order to protect the nation’s fledgling manufacturers.


Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar--Your Brain's Silent Killers by David Perlmutter, Kristin Loberg

autism spectrum disorder, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, epigenetics, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, phenotype, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell

I’ve broken down the program into four weeks, with each week devoted to focusing on one of these specific goals. In the days leading up to the first week, you should see your doctor to have certain tests performed that will give you a baseline. You’ll also use this time to get your kitchen organized, start your supplements, begin to wean yourself from carbs, and consider a one-day fast to kick-start the program. During week 1, “Focus on Food,” you’ll start my menu plans and execute my dietary recommendations. During week 2, “Focus on Exercise,” I’ll encourage you to start a regular workout program and give you ideas for moving more throughout the day. In week 3, “Focus on Sleep,” you’ll turn your attention to your sleep habits and follow a few simple tips to ensure that you’re achieving the best sleep possible every single night, weekends included.


pages: 305 words: 93,091

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data by Kevin Mitnick, Mikko Hypponen, Robert Vamosi

4chan, big-box store, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, connected car, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, incognito mode, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, Tesla Model S, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Best to use Bitcoin to do it. 4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/12/18/german-researchers-discover-a-flaw-that-could-let-anyone-listen-to-your-cell-calls-and-read-your-texts/. 5. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/12/15-phone-3-minutes-all-thats-needed-to-eavesdrop-on-gsm-call/. 6. http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-pellicano5mar05-story.html#navtype=storygallery. 7. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/business/media/24pellicano.html?pagewanted=all. 8. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/anthony-pellicanos-prison-sentence-vacated-817558. 9. http://www.cryptophone.de/en/products/landline/. 10. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/620001568/jackpair-safeguard-your-phone-conversation/posts/1654032. 11. http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair. 12. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/engineers-as-counterspys-how-the-greek-cellphone-system-was-bugged/. 13. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?


pages: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

And I realized that all were engaged in writing a genre of book both unnamed and unrecognized by New York publishers. Since I had an MBA from Columbia Business School and a series of relative successes in business, I was dragooned into becoming an agent, initially for Gregory Bateson and John Lilly, whose books I sold quickly, and for sums that caught my attention, thus kick-starting my career as a literary agent. I never did meet Richard Feynman. THE LONG AI WINTERS This new career put me in close touch with most of the AI pioneers, and over the decades I rode with them on waves of enthusiasm, and into valleys of disappointment. In the early eighties the Japanese government mounted a national effort to advance AI.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

Instead, Green Swans makes us believe in miracles. Not metaphysical miracles, but those that seem impossible today because we look at their feasibility from a business-as-usual perspective, defined by the status quo. Like John, I am realistically optimistic. Like him, too, I also say ‘neutrality be damned.’ I hope this brilliant book kickstarts new and honest conversations in boardrooms around the world. Conversations about what side of history we are on, and what steps we will now take to become ‘future fit leaders’. Read on to get a sense of where breakthrough mindsets and innovation will take us as we work to deliver the Global Goals.


pages: 328 words: 90,677

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

The dramatic impact of these micro-EVs present a radical challenge to the entire premise underpinning Tesla’s success in the US. Tesla was created to explicitly overturn the assumption that all EVs had to be tiny, unsafe “golf carts.” In the car-centric US, Tesla’s success at designing safe, powerful, status-conferring long-range EVs kick-started the premium plug-in segment. However, established premium brands are now starting to pour into that market. And the Nissan-Renault Alliance is even moving to fill the gap between micro-EVs and more affordable electric cars, building an electric version of its $5,000 India-market Renault Kwid in China that could bring real car luxuries and about eighty miles of electric range closer to the $10,000 price point.


pages: 350 words: 90,898

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport

Cal Newport, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, fault tolerance, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Garrett Hardin, hive mind, Inbox Zero, interchangeable parts, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Nash equilibrium, passive income, Paul Graham, place-making, pneumatic tube, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, work culture , Y Combinator

* * * — If you talk with a scholar of the history of technology, you’ll likely discover a fascination with a seemingly unlikely topic: the rise of medieval feudalism in the early Carolingian Empire. Historians trace the origins of this style of government to the reign of Charles Martel, grandfather to Charlemagne. In the eighth century CE, Martel kick-started feudalism by confiscating Church lands and redistributing them to his vassals. Why did Martel begin grabbing Church lands? This question was answered in a magisterial tract published in 1887 by the German historian Heinrich Brunner, who argued that granting land to loyal subjects was necessary for Martel to maintain horse-mounted warriors for his army.10 In later periods of history, rulers might simply tax their subjects and use the revenue to fund their military, but in the early medieval period, land was the primary source of capital.


The Wood Age: How One Material Shaped the Whole of Human History by Roland Ennos

British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, Easter island, experimental subject, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, place-making, rewilding, three-masted sailing ship, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

At last people could make precise joints such as the mortise and tenon, overlapping joints, and dovetails. The huge benefits this conferred can be seen in that the appearance of copper and bronze tools coincided with the emergence of two wooden technologies that were to transform transport in the Old World and kick-start the emergence of international trade: plank ships and wheels. We saw in the last chapter that Neolithic log boats were perfectly good at transporting people and goods short distances up and down rivers and across lakes. However, their round hulls made them inherently unstable, and as they were limited in size by the diameter of tree trunks, they were narrow and low in the water, so that they could never be seaworthy.


pages: 339 words: 92,785

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

As ever in military circles, enthusiasts excitedly deployed new jargon. All the talk was of ‘network enabled warfare’ that would allow ‘information dominance’, seamlessly connecting ‘sensor and shooter’. It was a computerised ‘revolution in military affairs’—another favoured bit of terminology. At its heart were great masses of data—and ‘big data’ would soon kickstart the new revolution in AI research. New warbots made their public debut in 1991—the Tomahawk cruise missile, memorably described by one correspondent in Baghdad as flying down a street, and turning left at an intersection; and the JDAM, the joint directed attack munition, a satellite guided bomb.


pages: 335 words: 94,578

Spectrum Women: Walking to the Beat of Autism by Barb Cook, Samantha Craft

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, financial independence, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Maui Hawaii, neurotypical, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, phenotype, rolodex, seminal paper, sexual politics, theory of mind, women in the workforce

I am not sure if it is due to how frantically my brain works and that it needs a bucket instead of a glass to harness the thoughts, but either way, I was progressively becoming addicted. When the opportunities arose for going out with a group of people, the pub was usually my first suggestion in meeting up. There I could quickly consume two drinks to help kick-start the calming of the mind. A sip here and a puff of cigarette there was a perfect recipe for me to cope socially. Mind you, prior to arriving at the venue, I would have smoked half a packet of cigarettes just to calm my nerves. By the time I hit the legal age for drinking at 18, I had already become addicted.


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

For more than half a century, we had fantasized about a future where we could stay at home in comfortable clothes, eat, play, work, learn, socialize, exercise, shop, and entertain ourselves without ever getting up. This was the promise at the heart of every science fiction fantasy, each tech company’s annual pageant of new products, every pitch from a digital start-up and slickly produced Kickstarter video, every sappy commercial from your overpriced national telecom conglomerate, featuring the happy family of four on their own devices in every room of the house, enjoying the benefits of unlimited streaming data (*innumerable restrictions apply). The digital future we worked to build our entire life finally arrived, and instead of finding ourselves thrust into the liberating, utopian place it had promised, we awoke in a luxurious, dystopian prison.


pages: 292 words: 87,720

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

It was just as simple as that.’4 In the meantime, Musk would have to rely on the green barons – the companies that controlled the emerging clean energy supply chain. A hundred years ago Ford’s Model T had created fortunes for the early oil drillers and refiners, leading to the creation of the global oil industry and some of the world’s largest companies. Now Musk had kickstarted a similar raw material rush. ‘The spice must flow … the new spice,’ Musk said, referring to the 1965 science fiction novel Dune, which detailed the struggle for control of a planet that produced the spice necessary for space navigation and the extension of life. Now that spice was a small group of metals – lithium, cobalt, copper and nickel.


The Rough Guide to England by Rough Guides

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, bike sharing, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, car-free, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, Corn Laws, country house hotel, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Downton Abbey, Edmond Halley, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, period drama, plutocrats, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl

Granary Square and the canal Granary Square, N1C 4AA • King’s Cross Visitor Centre Stable St • Mon–Fri 10am–5pm, Sat 10am–4pm • 020 3479 1795, kingscross.co.uk • Camley Street Natural Park 12 Camley St, N1C 4PW • Daily: April–Sept 10am–5pm; Oct–March 10am–4pm • Free • 020 7833 2311, wildlondon.org.uk • King’s Cross St Pancras From King’s Cross station, walk north up King’s Boulevard and you reach the Regent’s Canal and the district that once serviced the industries dependent on the canal and railways. The relocation of Eurostar to St Pancras kick-started redevelopment here, which is now well underway, transforming 67 acres into a new city quarter. It will ultimately include twenty new streets and ten new public squares, with around twenty venerable former industrial structures, mostly designed by Lewis Cubitt, surviving. Beyond the canal is the centrepiece Granary Square, a large open space almost entirely taken over by a grid of playful dancing fountains that are irresistible to children on hot days.

Mains such as steamed panache of Hastings fish cost around £15, or you can pick and choose from tasting dishes at £3.75 each. There’s plenty of outside seating in summer. Mon–Fri noon–2pm & 6–9pm, Sat & Sun noon–9.30pm. < Back to The Southeast Eastbourne Like so many of the southeast’s seaside resorts, EASTBOURNE was kick-started into life in the 1840s, when the Brighton, Lewes and Hastings Rail Company built a branch line from Lewes to the coast. Nowadays Eastbourne has a solid reputation as a retirement town by the sea, and though the contemporary Towner Gallery has introduced a splash of modernity, the town’s charms remain for the most part sedate and old-fashioned.

The archetypal Sixties’ London band, The Kinks, recorded some of the most thoughtful, poignant and enduring pop charmers of the era, in between bouts of scrapping onstage. Swinging London was still the place to be when a wave of hippy lifestyles and free love washed over England from sunny California, while the now-demolished UFO on Tottenham Court Road kick-started British psychedelia, booking Pink Floyd and Soft Machine in as house bands, and promoting the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream at Alexandra Palace in 1967 – London’s most notorious gig of the decade. Several bands playing a new style of hard rock sprang from the meeting of classic rhythm guitar bands with these new influences: Jethro Tull formed in 1967, and Led Zeppelin in 1968; Iron Maiden got their act together in 1975.


pages: 721 words: 238,678

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem by Tim Shipman

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Kickstarter, kremlinology, land value tax, low interest rates, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, working poor

Government lawyers had said it was impossible to do anything else, but in an environment where ministers like Andrea Leadsom were proposing to start tearing up regulations and the Daily Mail was running a ‘scrap EU red tape’ campaign, the move took some guts. May delivered the second announcement during an interview on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on the Sunday morning, pledging to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty – the mechanism for kickstarting two years of Brexit negotiations – by the end of March 2017. May had bought time during the leadership election by saying she would not trigger Article 50 before the end of the year. Senior civil servants in DExEU and Ivan Rogers in Brussels had warned her that announcing a timetable was a bad idea because the moment Britain fired the starting gun, ‘you lose pretty much all the leverage you have’, putting Britain on a countdown clock where the other twenty-seven countries set the rules of the negotiation.

(Sunday Times/News Syndication) May becomes the first foreign leader to visit Donald Trump at the White House. The president, who has a phobia about slopes and stairs, grabbed her hand for balance. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images) 29 March 2017. Theresa May signs the Article 50 declaration kickstarting two years of Brexit talks. Aides argued about whether she should use a black or blue pen. (Christopher Furlong/WPA Pool/Getty Images) May received EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker in Downing Street in April 2017. Details of their dinner soon leaked. (Mark Thomas/Alamy Stock Photo) ‘Spreadsheet’ Philip Hammond, May’s chancellor, botched his budget and fought a rearguard action for a ‘soft Brexit’.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Whether deepwater drilling, fracking, or mining; whether pipelines, big rigs, or export terminals, communities are terrified about what these activities will do to their water systems. This fear is what binds together the southeastern Montana cattle ranchers with the Northern Cheyenne with the Washington State communities fighting coal trains and export terminals. Fear of contaminated drinking water is what kick-started the anti-fracking movement (and when a proposal surfaced that would allow the drilling of roughly twenty thousand fracking wells in the Delaware River Basin—the source of freshwater for fifteen million Americans—it is what kicked the movement squarely into the U.S. mainstream).18 The movement against Keystone XL would, similarly, never have resonated as powerfully as it did had TransCanada not made the inflammatory decision to route the pipeline through the Ogallala Aquifer—a vast underground source of freshwater beneath the Great Plains that provides drinking water to approximately two million people and supplies roughly 30 percent of the country’s irrigation groundwater.19 In addition to the contamination threats, almost all these extractive projects also stand out simply for how much water they require.

Bast, “A Heartland Letter to People for the American Way,” The Heartland Institute, August 20, 1996, http://heartland.org; “Heartland Institute,” Conservative Transparency, Bridge Project, American Bridge 21st Century Foundation, http://conservativetransparency.org. “MERITS OF OUR POSITIONS”: “Reply to Our Critics,” The Heartland Institute, http://heartland.org/reply-to-critics; LEAKED DOCUMENTS: “2012 Fund-raising Plan,” The Heartland Institute, January 15, 2012, pp. 20–21. 33. “Money Troubles: How to Kick-Start the Economy,” Fareed Zakaria GPS, CNN, August 15, 2010; “Factsheet: Cato Institute,” ExxonSecrets.org, Greenpeace USA, http://www.exxonsecrets.org; “Koch Industries Climate Denial Front Group: Cato Institute,” Greenpeace USA, http://www.greenpeace.org; “Case Study: Dr. Willie Soon, a Career Fueled by Big Oil and Coal,” Greenpeace USA, June 28, 2011, http://www.greenpeace.org. 34.


pages: 347 words: 99,969

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher

Alfred Russel Wallace, correlation does not imply causation, Kickstarter, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker

Nouns denoting men (and male gods) are masculine; those denoting women and goddesses are feminine; everything else—objects, animals (and infants)—is neuter. Another straightforward case was Sumerian, the language spoken on the banks of the Euphrates some five thousand years ago by the people who invented writing and kick-started history. The Sumerian gender system was based not on sex but on the distinction between human and non-human, and nouns were assigned consistently to the appropriate gender. The only point of indecision was with the noun “slave,” which was sometimes deemed human and sometimes assigned to the non-human gender.


pages: 370 words: 102,823

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

Even if this leverage ratio of 15 were achieved (many observers fear it will not be, as much of the money contributed is not an addition to fiscal resources), €315 billion over three years represents an annual investment boost of approximately 0.75 per cent of EU GDP, which is far short of what is needed to kick-start sufficient growth. By comparison, in 2009–2010 the US government’s stimulus package amounted to around 2.8 per cent of GDP per annum over two years.17 An order of magnitude closer to this is needed today in Europe. The Juncker plan is not of sufficient size to provide a significant and sustainable stimulus to the European economy.


pages: 724 words: 106,509

The Men's Health Big Book of Exercises: Four Weeks to a Leaner, Stronger, More Muscular You! by Adam Campbell

Kickstarter

By simply avoiding foods that contain added sugar, you'll automatically eliminate most junk food. So your diet will instantly become healthier. And for most people, this strategy also dramatically reduces calorie intake. So you start losing weight, without counting calories or restricting entire food groups. Try it for 2 weeks. If this doesn't kickstart fat loss, move on to step 2. Step 2: Cut Back on Starch Starches are the main carbs in bread, pasta, and rice. And not just in the processed versions—such as white bread—but also in the 100 percent whole-grain kind. Of course, you've probably been told you actually need more of these foods. You don't.


pages: 389 words: 98,487

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car by Tim Harford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, collective bargaining, congestion charging, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, market design, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, new economy, Pearl River Delta, price discrimination, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, special economic zone, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Vickrey auction

For a design intended to work on a global level see Peter Cramton and Suzi Kerr, “Tradeable Carbon Permit Auctions” (working paper, University of Maryland, 1998), http:// www.market-design.com/files/98wp-tradeable-carbon-permit-auctions.pdf. Paul Klemperer, the auction designer who features in chapter 7, helped to design an auction for the United Kingdom government to kick-start their program of tradable emission permits. Anyone doubting my statement that “economists have long been in the forefront of analyzing environmental problems” will be surprised to hear that one of the first environmentalists was also one of the first and most famous economists, Thomas Malthus, whose study of overpopulation was published in 1798.


pages: 367 words: 102,188

Sleepyhead: Narcolepsy, Neuroscience and the Search for a Good Night by Henry Nicholls

A. Roger Ekirch, confounding variable, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, global pandemic, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mouse model, placebo effect, Saturday Night Live, stem cell, traumatic brain injury, web application, Yom Kippur War

Most likely causing a constriction of blood vessels and a rise in blood pressure, says Donadio. These are precisely the sorts of changes we see in animals that are playing dead. It’s a useful skill to have. If Massimo wants to go to sleep, all he needs to do is to bring on a cataplectic attack and keep himself there. It doesn’t take long before sleep takes over. He can use it to kick-start a lucid dream. With the cataplexy underway, he just begins to think of the subject matter, like being a world-class footballer, for instance, and when the sleep comes he’s there. * * * With a bunch of cataplectic attacks captured on film, the diagnosis of narcolepsy and cataplexy was looking increasingly likely for me.


pages: 351 words: 101,051

Also Human: The Inner Lives of Doctors by Caroline Elton

Alvin Roth, fear of failure, feminist movement, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Libby Zion, longitudinal study, medical residency, meta-analysis, Rubik’s Cube, traumatic brain injury, women in the workforce

Numbers matter not only in medical research—but also in medical education. In the UK, the GMC is now publishing data that examine the relationship between ethnicity and progression through medical school and beyond. Just as Doll put evidence about the links between smoking and lung cancer in the public domain—thus kick-starting public health campaigns to reduce smoking—the fact that data are publicly available on the GMC website is a vital first step. And the figures demonstrate, beyond all doubt, that there is a real problem. If one looks, for example, at progression through GP training, 10.3 percent of international medical graduates (IMGs) are graded as failing to make adequate progress.


pages: 329 words: 102,469

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, centre right, clean water, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Peace of Westphalia, postnationalism / post nation state, Project for a New American Century, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

It prefers more cautious, irenic formulations such as “prosperity, peace, and stability,” with “political pluralism and democracy” consigned to a second paragraph.41 But the main transatlantic differences are those about means that we’ve already rehearsed, with Europeans preferring quiet diplomacy, “constructive engagement,” and U.N.-led multilateralism to an American policy of kick-starting regional democratization through the unilateral invasion of Iraq, accompanied by a megaphone diplomacy of eradicating evil. The fundamental interests of Europe and America in the near East are, if anything, more convergent in the early twenty-first century than before. For a start, both Europe and America are painfully dependent on imported energy.


Interplanetary Robots by Rod Pyle

Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Elon Musk, independent contractor, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, X Prize

While much of this centers on the Trump administration's new directives for NASA to prepare for a return of humans to the moon, or at least its orbit, with a lunar orbiting station called the Gateway,1 there is also interest in lunar activity within the private sector. This interest has been slowly building for a couple of decades, but was kick-started by a competition ultimately called the Google Lunar XPRIZE (GLXP). This competition was a part of the larger XPRIZE competitions, which started with the Ansari XPRIZE. This original XPRIZE was announced in 1996 with a cash award of $10 million for the first nongovernmental organization to fly a reusable crewed spacecraft into space (which officially starts at an altitude of 62 miles) twice within two weeks.


pages: 337 words: 103,522

The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think by Marcus Du Sautoy

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Automated Insights, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, John Conway, Kickstarter, Loebner Prize, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, move 37, music of the spheres, Mustafa Suleyman, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons

At last, after many sleepless nights, he could relax. ‘Mathematics is one of the last great romantic disciplines,’ he said, ‘where basically one genius has to hold everything in his head and understand everything all at once.’ But we are reaching capacity with our human bit of hardware. Gonthier hopes his work will kick-start a period of greater trust and sustained collaboration between human and machine. The limits of our human hardware There is a growing sense among young mathematicians that many regions of the mathematical landscape are becoming so dense and complex that you could spend all three years of your PhD just trying to understand the problem your research supervisor has set you.


pages: 348 words: 102,438

Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside by Dieter Helm

3D printing, Airbnb, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital map, facts on the ground, food miles, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, quantitative easing, rewilding, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

They could look back at the 2011 White Paper on ‘The Natural Choice’ as the moment when two core ideas took root: that it is the duty of any generation to look after its natural capital so that it is passed on in better shape to the next; and that no economic policy makes sense unless the environment is at the heart of it, rather than as a separate silo of nice things that might be afforded if the growth of the rest of the economy makes us rich enough to care about them. We have become richer over the last 200 years, and on aggregate the environment has become poorer. The 2011 White Paper was pretty toothless. It was full of aspiration, but not content. Yet it has kick-started a positive process that may yet bear considerable fruit. It has provided the pioneers and now the 25 Year Environment Plan, which embeds the three key principles – public money for public goods, polluter pays and net environment gain – and these have now been advanced for agricultural policy too.


Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The singer and songwriter Amanda Palmer released her song “Machete” and a David Bowie tribute entitled Strung Out in Heaven: A Bowie String Quartet Tribute exclusively on Patreon. With more than 11,000 patrons, she has grossed over $1 million in two years. As Palmer says, “I’ve been struggling since I got off my label in 2008 to find the right platform for ongoing support, through which I can release constant material (and get paid).” She has also used Kickstarter to crowdfund the cost of producing music and videos.23 The Radiohead experiment demonstrated something else, which had already been discovered in countless pie-splitting economic experiments: not everyone is motivated purely by self-interest. In two-person pie-splitting experiments (often called the Ultimatum Game), the first player makes a proposal about how to divide a fixed pie, say $100, between herself and a second player.


pages: 364 words: 100,898

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

Black Lives Matter, gentrification, Kickstarter, off grid, place-making, sexual politics, Snapchat

“No, I’m all right,” I said. I wasn’t hurting anymore, but in place of the pain was something else, something sitting heavy that I couldn’t quite identify. * * * Wanting to kill some time before I got home to reminders of my disintegrating relationship, I went to Brixton for some Jamaican bun, hoping that I could kick-start my appetite with my favorite comfort food. I climbed the steps out of the Underground and stood catching my breath at the top. I inhaled a little too hard, and the smell of incense from the street sellers made me sneeze as I turned into the market. I hopped over a puddle that looked as suspicious as it smelled sour and carried on weaving through what always felt like thousands of people.


pages: 344 words: 96,690

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

business process, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, demand response, Donald Trump, estate planning, Firefox, folksonomy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, off-the-grid, Parler "social media", Salesforce, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, social bookmarking, social intelligence, Streisand effect, the long tail, Tony Hsieh

The company’s customers were already active with social technologies, and the company culture encouraged reaching out to customers in new and innovative ways—but very few social initiatives were under way already. That is, the company strategists knew they had to connect with their customers in the groundswell; they just didn’t know how. To get the company kick-started, the executives planned a multiday retreat with multiple outside speakers. By the time we saw these executives on the third day of their off-site, they were already buzzing about ways they could use the new technologies, from setting up a MySpace page to creating a viral campaign that leveraged a podcast.


pages: 383 words: 98,179

Last Trains: Dr Beeching and the Death of Rural England by Charles Loft

Beeching cuts, computer age, Downton Abbey, full employment, high-speed rail, intermodal, Kickstarter, price mechanism, railway mania, Suez crisis 1956, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning

Not only the number of lines, but the number of competing separate networks, the short distances between stations and the complex framework of regulations protecting passengers and businesses from ruthless exploitation by the railways’ monopoly made less and less sense once significant numbers of buses and lorries existed to rival the stopping train and the pick-up goods. When a small consignment of merchandise needed to be taken to or collected from a railway siding by lorry, the greater convenience of simply taking it to its final destination in one road journey was fairly obvious. The First World War kick-started the road haulage industry, as the government ordered large numbers of lorries for use on the Western Front and at the end of the war sold them off at a time when large numbers of men who had been trained to use them needed work and possessed demobilisation grants with which to purchase vehicles.


pages: 357 words: 98,853

Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome by Nessa Carey

dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, epigenetics, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kickstarter, mouse model, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs

It also showed that the only real block to bi-maternal reproduction is the DNA methylation pattern at key genes. It disproved a previous hypothesis that sperm were required because the sperm themselves carried certain necessary accessory factors such as particular proteins or RNA molecules required to kick-start development properly.16 Going back to Figure 10.2 we can see that imprinting patterns may change during development. Imprinted control of gene expression seems to be particularly important during development. In mice, for example, most of the 140 or so imprinted genes are only imprinted in the placenta.


pages: 302 words: 97,076

The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher

Bletchley Park, centre right, colonial rule, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Scramble for Africa, trade route, urban sprawl, éminence grise

But instead of power politics they talked of trophy bears that were once hunted in the forest through which we had walked, of how Milan as a boy had climbed up to an eagle’s nest on Mount Dinara to kidnap a chick that he then reared as a pet, and a whole stream of other tall mountain tales. As the stories grew, I went inside and unrolled my sleeping bag. The sound of scurrying mice could not keep me from sleep. It proved impossible to kick-start Arnie the following morning, so I decided to begin without him. I fancied climbing to the top of Tent Mountain, a challenge that Arnie was happy to miss. His new boots had blistered him cruelly during the climb to the lake, so I left him with a packet of anti-rub plasters and the agreement that he would follow me after exactly two hours.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

The answer was to force the banks to renegotiate the mortgages with the homeowners, reducing the principal according to the lower, real-world price. Obama provided several modest incentives for banks that voluntarily reduced the principal according to the lower, real-world price. But this would have meant that the banks absorb or at least share the losses from the drop in housing prices. Most refused. Had Obama been willing and able to kick-start faster growth with spending, the economic knot might have been loosened. Consumers would have had more income, banks could have started making profitable business loans, and housing prices might have stabilized. But in the absence of growth, the Federal Reserve kept the leaking system afloat by pumping up the largest banks with cheap money.


pages: 391 words: 99,963

The Weather of the Future by Heidi Cullen

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, air freight, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, availability heuristic, back-to-the-land, bank run, California gold rush, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, data science, Easter island, energy security, hindcast, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, millennium bug, ocean acidification, out of africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, trade route, urban planning, Y2K

Estimates project that the population should stabilize at around 250 million. That still is a lot people to feed on a plot of land that is only the size of Iowa, and which is expected to shrink by one-fourth, owing to a rising sea level, by the middle of the century. Rahman has an idea that he thinks might help kick-start adaptation programs: an international center for climate change adaptation that’s actually located in the developing world. As he says, “You know you are underdeveloped when most of the literature about your country is written by people outside your country. We decided to set up the center inside the developing world.”


pages: 371 words: 98,534

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

They may also be tailored to deliver financial stability, greater efficiencies and competition for local enterprises, and a favourable environment for national champions in key sectors and new technologies. All outcomes, though, will be in the context of meeting the Party’s political goals and objectives. It is not normal, however, to change and improve things, or to kick-start needed productivity growth, without experiencing sometimes painful disruption, the outcomes of which involve both winners and losers, and the conquest of interests that are hostile or have something to lose. In his seminal writing, the US economist Mancur Olson emphasised why, in the ascent to industrial leadership, states had to prevent vested interests, such as the military, steel magnates, railroad tycoons, bankers and so on, from blocking structural change in the economy and society.15 He called these vested interests ‘distributional coalitions’, and said that they tend to have crowded agendas, have difficulties reaching effective decisions in a timely way, have recourse to increasingly complex regulations, and build layer upon layer of government.


Data and the City by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic management, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, dematerialisation, digital divide, digital map, digital rights, distributed ledger, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, floating exchange rates, folksonomy, functional programming, global value chain, Google Earth, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, nowcasting, open economy, openstreetmap, OSI model, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, place-making, power law, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, semantic web, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, software studies, statistical model, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, text mining, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, urban planning, urban sprawl, web application

Even more so: these interfaces have started to function as the market places and theatre spaces through which citizens perform part of their lives and forge connections with others. If Castells’s city can be understood as an offline interface that produces urban publics, our digital interfaces have taken over some of the functions of the city. Whether it is finding a date through Tinder, a ride through Uber, a power drill to borrow through Peerby, funders through Kickstarter, or a plumber through Taskrabbit, the network society has been turning into a platform society. To come back to Batty’s insight: computers are now not just tools that automate and optimize existing urban functions such as traffic flows, they have partially taken over essential characteristics of the cityness we find in cities: their functioning as a ‘market place’ and a ‘theatre’.


Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder

Berlin Wall, centre right, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, index card, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Prenzlauer Berg, telemarketer, the built environment

My great friends in Berlin provided a much needed sense of normal life while I explored Stasiland: Annette and Gerhard Pomp, Charlotte Smith and Markus Ickstadt, Harald and Marianne Meinhold, Lorenz and Monika Prell and Rainer Merkel. My father John and my late mother Kate were enormously supportive. I am especially grateful to my publisher Michael Heyward, whose unstinting enthusiasm kickstarted me many times whilst I was writing, and whose editing is magnificent. Most of all I am indebted to Craig Allchin, my constant inspiration, who asked all the right questions, without ever questioning whether this was worth four years of our lives. About the Author Anna Funder was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1966, and grew up there and in Paris.


pages: 331 words: 96,989

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam L. Alter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, death from overwork, drug harm reduction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Richard Thaler, Robert Durst, side project, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, three-martini lunch

Your body is convinced that that is the side of the skyscraper. That’s not even a super high-res or super immersive VR platform. So we have some crazy days ahead of us. VR has been around for decades, but it’s now on the cusp of going mainstream. In 2013, a VR company called Oculus VR raised $2.5 million on Kickstarter. Oculus VR was promoting a headset for video games called the Rift. Until recently, most people thought of VR as a tool for gaming, but that changed when Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion in 2014. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had big ideas for the Oculus Rift that went far beyond games. “This is just the start,” Zuckerberg said.


The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, blood diamond, citizen journalism, creative destruction, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, future of work, glass ceiling, global village, Hacker Ethic, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, patent troll, peer-to-peer, prisoner's dilemma, public intellectual, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side hustle, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog

Rules and regulations will be put in place, but graffiti will be an important tool, a digital scribbling democracy keeping the legislators in check. The future of the public domain is uncertain, but one thing’s for sure: it’s going to be a colorful story. CHAPTER 5 Boundaries Disco Nuns, the Death of the Record Industry, and Our Open-Source Future Sister Alicia Donohoe moving the crowd in the party room, Christmas 1947. Not many nuns kick-start revolutions, and almost none have done so by DJing at children’s birthday parties. But Sister Alicia Donohoe was never out to change the world—she was just trying to make sure the kids were having a good time. Alicia grew up in 1930s Boston, in the suburb of Dorchester, the daughter of Anna and John Donohoe—a child of the Great Depression.


pages: 322 words: 99,918

A Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months Unearthing the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country by Helen Russell

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, death from overwork, do what you love, Downton Abbey, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, microdosing, obamacare, offshore financial centre, remote working, retail therapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, work culture

I was prepared for the fact that we’d be starting over. We’d convinced ourselves that this would be ‘liberating’, forcing us to try new things and meet new people and broadening our horizons. But this doesn’t seem quite so appealing when we find ourselves sitting at home, alone, again, wondering how to kick-start our Danish social life. ‘If Denmark has a population the size of South London,’ I tell Lego Man, ‘and we reduce our catchment area to, say, a twenty-kilometre radius of where we live and narrow it down to people within a two-decade age bracket, the number of people we may actually like gets even smaller.


pages: 325 words: 97,162

The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life. by Robin Sharma

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, dematerialisation, epigenetics, fake news, Grace Hopper, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, index card, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Rosa Parks, telemarketer, white picket fence

“All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end,” interrupted the artist, reinforcing another of The Spellbinder’s brain tattoos. “Yes,” agreed the billionaire. “The next step of the four-part pattern to program in a new ritual is to make sure you have a preset reward in place. The reward is what kickstarts and then grows your drive to get the new habit done. Always use the power of rewards for the advancement of your triumphs. So, let’s assume you do what you know to be right instead of following what’s easy and sprint out of bed fast—as soon as the alarm goes off. I’ll explain exactly what to do during your Victory Hour from 5 to 6 AM when I walk you through The 20/20/20 Formula.”


pages: 350 words: 98,077

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

The DeepMind group realized that they could improve their system by complementing Monte Carlo tree search with a deep convolutional neural network. Given the current board position as input, AlphaGo uses a trained deep convolutional neural network to assign a rough value to all possible moves from the current position. Then Monte Carlo tree search uses those values to kick-start its search: rather than initially choosing moves at random, Monte Carlo tree search uses values output by the ConvNet as an indicator of which initial moves should be preferred. Imagine that you are AlphaGo staring at a board position: before you start the Monte Carlo process of performing roll-outs from that position, the ConvNet is whispering in your ear which of the possible moves from your current position are probably the best ones.


pages: 405 words: 103,723

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism by Ruth Kinna

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, complexity theory, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Herbert Marcuse, intentional community, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, late capitalism, means of production, meritocracy, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, New Journalism, Occupy movement, post scarcity, public intellectual, rewilding, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, union organizing, wage slave

Plotting a parallel history of conventional and resistance politics from the eighteenth century, Graeber contrasts constitutional rule to ‘communal self-governance’.89 The first has its origins in the historic re-attribution of sovereignty from monarchs to the people. This transferred power to an educated elite – not coincidentally, all white men who enjoyed significant economic advantages and thought themselves ‘wiser and better able to understand the people’s true interests than the people themselves’.90 At the same time, it kick-started in the 1790s Tom Paine’s popular campaign against political and economic corruption. For Graeber, this was an instance of a transnational, transhistoric campaign for democracy and against the constitution. Occupy gave it new expression and in doing so created a model for self-government that also challenged hierarchy, privilege and domination.


Your Own Allotment : How to Find It, Cultivate It, and Enjoy Growing Your Own Food by Russell-Jones, Neil.

Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, discovery of the americas, Easter island, information retrieval, Kickstarter, mass immigration, spice trade

G ‘In-betweenies’. Hotter-rotters Some things, like grass mowings and soft, young weeds, rot quickly. They work as ‘activators’ or ‘hotter rotters’ and are also called ‘greens’. These are often the main things that many gardeners have, and precious little else.While they will get the compost heap kick-started, on their own, unfortunately, they 28 • Organic Matter 271 will rapidly decay into just a sludgy, smelly mess called silage, which is also what farmers do with grass to make winter fodder (although through controlled fermentation) in a silo. For best results you must mix the grass and weeds with ‘tougher’ more ‘woody’ items – the ‘slower-goers’ – often called ‘browns’.


pages: 335 words: 97,468

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

That part should be left to human beings. When the accounting firm EY audited the experiment, they showed that, with de Blok’s approach, patients got better in half the time. When the experiment was expanded, costs were 30 per cent less than the traditional approach. A single, simple experiment had proved a revelation and kickstarted a revolution. When asked what about the experiment had surprised him, de Blok’s answer was succinct. ‘I never imagined it could be so easy to make such a huge difference so fast,’ he laughed. Since then, de Blok named the company Buurtzorg (which simply means ‘neighbourhood care’) and, with 10,000 nurses, it now provides approximately two thirds of all homecare nursing in the Netherlands.


pages: 372 words: 98,659

The Miracle Pill by Peter Walker

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, car-free, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, coronavirus, COVID-19, driverless car, experimental subject, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, Sidewalk Labs, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, twin studies, Wall-E, washing machines reduced drudgery

Many dozens of studies have proved this effect, some showing that even walking on a treadmill can help notably reduce lipaemia, the technical term for high fat concentrations in the blood.5 This effect is more significant in people who are otherwise fit, but still happens if you are not. The other hugely significant function kickstarted by movement is the processing of sugars in our bloodstream, a vital ability in the prevention of type 2 diabetes and other metabolic disorders. Skeletal muscle plays a key role in this, and as we saw with Richard Mackenzie’s experiments, even a single bout of activity can improve the body’s response to insulin.


pages: 300 words: 99,410

Why the Dutch Are Different: A Journey Into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the Acclaimed Guide to Travel in Holland by Ben Coates

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, drug harm reduction, Easter island, failed state, financial innovation, glass ceiling, invention of the printing press, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, megacity, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, short selling, spice trade, starchitect, trade route, urban sprawl, work culture

As the VOC and WIC helped make Dutch merchants rich, artists in turn benefited from the patronage of those who – in keeping with their Calvinist faith – believed that wealth should be used to support meaningful cultural pursuits. Keen to keep their customers happy, the artists often focused on themes reflecting the sources of their wealth: the sea, the windmills and the fertile farmland. Newly affluent merchants were also keen to document their own successes, commissioning self-portraits that kick-started the careers of portraitists such as Hals and Rembrandt. Nevertheless, ownership of fine art was not restricted to the wealthy. Visitors from other countries often expressed amazement that even simple farmers in the Netherlands owned beautiful works of art. As a result of this varied market, Dutch painters produced high-quality works covering an unusually wide range of genres, from portraits to landscapes to still lifes.


pages: 357 words: 99,456

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

In the early months of this scandal, the New York Times said Trump’s campaign had “repeated contacts” with Russian intelligence; the Wall Street Journal told us our spy agencies were withholding intelligence from the new president out of fear he was compromised; news leaked out that our spy chiefs had even told other countries like Israel not to share their intel with us because the Russians might have “leverages of pressure” on Trump. CNN told us Trump officials had been in “constant contact” with “Russians known to U.S. intelligence,” and the former director of the CIA, who’d helped kick-start the investigation that led to Mueller’s probe, said the president was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” committing acts “nothing short of treasonous.” Hillary Clinton insisted Russians “could not have known how to weaponize” political ads unless they’d been “guided” by Americans. Asked if she meant Trump, she said, “It’s pretty hard not to.”


pages: 309 words: 97,320

Fire and Ice: The Volcanoes of the Solar System by Natalie Starkey

active measures, carbon-based life, COVID-19, Easter island, Eyjafjallajökull, global pandemic, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, lockdown, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, supervolcano

But either way, the fact that water has been detected within a wide range of lunar rocks, and even found within ice deposits at the lunar poles, means that scientists can conclude that the interior of the Moon – its mantle – contains water. This water, and other volatiles such as sulphur, chlorine and carbon monoxide, to name but a few, can account for the extra ‘fuel’ that is needed to kick-start those fire-fountain-type explosive eruptions. The fact that the Moon is now known to contain water opens some exciting opportunities for our future exploration of space. When we eventually send humans back to the Moon and even set up a permanent base for exploration of the lunar surface and surrounding Solar System, it will be incredibly useful if they are able to obtain their own water in situ.


pages: 320 words: 95,629

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Then reversing that by holding my breath. This sequence has a purpose. I am my adrenal gland. Far above me in my brain, the nucleus of the solitary tract buried in the medulla oblongata is firing. An electrical signal arrives to me from Arvind’s brain. It says, “Stressing out. Low oxygen! Careful!” I immediately release adrenaline to kick-start a fast defensive response. In milliseconds adrenaline spills out of my inner layer of cells into a dense network of blood vessels. The adrenaline hormones do their work almost instantaneously. They flood Arvind’s body, acting on receptors in nerves, muscle cells, and immune cells. Arvind’s heart rate spikes, his breathing rate spikes, and his white blood cells release anti-inflammation molecules called cytokines.


pages: 412 words: 97,696

Bad Actors by Mick Herron

butterfly effect, fake news, Kickstarter, place-making, social distancing

But that same blood had the tendency to remind him that he was involved in humanity, like it or not, which in turn meant he’d repeated the same stupid error and done somebody a favour. The same somebody, in fact, that he’d done a favour for first time round. Which was why, lying in bed, he had the not-unfamiliar sense of having kick-started something he’d regret. To cheer himself up, he read the text that had woken him. It was from his landlord: the rent hadn’t been paid. Which meant his bank had screwed up again—the second direct debit to have gone awry this week. His alarm clock chirruped. Limbs and body bruised and stiff, Lech showered and dressed, drank a cup of black tea, and set off for work.


pages: 345 words: 100,989

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal by Duncan Mavin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, financial engineering, fixed income, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Kickstarter, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Masayoshi Son, means of production, Menlo Park, mittelstand, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, private military company, proprietary trading, remote working, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, supply chain finance, Tim Haywood, Vision Fund, WeWork, work culture

FIVE Greensill Capital Lex Greensill’s work in government was getting him noticed and earning him status. But it wasn’t making him rich. Greensill Capital had launched in 2011, partly funded by watermelons. Lex and his youngest brother, Peter, had struck a deal that saw Peter – who was building a farming business – get a stake in Greensill Capital and Lex get access to some watermelon revenues to kickstart his company. But he needed more. Lex gradually collected a coterie of wealthy patrons. Perhaps the most important of these, in money terms at least, was John Gorman, a US entrepreneur involved in property, financial services and agriculture. Gorman had been director at a Chicago-based bank and co-owned a construction company.


pages: 334 words: 103,106

Inheritance by Leo Hollis

British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, coronavirus, Fellow of the Royal Society, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, lockdown, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, place-making, side hustle, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning

At the same time, the politicians demanded scrutiny ‘to inform themselves of the Debts and Value of the Estate; and to summon and hear all Parties concerned: And to send for Persons, Papers, and Records’.27 Goring House itself had an unusual story. The land had been part of the sale of royal lands when Cranfield bought the rights to Ebury Manor. James I held on to a few acres and hoped to kickstart the British silk industry. He had looked with jealousy at what Henri IV had done to encourage fine silk workers to come to Paris. And so, James wanted the same beside the Thames. Since the arrival of Huguenot refugees in the 1580s, the city had acquired the skilled weavers needed, but there was still a lack of home-grown raw materials.


pages: 307 words: 101,998

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives by Chris Stedman

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, context collapse, COVID-19, deepfake, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, game design, gamification, gentrification, Google Earth, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Overton Window, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sentiment analysis, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TikTok, urban planning, urban renewal

A song uploaded by a relative unknown goes viral and soon becomes the longest-running number-one song in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart (Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”), or someone tweets out a goal and forgets they ever posted about it until that goal has been reached. Crowdfunding websites, like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, exist for the very purpose of making people’s dreams a reality. Still, this constructive process is often less overt or intentional. When I got my first cell phone, it had the option of creating nine speed-dial shortcuts. I had to choose my nine people, and if I wanted to add one, I had to take someone else out.


pages: 337 words: 100,260

British Rail by Christian Wolmar

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Beeching cuts, book value, Boris Johnson, COVID-19, driverless car, full employment, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, vertical integration, éminence grise

There were continued attempts to close large swathes of the railway throughout British Rail’s tenure despite the obvious political difficulties in carrying out such a programme. Consequently, as soon as there was a change of government back to Labour with Heath’s defeat in February 1974, the whole process was kickstarted yet again. Labour was supposed to be more supportive of the railway than the Conservatives, but there was a faction within the new government that was hostile towards the industry. It was led by Tony Crosland, who took over at the Department of the Environment when Wilson regained power in March 1974.


Italy by Damien Simonis

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, bike sharing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, company town, congestion charging, dark pattern, discovery of the americas, Frank Gehry, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, large denomination, low cost airline, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, period drama, Peter Eisenman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, retail therapy, Skype, spice trade, starchitect, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The barbarian invasions of the 5th and 6th centuries began a process that turned a unified empire into a land of small independent city-states, and it was these states — or rather the merchants, princes, clergy, corporations and guilds who lived within them — that started the craze in artistic patronage that was to underpin the great innovations in art and architecture that were to characterise the Renaissance. Continuing the trend kick-started in the Byzantine period, ideas of clarity and simplicity of religious message began to outweigh ideals of faithful representation during this time. This is why, at first glance, many pictures of the period look rather stiff. There is nothing of the mastery of movement and expression that had been the pride of Greek art and that had been adopted by the Romans.

The issue of construction — and the regulations that govern it — has long been a contentious subject in Italy, and in April 2009 it was brought into sharp focus by two very different events. The first was an announcement by PM Berlusconi that he intended to relax planning-permission rules for home extensions. This, he said, would promote spending and help kick-start the economy. Environmentalists and opposition MPs replied that it would more likely lead to an outbreak of uncontrolled construction. The second event was the devastating earthquake that struck Abruzzo, killing 308 people and leaving much of L’Aquila city centre uninhabitable. In the days following the tragedy, tough questions were raised as to why many modern buildings, which had supposedly been built in compliance with strict building regulations, had failed to withstand the 6.3 magnitude quake

Return to beginning of chapter Liguria, Piedmont & Valle d’Aosta * * * LIGURIA GENOA AROUND GENOA RIVIERA DI LEVANTE RIVIERA DI PONENTE PIEDMONT TURIN THE MILKY WAY SOUTHERN & EASTERN PIEDMONT NORTHERN PIEDMONT VALLE D’AOSTA AOSTA AOSTA VALLEY CASTLES PARCO NAZIONALE DEL GRAN PARADISO VALTOURNENCHE VALLE D’AYAS, VAL DI GRESSONEY & VALSESIA * * * Cathedral-like mountains, Fiat cars, ritzy Mediterranean resorts and artistic football – Liguria, Piedmont and the Valle d’Aosta are the country in microcosm: three culture-defining northwestern enclaves that also generously provided the nation with its first king (Vittorio Emanuele II) and its first capital (Turin). But, fresh from kick-starting the Risorgimento (Italian unification), the northwest didn’t just turn around and retreat back into its shell. On top of its valuable historical relics, Liguria-Piedmont has also ignited many of Italy’s gastronomic traditions. The fertile plains of the Po river valley harvest culinary delicacies that are an intrinsic part of any Italian dinner plate – arborio rice, grapes for Barolo wine, basil for earthy pesto and wheat for aromatic focaccia, while its seas are awash with anchovies, octopuses and prawns.


The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991 by Robert Service

Able Archer 83, active measures, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Chicago School, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

His one big proviso was that the Americans would be barred from carrying out tests in outer space. His message to Shultz was that he had shown a flexibility on this question that should have enabled an agreement in Iceland. He hoped that Reagan and his officials would now recognize the genuineness of his offer. Dubinin tried to kick-start the renewal of negotiations by asking when Shevardnadze could meet Shultz again.30 Gorbachëv wanted to continue to make it difficult for the White House to reject his overtures. He felt sharp frustration about how Reagan and his officials kept quiet about the Soviet offer to allow laboratory research on space defence.31 He hoped to nudge the West Europeans into bearing down on Reagan.

11 Analytical papers were prepared for the Big Five, and there was speculation that Reagan might find it difficult to hold on to his entrenched position as his pile of domestic political problems grew.12 Soviet officials had orders to make enquiries, and yet clarity was difficult to obtain. Arthur Hartman, America’s Ambassador to the USSR, explained that the ‘zero option’ proposal had always referred only to certain categories of nuclear weapons and not to all of them.13 When the Soviet Foreign Trade Minister talked to former President Nixon in December 1986, he asked how to kick-start the arms talks again with Reagan. Ambassador Dubinin repeated the enquiry after New Year. Nixon havered, advising that Gorbachëv should communicate directly with the President.14 Gorbachëv needed to sort out problems nearer to home as he prepared for the next Central Committee plenum. He had begun the work of forcing change on the General Staff and the Defence Ministry.


The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

Other financial institutions might set up special innovation district funds to invest directly in firms and intermediaries that are at the cutting edge of design, execution, and management of this new form. Philanthropic commitments would be available, from corporate as well as civic organizations, to catalyze the supportive innovation ecosystem as well as efforts to make innovation more inclusive. Crowd-funding entities like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and others would routinely give entrepreneurs and residents access to pooled capital to pursue their own creative and community projects. Government would become a true and reliable partner in realizing the potential of the innovation form. Cities and suburban municipalities would revise land-use ordinances and building codes to enable the mixing of uses in districts as well as facilities.


pages: 431 words: 107,868

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future by Levi Tillemann

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, car-free, carbon footprint, clean tech, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, gigafactory, global value chain, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, manufacturing employment, market design, megacity, Nixon shock, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, RFID, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, smart cities, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Anegawa had built Japan’s EV program with the intent of promoting nuclear power—even as the entire automotive world told him that EVs were a hopeless quest. But what now? EVs were doing fine, and so was Anegawa. Plug-in vehicles were on a steady upward growth trend and “Crazy Anegawa” was world-renowned for kick-starting a global technology revolution. But TEPCO was in serious trouble. Anegawa’s friends and colleagues in TEPCO’s nuclear section—the same ones who had chided Anegawa’s reckless decision to abandon his nuclear engineering career—were reviled in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown. TEPCO had made grievous sins of commission and omission, before, during, and after the Fukushima nuclear crisis.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

As the boom unfolded, it produced disorientation on the left. Varga – Stalin’s tame economist – actually got it right: in 1946 he warned the Soviet leaders that the state-capitalist methods pioneered during the war could stabilize the West.9 The dominant Anglo-Saxon powers would, he forecast, probably loan the rest of the world enough money to kickstart consumption again, and the wartime methods of state organization would replace the ‘anarchy of capitalist production’.10 For saying this he was hounded from his post, forced to recant and admit to being ‘cosmopolitan’. Stabilization of the Western economies was impossible, Stalin had decreed. In the West, the far left remained on the doomy side of the argument: ‘The revival of economic activity in capitalist countries weakened by the war … will be characterised by an especially slow tempo which will keep their economies at levels bordering on stagnation and slump,’ wrote the Trotskyists in 1946.11 When this was proved nonsense, Marxists were not the only ones left confused.


pages: 397 words: 109,631

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard E. Nisbett

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, endowment effect, experimental subject, feminist movement, fixed income, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Henri Poincaré, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Shai Danziger, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, William of Occam, Yitang Zhang, Zipcar

Evolution theory triumphs, not because it’s falsifiable and has yet to be falsified, but because (a) it’s highly plausible, (b) it accounts satisfactorily for countless thousands of diverse and otherwise apparently unrelated facts, (c) it generates hypotheses that are testable, and (d) as the great geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” The evolutionary hypothesis and the God hypothesis are of course not incompatible. “God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.” Evolution is actually one of the less mysterious ways an all-powerful being might have chosen to kick-start life and keep it running all the way to us. Dobzhansky, incidentally, was a religious man. Francis Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project and the current director of the National Institutes of Health and (obviously) a believer in evolution, is an evangelical Christian. Collins would never pretend that his belief in evolution is of the same kind as his belief in God—which he would be the first to acknowledge is not falsifiable.


pages: 372 words: 109,536

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money by Frederik Obermaier

air gap, banking crisis, blood diamond, book value, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, family office, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, mega-rich, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, out of africa, race to the bottom, vertical integration, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

This ex-colleague is named as the real owner of the company, but neither he, K. nor Siemens was ever mentioned when Casa Grande Development was handing out millions from the slush funds, entering into contracts or conducting business. The nominee directors signed, and from the outside it was impossible to tell who was really controlling matters. The company was an ideal vehicle for kick-starting the business of Siemens’s South American division anonymously and circumventing both the law and internal oversight. Even if someone had discovered who owned Casa Grande Development’s shares, they would not have been able to prove any link to Siemens. That is because only so-called bearer shares were issued at first.


pages: 404 words: 108,253

9Tail Fox by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

gentrification, Kickstarter, large denomination, San Francisco homelessness, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, transcontinental railway

Then you give the general these …’ Professor Persikov pointed to the notes on his desk. ‘He will send it to the Boss. The Boss will know what to do.’ Misha didn’t doubt this. It was an act of faith that the Boss always knew what to do. So Misha took the bike, which apparently belonged to a NKVD colonel, kick-started the machine and walked it in circles across frozen mud, before climbing into the saddle. The bike was easier to ride than Misha expected, its centre of gravity so low the machine practically glued itself to the ground. It was because Misha didn’t know in which direction to find a general that he rode away from the gunfire, and it was this that got him shot.


pages: 375 words: 106,536

Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Columbine, computer age, credit crunch, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Etonian, false memory syndrome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, late fees, Louis Pasteur, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, telemarketer

The services soon became so popular, with queues around the block, they were compelled to introduce two Sunday evening sittings—and still not everyone could get in. HTB became Britain’s richest church. (It still is: Last year’s income was $2.34 million.) This evangelical euphoria lasted the year, with miracles such as Prison Alpha cropping up all over the place. And then it ebbed away. But its influence has lasted. The Toronto Blessing was the kick-start Alpha needed. Alpha began at HTB in 1979 as a brush-up course for rusty churchgoers. Hardly anybody attended. It trundled along, causing no ripples, until Nicky arrived in 1991. Nicky is the son of agnostics. He discovered God while studying for the Bar at Cambridge, and gave up a career as a barrister to be ordained into the Church of England, in 1986.


pages: 438 words: 109,306

Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank That Runs the World by Adam Lebor

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, foreign exchange controls, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute cuisine, IBM and the Holocaust, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, special drawing rights

It is time for the BIS’s much-vaunted globalism to extend to its social conscience. The bank should set up a charitable foundation—George Soros’s Open Society Institute could be one model—to support global training, education, internship, and development programs for young business people and bankers. One day’s worth of annual profit—$3.2 million—would be enough to kick-start such a program, which with the BIS’s imprimatur would soon attract corporate sponsorship. The bank’s staff could be encouraged to contribute, in lieu of the income tax they are spared. The foundation should be given a block of shares to ensure that civil society has a vote at the bank’s annual general meeting.


pages: 398 words: 109,479

Redrobe by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

air freight, Burning Man, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Kickstarter, music of the spheres

But this was Mexico City. Half the cameras weren’t working, and the output from those that were didn’t run basic visual recognition software. They got watched by low-paid staff who worked hard not to notice anything at all, it wasn’t worth the paperwork. But enough of that… The traffic on Axl’s side of the paseo was kick-starting into movement and finally he’d spotted Kachowsky’s red coupe, it was the semiAI model with bulletproof shell but the Kevlar softtop was down and the man would be driving it on manual, he was that kind of idiot. Blipping the bike into action reactivated the poster. Axl glanced again at the faded tri-D with its idealised portrait of a girl in green uniform with silver braid looped down her chest in traditional cavalry knots.


pages: 376 words: 110,796

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom, Charles D. Walker

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Dennis Tito, desegregation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Elon Musk, high net worth, Iridium satellite, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, private spaceflight, restrictive zoning, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, technoutopianism, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, young professional

"After Branson announced it and after having had the first private spacecraft in space, it suddenly just became a lot more attainable and real." Little did she know at the time that within a few months, she would have a reservation on a Virgin Galactic flight. Hidalgo is part of a new generation of young professionals from the postApollo era whose enthusiasm and high energy kick-started a resurgence in space advocacy. Growing up in northern California, starry-eyed and idealistic, she assumed that by the time she was an adult, everyone would have a rocket in the garage. "My whole life, I just assumed I'll get to go. It was never anything I questioned." She thought about applying to the astronaut corps at one point and had pursued an advanced degree in biology to be astronaut eligible, a prerequisite to send in an astronaut application.


pages: 605 words: 110,673

Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt

British Empire, double helix, drug harm reduction, en.wikipedia.org, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, offshore financial centre, precautionary principle, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), War on Poverty

As we’ll see shortly, drugs target receptors designed to respond to these natural chemicals; the better we understand natural chemicals, the better we’ll understand the effects of the drugs that mimic them. To illustrate how these chemicals work, let’s meet Ben, a clean-living man who doesn’t like to take any drugs at all – not even coffee. As he wakes up and gets out of bed, glutamate is released, kickstarting his body’s transition into being awake. He drives into work, getting stuck in traffic; it’s really important he’s on time today, and his brain is flooded with noradrenaline as he becomes angry and stressed at the thought of being late. When he gets to work, it turns out his boss is late as well so he isn’t in trouble after all, and a rise in serotonin levels makes him feel better.


pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

“In the slums, once you’re thirty, if you don’t have a job, you probably never will. I started to think people should be able to stay on the land if they want to. That is better for many people.” The heirloom rice project educated hundreds of Cordillera farmers and put them in control, she says. It helped to kick-start the organic movement in the Philippines. Then came the backlash. Things were going well. By 2016, Mary Hensley had found investors willing to build infrastructure that would enable RICE to expand deeper into the Cordillera, to ship new kinds of heirloom rice—especially the region’s trademark purple rice.


pages: 367 words: 108,689

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis by David Boyle

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Goodhart's law, housing crisis, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mega-rich, Money creation, mortgage debt, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Ocado, Occupy movement, off grid, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pensions crisis, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, precariat, quantitative easing, school choice, scientific management, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, work culture , working poor

By the same Author Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash The Tyranny of Numbers The Money Changers: Currency Reform from Aristotle to E-Cash Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life Blondel’s Song: The Capture, Imprisonment and Ransom of Richard the Lionheart Toward the Setting Sun: Columbus, Cabot and Vespucci and the Race for America The New Economics: A Bigger Picture (with Andrew Simms) Money Matters Eminent Corporations (with Andrew Simms) Voyages of Discovery The Human Element: Ten New Rules to Kickstart Our Failing Organizations Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB This Fourth Estate paperback edition published in 2014 First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2013 1 Copyright © David Boyle 2013, 2014 David Boyle asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.


pages: 375 words: 109,675

Railways & the Raj: How the Age of Steam Transformed India by Christian Wolmar

Beeching cuts, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial rule, James Dyson, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, Meghnad Desai, Ponzi scheme, railway mania, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, trade route, women in the workforce

As we shall see in Chapter 7, Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Indian independence movement, made great play of the role of the railways as an instrument of imperial repression and was, at times, openly hostile to them. THREE CONTROLLING THE RAILWAYS WHILE THE GENEROUS arrangements that guaranteed the companies a rate of return may have been necessary to kick-start construction in the early days, they were neither sustainable nor practical in the long term. However, given the imperative to build railways rapidly in response to the Rebellion, the system remained in place for a further decade, by which time the rudiments of the subcontinent’s railway network had been well established.


Lonely Planet Ireland's Best Trips by Lonely Planet

Kickstarter, mass immigration, reserve currency, urban renewal

Instead it’s a route to the heart of the country’s compelling narratives: faith, poverty, mass migration, territorial disputes, the Troubles. With unsigned, cliffside roads that look more like farm tracks, you’ll probably get a little lost. But locals are helpful if you do – and asking for directions is a great conversation starter. Top of Chapter 1 Derry Kick-start your Inishowen trip by exploring the story of one of the coast’s most famous victims: La Trinidad Valenciera. This Venetian trader was the second-biggest vessel in the Spanish Armada and was shipwrecked at Kinnagoe Bay in 1588 – a spot you’ll see later. Derry’s award-winning Tower Museum (www.derrycity.gov.uk/museums; Union Hall Pl; adult/child £4/2; 10am-5.30pm) tells the vessel’s story and features poignant wreck finds: pewter tableware, wooden combs, olive jars, shoe soles.


pages: 390 words: 108,171

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

For someone as detail-oriented as Musk, he responded with an almost blasé approach, ignoring the crux of the question and simply saying that “the radiation thing is not too big of a deal.” Another big question hanging over the presentation was: Who was going to pay for all of this? Musk said he would “make the biggest contribution I can” of his own personal wealth. But at one point he joked that SpaceX might have to use Kickstarter, the online fund-raising platform, to raise money. “As we show this dream is real… I think the support will snowball over time,” he said, without offering any details. But that was more of a wish than a concrete business plan. And his idea that this would ultimately have to be a “public-private partnership” also seemed improbable.


pages: 323 words: 107,963

Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women's Pain by Abby Norman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, double helix, Downton Abbey, feminist movement, financial independence, Kickstarter, messenger bag, period drama, phenotype, quantum entanglement, Saturday Night Live, the scientific method, women in the workforce

Those large “pecs” in bodybuilders were basically abnormally large breast tissue from excess estrogen, and the weight gain perceived from the steroid was really just water weight from bloating, also caused by the estrogen. Those quick gains that are characteristic of steroids are, oddly enough, extremely familiar to most menstruating women. The water weight a woman gains before her period each month can be severe—ten pounds in a day—but it isn’t permanent. The male Olympians using Dbol as a kick-starter for injectable steroid regimens were in for a rude awakening about its long-term side effects. When the drug came under fire for “off-label use,” many of the athletes who were using it were women seeking to compete at a higher level. Since the drug hadn’t been explicitly tested in women, the ill-effects of the drug, as reported by the female cohorts, probably helped get it off the market.


Lonely Planet Jamaica by Lonely Planet

British Empire, buttonwood tree, carbon footprint, estate planning, European colonialism, fixed-gear, food miles, jitney, Kickstarter, talking drums, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning

The upside is an admission charge keeps out the beach hustlers, though it doesn't ensure that the beach is kept clean. Founded as a bathing club in 1906, Doctor’s Cave earned its name when English chiropractor Sir Herbert Barker claimed the waters here had healing properties. People flocked to Montego Bay, kick-starting a tourism evolution that would culminate in the appearance of Homo Margaritavillus decades later. There are lots of facilities on hand including a restaurant, a grill bar, an internet cafe and water sports, and lots of things to rent (beach chairs, towels, snorkeling gear). Dead End BeachBEACH ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; Kent Ave) A meet-the-locals affair just north of Gloucester Ave, this narrow strip is also known as Buccaneer Beach.


pages: 350 words: 103,270

The Devil's Derivatives: The Untold Story of the Slick Traders and Hapless Regulators Who Almost Blew Up Wall Street . . . And Are Ready to Do It Again by Nicholas Dunbar

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delayed gratification, diversification, Edmond Halley, facts on the ground, fear index, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

They cluster like sheep around the financial giants that spawned them: Morgan Stanley has two hundred fifty androids, while Lehman Brothers left over one thousand of these orphans, each of them mindlessly sucking up repayments from borrowers and sifting the cash through pumps and valves to investors.2 How did these mortgage robots get to be so numerous? Fannie and Freddie played a role, according to FDIC chairman Sheila Bair. She recalls how a combination of weak governance of the two mortgage agencies and government encouragement of minority home ownership kick-started the subprime boom: “I remember very well when I was at Treasury in 2001 when a broader government effort to expand homeownership was launched. It was well intentioned and turned out to be a significant driver.” She says that Fannie and Freddie got around restrictions on mortgage eligibility by letting Wall Street package subprime loans and then invest in the end product—with U.S. government backing.


pages: 624 words: 104,923

QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Barry Marshall: ulcers, British Empire, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Fellow of the Royal Society, Helicobacter pylori, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, placebo effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, Stephen Fry, sugar pill, trade route, two and twenty, V2 rocket, Vesna Vulović

Now uninhabited except for giant iguanas and goats the size of ponies (left by seventeenth-century pirates), in the late nineteenth century, it was home to the notorious Navassa Phosphate Company where, in 1899, four white overseers were killed by black miners rioting against appalling working conditions. The discovery of this shameful pocket of slavery caused outrage among liberal Americans and some historians credit the Navassa Riot with kick-starting the modern American labour movement. Navassa is still subject to a formal claim by Haiti – the last US territory to be claimed by a foreign nation. Guano is the product of billions of anchovies (Engraulis ringens) that live in gigantic shoals off the coast of Peru, the largest fish resource by weight in the world.


pages: 370 words: 112,602

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cass Sunstein, charter city, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, experimental subject, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, land tenure, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, microcredit, moral hazard, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, tontine, urban planning

Jeffrey Sachs, adviser to the United Nations, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City, and one such expert, has an answer to all these questions: Poor countries are poor because they are hot, infertile, malaria infested, often landlocked; this makes it hard for them to be productive without an initial large investment to help them deal with these endemic problems. But they cannot pay for the investments precisely because they are poor—they are in what economists call a “poverty trap.” Until something is done about these problems, neither free markets nor democracy will do very much for them. This is why foreign aid is key: It can kick-start a virtuous cycle by helping poor countries invest in these critical areas and make them more productive. The resulting higher incomes will generate further investments; the beneficial spiral will continue. In his best-selling 2005 book, The End of Poverty,4 Sachs argues that if the rich world had committed $195 billion in foreign aid per year between 2005 and 2025, poverty could have been entirely eliminated by the end of this period.


pages: 315 words: 106,402

The Blind Side by Michael Lewis

Kickstarter, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube

Michael listened to the hearty Cajun coach for a good thirty minutes, as he listened to the other coaches, only in Coach O’s case there was a twist: Michael couldn’t understand a word he said. He seemed to be saying something about being a really good recruiter, who planned to turn the Ole Miss football program around, but that he needed a star recruit like Michael Oher to kick-start the process. “It was scary,” said Michael later. “I never heard anything like that.” Leigh Anne, Collins, and Sean Junior were equally lost. Only Sean, who grew up in southeast Louisiana, could understand what Coach O was trying to say. “Coach O is pure one hundred percent coon-ass,” he explained, “and I grew up surrounded by coon-asses.”


A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, delayed gratification, demographic transition, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Eyjafjallajökull, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, sceptred isle, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

And death shall have no dominion In a hole in the ground, a man lay extremely dead. He was either left in this tomb by his family or perished right there, with no idea that he was one of the more important people in millions of years. Posthumously – very posthumously – this man did two things: the first is that his emergence out of that cave kick-started the study of ancient humans. It had been his home, we presume, in what we now call Germany, around 40,000 years ago. Kleine Feldhofer Grotte is no longer there; it was discovered but destroyed by quarry miners in the nineteenth century. The entrance stood a few metres above the valley floor, a man-sized squeeze into a rocky room around three by five metres, with a high ceiling.


pages: 363 words: 105,039

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

But Moonlight Maze did demonstrate that state-sponsored hackers could gain far deeper and broader access than many in the U.S. government had thought possible. And next time, they might not use those abilities for mere spying. In January 2000, President Bill Clinton himself encapsulated the threat in an ominous speech on the White House’s South Lawn. The brief remarks were intended to unveil a plan to kick-start U.S. cybersecurity research and recruiting. Instead, they resonate as a warning from the past. “Today, our critical systems, from power structures to air traffic control, are connected and run by computers,” Clinton said. There has never been a time like this in which we have the power to create knowledge and the power to create havoc, and both those powers rest in the same hands.


pages: 327 words: 112,191

War Doctor: Surgery on the Front Line by David Nott

Desert Island Discs, Kickstarter, Live Aid, no-fly zone, Skype

It was an amazing system, beautifully managed by an ICU specialist called Ammar Zacharia, who had trained all the ICU nurses so they knew exactly how to respond to the comments of the online specialists. We continued to monitor the boy for the next twenty-four hours, until he was well enough to breathe on his own. His parents were ecstatic, and it was a wonderful way to kick-start my mission. Some days were busier than others, and some were so busy that the days merged into the nights and vice-versa. We didn’t see many fragmentation wounds that autumn, but the gunshot casualties kept coming; Aleppo was sniper city. I remarked to Abdulaziz that on some days there was a weird consistency to the injuries we saw coming in – the patients all seemed to have been shot in the same part of the body.


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

How that must have hurt in South Kensington: that a bunch of amateurs on a crowdsourced website had the nerve to outlaw proper, professional, paid journalists! As we enter the third post-Millennium decade amidst a rapidly changing media environment, will the notorious sidebar of shame continue to flaunt its thumbnails? The #MeToo movement, kickstarted by the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s career-long criminal lifestyle of sexual harassment, assault and misogyny, has unleashed a mainstream focus on the insidious objectification and subjugation of women (which, spoiler, isn’t new). A rise in popular interest in mental health means that consumers are also questioning forms of journalism that are no more sophisticated than a combination of leering and jeering.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

But despite their best efforts, a recent high-profile partnership between the Watson team and MD Anderson, a large American cancer hospital, ended in conspicuous failure: the $60 million system designed to help treat cancer was deemed “not ready for human investigational or clinical use.”8 Indeed, the companies behind the health care technologies that really change our lives may not exist yet. And the same goes for the rest of the economy. After all, many of today’s most familiar technology names—Airbnb, Snapchat, Spotify, Kickstarter, Pinterest, Square, Android, Uber, WhatsApp—did not exist a dozen years ago.9 Many technologies that will be household names in the future probably have not yet been invented. WHY BIG? Like today’s tech giants, the technology companies that dominate in the future are also likely to be very big.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Further down the street, a dozen or so mushroom farmers worked on supplying the company with the raw materials it needed to make its products. MYCL's clients varied from partner companies in the Bandung region to buyers from as far as Australia, the UK, and 14 other countries, who bought their mushroom-and-wood watch via Kickstarter. The story of the Bandung entrepreneurs is not exceptional in Indonesia. Around the same time as MYCL took off, Winston and William Utomo were pursuing their own entrepreneurial dream. Born and raised in Surabaya, another large Indonesian city some 700 kilometers (430 miles) east of Bandung, the twentysomething brothers got inspired by new American media companies such as Disney and BuzzFeed, technology companies such as Google and Facebook, and venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Further down the street, a dozen or so mushroom farmers worked on supplying the company with the raw materials it needed to make its products. MYCL's clients varied from partner companies in the Bandung region to buyers from as far as Australia, the UK, and 14 other countries, who bought their mushroom-and-wood watch via Kickstarter. The story of the Bandung entrepreneurs is not exceptional in Indonesia. Around the same time as MYCL took off, Winston and William Utomo were pursuing their own entrepreneurial dream. Born and raised in Surabaya, another large Indonesian city some 700 kilometers (430 miles) east of Bandung, the twentysomething brothers got inspired by new American media companies such as Disney and BuzzFeed, technology companies such as Google and Facebook, and venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.


pages: 403 words: 105,550

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

Arif was harnessing the forces of money and business to transform how people lived and worked in the Middle East and now this Egyptian billionaire was answering his call with talk of a political revolution. Arif closed the conference with an impromptu fundraising session. He asked attendees for $25,000 to create a fund to mentor new business builders. Fadi joined Arif on stage to kick-start proceedings and they raised $500,000 within an hour. The show impressed the Americans. The Washington Post published an enthusiastic article about the conference which depicted Arif and Fadi as visionaries who were sowing the seeds of hope in a troubled region. In Washington, the State Department official Greg Behrman forwarded the Washington Post article to Anne-Marie Slaughter, one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides.


pages: 325 words: 107,099

The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri

airport security, fake news, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, messenger bag, rolodex, white picket fence

Then I remember that new refugees believe all settled Westerners have access to each other, that I belong to a secret network including the head coach of Arsenal. Minoo is my age, from Isfahan. A woman at her church asked that I befriend her and for a year I’ve consistently failed at that. I try to listen, to advise her. She stares, wide-eyed and numb. I suggest ways to kick-start her new life, to smooth the way for herself and family. It’s hard making suggestions. Do the concessions I’m asking of her amount to self-harm? ‘Can you do something for him?’ she asks. ‘Speak to someone?’ ‘Is he good?’ I ask. ‘Is he already part of a team?’ ‘Yes, he’s the best. He plays at school.’


pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

—we have a Simulate Running mode for players who are unable to run—but the gain is as futile as skipping to the last page of a novel. No one’s stopping you, but you’re only ruining the experience for yourself. With a hole where its heart should be, generic gamification is vulnerable to cheating in the way that good games aren’t. Following a Kickstarter in late 2011, Zombies, Run! launched in early 2012 and went on to attract over ten million downloads by 2022, with hundreds of thousands of players running with the app every month. It’s the most popular smartphone fitness game in the world, and it achieved that feat through a more complete understanding of what it means to run.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

In contrast, there is evidence that improving these services doesn’t just have a positive impact on health but also on gender equality, environmental safety, and education.59 Simply put, it’s impossible to imagine any country obtaining the rapid rates of economic growth and poverty reduction that the New Optimists present as proof of human progress if the water and sanitation hurdle isn’t crossed first. As we have seen, capitalism has not been the principal driver of economic growth in the developing world: public sector investments in basic infrastructure and social services like education and healthcare have allowed countries in the developing world to be able to kick-start their economic growth and allow private markets to thrive. A 2018 UNCTAD development report (aptly subtitled “the free trade delusion”) made this clear, effectively debunking the narrative of private sector-led development that was prevalent during the 1990s: [I]nfrastructure sectors are closely interdependent, and therefore it is critical that infrastructure development is approached systemically by the state, which is the only actor with the required political power and coordination capacity.


Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil by Nicholas Shaxson

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, income per capita, inflation targeting, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil-for-food scandal, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Tragedy of the Commons, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

This fed a cozy postcolonial complacency in the West: Big Oil, it was assumed, would endlessly dominate feeble African rulers who would be too busy scrambling for the cash to let supplies be interrupted. For those people who did notice that the citizens of these oil zones seemed to be getting poorer and angrier, the answer was to send a few dollops of aid to tide the natives over until the oil money kick-started their economies. This paternalistic view has now given way to concern—even alarm. One jolt came on September 11, 2001, when the West began to understand better Africa’s value as a reliable alternative energy supplier. Another came after Chinese president Hu Jintao stepped off a plane in Gabon in 2004 and announced a new era of trade, aid, and friendship with Africa “without political strings.”8 Chinese and other Asian companies soon began aggressively to pursue West African oil assets, with fast and substantial success.


Reactive Messaging Patterns With the Actor Model: Applications and Integration in Scala and Akka by Vaughn Vernon

A Pattern Language, business intelligence, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, functional programming, Internet of things, Kickstarter, loose coupling, remote working, type inference, web application

You can also download the tools directly, which you want to do for reasons other than build dependencies. Using Typesafe Activator Go to http://typesafe.com/activator/ or anywhere else on the http://typesafe.com Web site and use any one of a number of links to download the Typesafe Activator. This is a developer environment that can be used to kick-start your use of the Typesafe Reactive Platform. Use the wizard-based user interface to generate a wide variety of sample projects. Once a given project is generated, you can safely exit the Typesafe Activator environment and open the sample project in your own development environment. Using sbt The Simple Build Tool, or sbt, is more or less a de facto standard for building Scala programs.


pages: 467 words: 114,570

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Book of Ingenious Devices, colonial rule, Commentariolus, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, retrograde motion, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, trade route, William of Occam

In geometry, too, the Indians and Persians could claim little expertise. But it is unfair to dismiss their contribution to the development of Arabic science completely during the translation movement. For without its exposure to Indian mathematics, the Muslim world would not have had the decimal numbering notation, or the kick-start in trigonometry that was to prove so useful in astronomy. Similarly, Arabic astronomy is seen as a continuation of the work of the Persian observatories, which itself would not have flourished without Indian mathematics. An alternative and erroneous view, more sympathetic to Persian culture and history, is based on an interesting myth that is worth recounting here.


pages: 404 words: 118,759

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature by Ben Tarnoff

California gold rush, interchangeable parts, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, new economy, New Journalism, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, South of Market, San Francisco, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman

“I wasn’t sure who Thomas Starr King was,” explained the legislator responsible for the change. Fortunately for King, his legacy endured in other ways. To San Francisco’s writers he had been a patient father, scribbling edits in the margins of their manuscripts and administering fortifying doses of moral support. He taught them to take themselves seriously, and helped kick-start a literary culture that, after his death, grew in directions he could have never foreseen. • • • TWO MONTHS AFTER SAN FRANCISCO Lost its best-loved preacher, its favorite heretic returned. Twain’s principal vice was pride, followed closely by greed and gluttony. He had been in Nevada for seven months, blistering from the heat of the desert sun, and he atoned for the long absence by splurging on the special charms of “the most cordial and sociable city in the Union.”


pages: 373 words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

“This decision was a victory for the sharing economy and the countless New Yorkers who make the Airbnb community vibrant and strong,” wrote Hantman afterward on Airbnb’s public-policy blog.14 Tech-news sites like TechCrunch and the Verge celebrated the victory. Perhaps the only person who wasn’t celebrating was Nigel Warren himself. “I was happy but not grateful,” he says, recalling the whole strange saga in a quiet conference room in the Brooklyn offices of Kickstarter, the crowd-funding website where he has worked as a product manager since 2014. I asked him if he thought Airbnb behaved honorably in his case. “I don’t think honor really came into it,” he says. “There are certain companies that at certain times act with honor outside the bounds of what the marketplace demands.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

Or, as Arnold would say, ‘No pain, no gain’. The inverted-U rapidly became an iconic economic diagram, especially in the nascent field of development economics, where it bolstered the theory that poor countries should concentrate income in the hands of the wealthy since only they would save and invest enough of it to kick-start GDP growth. In the blunt words of the field’s founding theorist, W. Arthur Lewis, ‘development must be inegalitarian’.8 In the 1970s, both Kuznets and Lewis won the Nobel-Memorial prize in economics for their respective theories on growth and inequality, while the World Bank treated the curve as an economic law and used it to publish projections of how long it would take for poverty levels to start falling in low- and middle-income countries.9 The Kuznets Curve, which suggests that as countries get richer, inequality must rise before it will eventually fall.


pages: 405 words: 117,219

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

The inquisitive minds of the Renaissance and of the Enlightenment looked up to him as they began to study nature, cataloguing it meticulously, and conducting experiments with their new observational instruments. And that was how modern science was born. Then Descartes came along and – as we saw – brought Plato in through the back door. As a reaction to continental rationalism,11 the English philosopher and physician John Locke (1632–1704) kick-started British empiricism by reasserting the Aristotelian dictum that knowledge is based on experience as evidenced by the senses. Locke suggested that in order to gain knowledge about the material world one had to build hypotheses that were testable by observation and experiment – the approach that we refer to today as the scientific method.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

In the last Renaissance, people went to the town square to find each other; in the New Renaissance, the town square is always with us, in the form of real-time, location-based data on our identities, choices and behaviors. We go to it anytime to fulfill an ever-widening range of needs—to shop, eat, exercise, travel and meet with one another. We can match partners for love or sex (Match.com, Tinder), match entrepreneurs with investors (kickstarter.com, indiegogo.com), drivers with riders (Uber, Lyft), spare rooms with travelers (Airbnb), public stewards with street-level concerns (SeeClickFix.com), people in need with good Samaritans (causes.com, fundly.com), problems with the talents to solve them (hackathons, InnoCentive.com) and victims with aid-givers and watchdogs (ushahidi.com), to name a few.


pages: 442 words: 115,860

Effendi by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

clean water, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, no-fly zone, sensible shoes

“One of the best,” Raf said to Hakim, as Eduardo turned away. “One of the best.” Hakim looked doubtful. “I mean it,” said Raf, and watched Eduardo shuffle away from Café Athinos, dodging traffic until he finally reached his ancient Vespa, which was parked up next to the Corniche wall. It took Eduardo five goes to kick-start the machine. The man cost Champollion less than the precinct paid out each week for fresh coffee and still counted himself lucky. “Guard the hospital,” said Raf to the two men remaining, well aware that Hakim and Ahmed were really meant to guard him. By giving them other duties he freed himself up; they both knew that and were powerless to do anything about it.


pages: 390 words: 109,870

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

In November 2015 world leaders in Paris agreed to limit global warming to under two degrees compared to pre-industrial levels. The Paris deal was greeted with much fanfare and celebration. But not for EF!, who thought it was a weak compromise.* Indra, who’s been involved with EF! since the 1991 protests against the extension of the M3 motorway (which is credited with kick-starting the direct-action anti-roads movement that swept the United Kingdom in the 1990s, notably the Newbury Bypass protests), organised an emergency meeting of activists to figure out how to keep the pressure up.8 In February 2016, after learning about this ‘moot’ at a book fair for radical anarchists I’d attended a few weeks earlier, I made my way to the Centre for Science and Art in the small Gloucestershire town of Stroud.


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

Much has changed since Theodore Roosevelt was ostracized from his class for supporting such ideas as the income tax, women’s suffrage, and the right to strike. The rich are now a class divided, with an influential slice embracing liberalism. That shift has helped fuel a push for social change at home, kick-start a new crusade against poverty abroad, and put Democrats in control of Washington. This may all be a good thing, depending on your outlook, but it doesn’t change stark truths about money and power. A benign plutocracy is still a plutocracy. The Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis once commented that “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”


pages: 374 words: 114,600

The Quants by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, index fund, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, job automation, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kickstarter, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Mercer, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, éminence grise

Acknowledgments A cast of thousands, it seems, helped me with this book, including a multitude of unnamed sources behind the scenes who explained the inner workings of these highly secretive investors. My agent, Shawn Coyne, helped bring the idea to life and deserves enormous credit for helping develop it. My editor, Rick Horgan, and his gifted associate editor, Julian Pavia, had a wealth of ideas that gave a healthy kickstart to the book when it needed it. Mitch Zuckoff was an ideal sounding board and provided fantastic insights into how to put the book together and make the ideas understandable. Thanks to my editors at The Wall Street Journal, particularly Jon Hilsenrath and Nik Deogun, who encouraged my interest in writing about this strange group of traders; and Anita Raghavan, who helped me crack open the quant group at Morgan Stanley.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

In 2003 the consultancy firm McKinsey was commissioned by a group of booster-ish businessmen, Bombay First, to write a report setting out Mumbai’s status as a ‘World City’. The plan set out six key areas of investment, the main one being a hyper-scaling of the real-estate market as the means to kick-start the economic boom; as one critic later commented: ‘As a report by the builders’ lobby, the recommendations scream[ed]: privatisation, corporatisation and build, build, build.’ The report particularly recommended developing previously abandoned land, relaxing restrictions on building on coastal zones, and opening up the slum redevelopment authority to the market.


pages: 347 words: 115,173

Chasing the Devil: On Foot Through Africa's Killing Fields by Tim Butcher

barriers to entry, blood diamond, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, Google Earth, Kickstarter, Nelson Mandela, pre–internet, Scramble for Africa, trade route, upwardly mobile

I could see a white flag on a bamboo cane sticking from the prow. Coastal fishermen were among the first Africans to receive the attention of Christian missionaries and I was sure the flag carried a biblical invocation seeking protection from the perils of the sea. Down on the car-deck there was movement. The motorbikers had begun fidgeting with their kick-start pedals and the women were standing, stretching out of their lappa cocoons. Those who had heavy loads to carry on their heads fashioned hand cloths into quoits to cushion their scalps. I looked far ahead and could see why they had stirred. Freetown was coming into view. At first it was like a watery Japanese print as I could make out only the blurred loom of mountain ranges overlaid more and more faintly, one behind the other.


pages: 441 words: 113,244

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

Like a Fish to Water In the summer of 2009, the Seasteading Institute hosted the first annual floating festival of self-governance on the Sacramento Delta and called it Ephemerisle, which has since come to be known as “Burning Man on the water.” Every year, a few hundred people create a makeshift island by connecting a variety of boats, platforms, inner tubes, and floating art projects. Want to attend? Bring your own land. The annual event has since blossomed without our help and with no central organizer. This kick-start method is the essence of our nonprofit role. The vision was that Ephemerisle could grow in size, duration, and frequency until a man-made island was floating year-round, and as ocean folk learned the tricks of ocean living, eventually Ephemerisle would move to international waters. Upon this dream a small bluetopia was born.


pages: 379 words: 118,576

On Her Majesty's Nuclear Service by Eric Thompson

amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Parkinson's law, retail therapy, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

For that reason, the old doctrine of a balance of power is unsound. We cannot afford, if we can help it, to work on narrow margins, offering temptations to a trial of strength. We must not let it happen again.’ Not letting it happen again was the challenge for my generation; it meant that Britain had to have nuclear weapons. **** My ambition was kick-started fourteen years later when Father spotted an advert in the Glasgow Herald for scholarships to Britannia Royal Navy College, Dartmouth, the college to which the Royal Family sent its sons; where Prince Philipos of Greece was introduced to the Princess Elizabeth before her accession to the throne.


pages: 561 words: 114,843

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, + Website by Matt Blumberg

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Broken windows theory, crowdsourcing, deskilling, fear of failure, financial engineering, high batting average, high net worth, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, pattern recognition, performance metric, pets.com, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype

The two most common types of bootstrapping are customer financing and your company’s cash flow. Customer Financing Customers don’t lend you money; they pay for your services. Some are even willing to do so in advance. That’s called customer financing. If you can pull it off, it’s great. The Good: If customers will pay for your products and services in advance (think Kickstarter or Indiegogo for business-to-consumer [B2C] and you can also sell something to a big enterprise customer ahead of delivery), it’s incredible validation of the market value of your idea. The Bad: Customers can react very badly when startups fail to meet milestones. VCs expect this but customers may never come back.


pages: 410 words: 114,005

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do by Matthew Syed

Abraham Wald, Airbus A320, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crew resource management, deliberate practice, double helix, epigenetics, fail fast, fear of failure, flying shuttle, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Dyson, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, luminiferous ether, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, publication bias, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

To do that in even minimal form required a huge amount of work, based on deep knowledge of the various systems. But Houston had an insight. He realized that the MVP doesn’t need to be a working prototype at all. All it has to do is mimic the essential features of the final product. Provided it is sufficiently representative it can demonstrate whether consumers really want to buy it and thus kick-start the process of trial and error. So Houston created a video that showed how the product would work in practice. There was no software, no code, but he didn’t need these for his MVP. After all, how do you decide if you want a piece of software? You often look over the shoulder of someone who has got it, and is raving about it, and watch what it does.


Frozen in Time by Mitchell Zuckoff

belly landing, Ford Model T, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, New Journalism, three-masted sailing ship

This book is marbled with his insights and contributions. Three retired Coast Guard captains played key roles in this book. Don Taub spent years investigating these events: he tracked down participants, analyzed innumerable documents, and corrected mistakes made in earlier accounts. Thomas C. King Jr., who kick-started the Duck Hunt, provided essential help as I began this project. Charles Dorian sent me the rare photographs he took as an ensign aboard the Northland during the fall of 1942. His tales of life aboard ship were invaluable. I’m thankful to the family members of the heroes whose stories are told here.


pages: 428 words: 117,419

Cyclopedia by William Fotheringham

Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed-gear, flag carrier, gentleman farmer, intermodal, Kickstarter, Northern Rock, safety bicycle, éminence grise

It has run through some of the highest passes in the Alpine foothills, and finished variously in Milan, Como, Monza, and Bergamo. It retains two constants: the mountains that border the lakes north of Milan, Lecco and Como, and the climb to the chapel at Madonna del Ghisallo (see CHAPELS for the significance of this landmark). That ascent kick-started the career of cycling great ALFREDO BINDA, who turned professional in 1924 spurred on by the thought of a 500-lire prize awarded outside the chapel: he won it and never looked back. Lombardy was also where the Classic-winning career of SEAN KELLY took off in 1983; the Irishman also scored one of his greatest wins here in 1991.


pages: 309 words: 114,984

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

Reaching the ideal future state will depend on government assuming its proper role: the meaningful—and limited—use of its vast powers. Notwithstanding this implied criticism, history will judge the federal government’s health IT initiatives in the 2004–2015 era favorably, as a time when its actions kick-started the digital transformation of the healthcare system, a transformation that—if we can ever reach the state I’ve described here—will have made the healthcare system better, safer, and cheaper. 39 They are listed at the end of the book. 40 Today, a version of this model is known as the Patient-Centered Medical Home, but no one has yet sorted out all the details, particularly the data integration part. 41 Another FYI: I am on the advisory board of a start-up named Amino.com, one of many trying to build such a Webbased tool.


pages: 335 words: 114,039

David Mitchell: Back Story by David Mitchell

British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Desert Island Discs, Downton Abbey, energy security, gentrification, Golden age of television, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Russell Brand, Stephen Fry

Each school agrees to put us up for the night and pay a few hundred quid, which, if you get enough schools, covers production and transport costs, a bit of spending money for the cast and crew, and enough left over to hire the Etcetera Theatre, Camden, for a few weeks – so that we can invite agents along in the hope of using the production to kick-start our careers. The Etcetera Theatre, Camden, I should add, is not a theatre. It’s a room above the Oxford Arms pub from which you can hear the football match being watched by the regulars downstairs. Nevertheless it is, for some reason, on the London theatre map. Agents, casting directors and the like have heard of it and, in a quiet week, can be prevailed upon to go there.


pages: 387 words: 112,868

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

For banks that were terrified of cyber attacks, the idea of a payment network that could keep running even if one player, or one set of servers, got taken out was incredibly attractive. More broadly, the banks were waking up to several increasingly viable efforts to decentralize finance and take business that had belonged to the big banks. Crowdfunding companies like Kickstarter, and peer-to-peer lending services like Lending Club, were trying to directly connect borrowers and savers, so that a bank was not necessary. The blockchain seemed to present a decentralized alternative to an even more basic part of the banking industry’s business—payments. The banks were notably not becoming any more friendly toward working with Bitcoin the currency.


pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

* * * One evening in 2015 Hoffman was having dinner with one of his frequent companions, Mark Pincus, and after getting a few preliminaries out of the way (such as recaps of Hoffman’s recent meetings with the secretary-general of the United Nations and the Duke of York, and a new book he’d read called Superintelligence), Pincus, an enthusiastic, boyish-looking middle-aged man, brought up an idea he was especially excited about. “In this election, we’d want a million people to raise one billion dollars to run Mike Bloomberg”—the former mayor of New York—“for president. Through Kickstarter. Say the minimum is five hundred million. I think he’d be the best. It’d be pretty cool. That would change politics forever.” He leaned closer to Hoffman. “Why couldn’t that happen? A million people buying the presidency. Look at Star Citizen.” That’s an online multiplayer simulation game about the governance of the United Empire of Earth in the thirtieth century.


pages: 443 words: 116,832

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

And before 2014 was over, one did. 8 Coercion “I NEVER THOUGHT I’D BE HERE BRIEFING ON A BAD SETH ROGEN MOVIE, sir,” an Obama aide said to the president. It was a preamble to an intelligence discussion in the White House. Obama asked how he knew the film in question, The Interview, was a bad one. The aide had a ready comeback: “Sir, it’s a Seth Rogen movie.”1 While WarGames kickstarted President Reagan’s interest in cybersecurity and There Will Be Blood served as an inspiration of sorts for some of the NSA’s counterintelligence efforts, The Interview caused an actual cyber attack all by itself. The film was a buddy comedy featuring Rogen and costar James Franco playing a pair of media personalities aiding a CIA-orchestrated assassination of Kim Jong-un.


pages: 523 words: 112,185

Doing Data Science: Straight Talk From the Frontline by Cathy O'Neil, Rachel Schutt

Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bike sharing, bioinformatics, computer vision, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, distributed generation, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, finite state, Firefox, game design, Google Glasses, index card, information retrieval, iterative process, John Harrison: Longitude, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, machine translation, Mars Rover, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, pull request, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, selection bias, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, text mining, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

The community is so tight-knit that when Cathy was speaking about MapReduce at a meetup in April, she was able to refer a question to an audience member, Nick Avteniev—easy and immediate references to the experts of the field is the norm. Data science’s body of knowledge is changing and distributed, to the extent that the only way of finding out what you should know is by looking at what other people know. Having a bunch of different lecturers kickstarted this process for us. All of them answered our questions. All gave us their email addresses. Some even gave us jobs. Having listened to and conversed with these experts, we formed more questions. How can we create a time series object in R? Why do we keep getting errors in our plotting of our confusion matrix?


pages: 358 words: 119,272

Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons From Wall Street's Four Great Bottoms by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, collective bargaining, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, diversified portfolio, fake news, financial engineering, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, hindsight bias, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Money creation, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, price stability, reserve currency, risk free rate, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, short selling, stocks for the long run, yield curve, Yogi Berra

The huge monetary impact of such deposit flight and the inability, or unwillingness, of the Federal Reserve to counteract it, is the key reason why the US recession of 1930 developed into the depression of 1931-32. Total deposits in the US banking system declined from $59,828 million at the end of June 1930 to $58,092 million by the end of the year. This initial decline was modest but it kick-started a process which, combined with Fed inactivity, resulted in very negative impacts for bank balance sheets. The banks reacted normally to deposit flight by seeking more liquid assets for their balance sheets. This had a significant impact, as the banks tended to shift their holdings away from corporate bonds and into government securities.


pages: 387 words: 119,244

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy by Iain Martin

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, call centre, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Thorp, Etonian, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, interest rate swap, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, pets.com, proprietary trading, Red Clydeside, shareholder value, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, value at risk, warehouse robotics

The answer appeared to be that it would extract oil instead, make computers (in the emerging industry known as ‘Silicon Glen’) and possibly expand financial services. Mathewson’s mantra as boss of the SDA was that he would make any public sector money available go as far as possible, whether it was in trying to kickstart the attempts at regenerating Glasgow or persuading foreign businesses to invest in Scotland. He also wanted to use his muscle and expanding network of connections to save grand old companies if they were worth saving. The SDA and Mathewson were pivotal in the 1980s when Weir Group, the engineering giant, encountered difficulties and needed rescuing.


pages: 391 words: 112,312

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, business cycle, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, full employment, George Floyd, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, mouse model, Nate Silver, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, QAnon, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, the scientific method, TikTok, transcontinental railway, zoonotic diseases

Keynes’s great work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936, changed the role of government in capitalist societies, leading to increased regulation and the creation of global institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It became accepted wisdom that, in times of recession, substantial government spending would kick-start consumption and cause businesses to expand, thereby reducing unemployment. The governmental bailouts during the 2007–2008 financial crisis in the U.S. were an example of Keynesian interventions. Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom had been the bible of conservative economists since its publication in 1944, in the midst of the civilizational struggle between democracy and fascism.


pages: 401 words: 119,043

Checkpoint Charlie by Iain MacGregor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, British Empire, index card, Kickstarter, Live Aid, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Ted Sorensen

Without the opportunities opened then to someone from his background in Stavropol in the North Caucasus, Gorbachev’s progress to the Soviet leadership might never have happened. He now saw his mission as bringing social and economic reform to the Soviet Union before it was too late and its Cold War rival—the USA—was over the horizon. In 1985 he had remarkably kick-started social and economic reforms—perestroika—within the Soviet Union to accelerate economic growth. The following year, he ushered in glasnost—a term for a more open society that tolerated debate in politics and culture. Change was coming from the East, and within five years of Gorbachev’s rule, its influence would be felt in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany.


pages: 444 words: 117,770

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

A few years ago I co-founded a cross-industry and civil society organization called the Partnership on AI to help with this kind of work. We launched it with the support of all the major technology companies, including DeepMind, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and OpenAI, along with scores of expert civil society groups, including the ACLU, the EFF, Oxfam, UNDP, and twenty others. Shortly after, it kick-started an AI Incidents Database, designed for confidentially reporting on safety events to share lessons with other developers. It has now collected more than twelve hundred reports. With more than a hundred partners from nonprofit, academic, and media groups, the partnership offers critical, neutral windows for interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

From the late 1970s onwards, free-market capitalism would unleash the power of exponentiality. From this moment, the foundations of the transition to the Exponential Age were laid. But it would take a little while to get going. Giving an actual date for the start of the Exponential Age is tricky. It is not like the age of flight (kick-started by Orville and Wilbur Wright’s flight at Kitty Hawk, 1903), or the atomic age (the Chicago Pile-1 prototype reactor, 1942), or the space age (Sputnik’s orbit, 1957). Exponential change is a continual, smooth curve; there are no sharp, disjointed moments. And as we saw in Chapter 1, the change starts off barely perceptibly, speeds up deceptively gradually, and only eventually does everything take off.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

In the arts, funding often works to support non-commercial work; maybe that could be flipped so that government funding is provided for successful projects and people. Schemes could be introduced to discount credentialism and help, say, with late-stage career changes. Innovative funding mechanisms like Kickstarter could be further developed, new tools created for experiment. What should apply more widely to the domain of ideas: massive online collaborations like Wikipedia, techniques like red teaming and wargaming, novel approaches to computer simulations, randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in unfamiliar areas?


pages: 451 words: 115,720

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

Investing in carbon-fuel industries was far from being a safe bet, Leggett warned.15 Closing off the zero-carbon nuclear escape route (“nuclear power cannot compete economically with energy efficiency and most forms of renewables”), Leggett made his plug: “Saving the capital markets—not to mention the planet—will require kick-starting multi-billion dollar markets in solar energy.”16 Banks, insurers, and pension funds should send emissaries to the climate change negotiations. There were practical things they could do. Now that solar PV panels were cheaper than marble, the facades of their head offices could be covered in PV.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

“These efforts are absolutely independent of public input,” James Losey told me.150 Meinrath is dubious about the efforts of policy makers to appease concerned citizens about new copyright laws and treaties: “All multi-stakeholder efforts I’ve heard about have been more towards the PR BS side of the spectrum than anything meaningful.”151 Note well, as MacKinnon chronicles, the lessons from China and Russia are that those governments routinely use copyright enforcement as a politically convenient cover for cracking down on dissent.152 There is also a synergy of interests between the commercial forces that want to monitor people surreptitiously online to better sell them to advertisers and the copyright holders who want to monitor people online to see who might be using their material without permission.153 The irony is this: research demonstrates that while aggressively enforcing onerous copyright laws can quash dissent, because of the technology, that approach is ineffective at reducing the supply of “pirated” material online.154 “In the long run,” as David Friedman puts it, “simply enforcing existing law is not going to be an option.”155 Scholars like Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi propose smart reforms, while others, like Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig, and Friedman, demonstrate that there may be ways to make cultural production compatible with the Internet.156 “I think we are at a point where we are asking whether you really need a film industry for a film to be made or a music industry to make music,” Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler put it in 2012.157 The problem, of course, is that alternative approaches are not compatible with the media giants remaining enormous and enormously profitable. Independent of the legislative front, in 2012 the media giants proceeded to work out private arrangements to enforce copyright to their satisfaction with the telecom cartel and Internet giants such as Google.


pages: 409 words: 125,611

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

The U.S. economy is headed for a serious recession and needs a big stimulus. We need increased unemployment insurance; if states and localities are not helped, they will have to reduce expenditures as their tax revenues plummet, and their reduced spending will lead to a contraction of the economy. But to kick-start the economy, Washington must make investments in the future. Hurricane Katrina and the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis were grim reminders of how decrepit our infrastructure has become. Investments in infrastructure and technology will stimulate the economy in the short run and enhance growth in the long run. 4.


pages: 654 words: 120,154

The Firm by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset light, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, book value, borderless world, collective bargaining, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, family office, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, vertical integration, young professional

He took to wearing Brioni suits and started going to Studio 54. (He was single at the time, and there were even rumors of his being seen with Hollywood actress Karen Black.) And while he can be quite rightly credited for focusing the firm on the need to know what it was talking about, he also deserves a share of credit for kick-starting the shift toward a more commercial—and greedier—McKinsey. Today he lives with his third wife, Linda, in a sprawling mansion in Montecito, California, where, among others, Google chief Eric Schmidt, Al Gore, and Carol Burnett own homes. He calls it Casa Leo Linda, and when you enter the gigantic front door, you pass by the house’s ceremonial guards—two statuary lions.


pages: 384 words: 122,874

Swindled: the dark history of food fraud, from poisoned candy to counterfeit coffee by Bee Wilson

air freight, Corn Laws, food miles, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, new economy, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair

One British journalist in China has written that the problem of counterfeited food is itself “a consequence of China’s economic policy, which has encouraged local provinces to pursue growth at all costs.”89 A blind eye will be turned to pirateers, so long as they pay their taxes and generate profits. A professor at People’s University, Huang Guoxiong, was quoted as saying that “there is an outdated belief among local offi cials that they can only kickstart development in their areas by fostering low-price industries producing fakes.”90 However much the Chinese government lamented the dead babies, it was partly responsible for their deaths. The scandal brought to the surface the feeble regulatory powers of the Food and Medicine Inspection Bureau. In March 2003, state news media reported that of 106,000 food companies in China, only 17,900 were licensed.


pages: 423 words: 129,831

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, big-box store, blue-collar work, congestion pricing, Donner party, edge city, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, Ralph Nader, side project, smart transportation, Southern State Parkway, streetcar suburb, traveling salesman, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen

Before he died of leukemia in 2001, its 24,576 bulbs had boosted his electric bill to about $110,000 a month. When I had lunch at the Sombrero one afternoon, a carload of Mexicans—actual Mexicans—was seated a couple of tables away. They had trouble deciphering the menu and got little help from the wait staff. Nobody spoke Spanish. 18 BACK IN BALTIMORE, city officials searching for a way to kick-start their downtown's redevelopment announced that they'd found it in a gleaming black office complex called Charles Center, which in short order rose from the business district's southern edge. The project caused an immediate ripple in the city's plans for an east-west expressway. In July 1959, the Sun revealed that planners were secretly discussing a new I-70 route that swung south of downtown, instead of north—an alignment that spared Tyson Street and snuggled up to Charles Center.


pages: 597 words: 119,204

Website Optimization by Andrew B. King

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, bounce rate, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, information retrieval, iterative process, Kickstarter, machine readable, medical malpractice, Network effects, OSI model, performance metric, power law, satellite internet, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social graph, Steve Jobs, the long tail, three-martini lunch, traumatic brain injury, web application

Sophisticated marketers create personas, or personality archetypes, that help to customize different paths for different types of customers. Each path has copy that is tailored for that persona's level of education, different personality characteristics, and needs. By populating your paths with friendly, tailored, benefit-oriented copy, you can kick-start the liking process. You'll learn more about personas later in this chapter. Authority: Dutiful deference. Systemic societal pressures have instilled deference to authority in most humans. We tend to obey people who appear authoritative, especially those with impressive titles and the trappings of what people in the culture consider signs of success.


pages: 400 words: 121,378

Red Platoon: A True Story of American Valor by Clinton Romesha

Berlin Wall, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Kickstarter, Skype, WikiLeaks

And a giant part of that confusion stemmed from the fact that the larger mission was itself something of a mystery, at least to us. If I had to explain why we’d been sent to Keating and what we were supposed to accomplish there, what it apparently boiled down to was that we were helping the Afghan government beef up security just enough to kick-start commerce in the region. This would enable local people to start making money, which they could then use to buy a bunch of DVD players and toasters and other sweet stuff for themselves and their families, thereby magically transforming Nuristan into a hub of vibrant economic development. At this point, the government could hold elections, which would enable folks to race off to the ballot box and vote to shut down the Taliban—whereupon everybody could kick back in front of their new TV sets, break out some cocktails, and enjoy themselves.


pages: 326 words: 48,727

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth by Mark Hertsgaard

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, defense in depth, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, food miles, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, ocean acidification, peak oil, Port of Oakland, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, urban planning

Leggett also organized insurance executives to attend UN climate negotiations in Berlin in 1995, where the executives lobbied diplomats to impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions; it was the first time governments learned that the oil and coal industries did not speak for all businesses on the climate issue. Leggett's goal was to persuade the insurance industry to use its leverage over global capital flows to kick-start the solar energy revolution. "The insurance industry collects some $1.4 trillion in premiums every year," Leggett told me at the time. "Much of that $1.4 trillion is reinvested in fossil fuels, which only make things worse, and almost none in solar and other renewables. We'd like to reverse that."


pages: 424 words: 121,425

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

These loans are not designed to cover emergencies or living expenses but are geared toward entrepreneurs who cannot get traditional loans.84 P2P lending is often confused with crowdfunding, but in P2P lending, the lender receives interest and eventual repayment of the loan. In a crowdfunding project, like Kickstarter, supporters of a particular project do not get their money back, but depending on the venture, receive some form of a prize, such as a CD or even a sample of potato salad. In essence, a P2P lending company is a financial intermediary. It links a source of credit to a demand for credit. Some companies even screen or rate borrowers, offering true intermediary functions.


pages: 404 words: 124,705

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter by Susan Pinker

assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, facts on the ground, fixed-gear, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, indoor plumbing, intentional community, invisible hand, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, Occupy movement, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), place-making, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, tontine, Tony Hsieh, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, Yogi Berra

For those parents who might want to outsource other aspects of early parenting, there are apps that purportedly teach babies to say their first words. One promotional blurb asks: “What parent hasn’t held up items and said their name aloud? You hold up a sock and say ‘so-ock.’ Now Baby Flashcards has taken that game and made it virtual!” It’s too early to know whether an app can help toddlers control their bladders or kick-start their speech. Right now there’s no evidence that they do, nor is there a contingent of researchers seriously investigating the question. That’s a telling sign of avoidance, or maybe wishful thinking. Sixty-one percent of Americans now own smartphones, according to the Pew Center on the Internet and American Life, as do the majority of adults in Canada and the U.K.


pages: 407 words: 121,458

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Fred Pearce

additive manufacturing, air freight, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blood diamond, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, demographic transition, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food miles, ghettoisation, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kibera, Kickstarter, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, profit motive, race to the bottom, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Grosvenor says its PET makes fleeces and car upholstery and its HDPE often resurfaces as drainpipes. For now, roughly half our plastic bottles returned for recycling are sold to China. Ray Georgeson at the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) says a British plastics-recycling business could be kick-started if plastic-bottle makers would agree to accept 25 per cent recycled feedstock. But they won’t. It’s not cost-effective, they say. The going rate for old plastic bottles is about £120 a tonne, which is about half a penny per bottle and more than twice what British recyclers say they can afford to pay because of the high wages they have to pay.


pages: 380 words: 125,912

Journeyman: One Man's Odyssey Through the Lower Leagues of English Football by Ben Smith

Kickstarter, young professional

I did not stipulate what type of car I wanted but I cannot say the green Seat Ibiza, complete with tow bar, was what I had envisaged. I was a young eligible bachelor and this was not the sort of transport a ‘man about town’ should have been driving – not in my opinion anyway. It was probably very cool in rural Somerset, though, and it was in club colours. I was hoping that bank holiday performance would kick-start my season and bring on a consistent level of performance after a so-so beginning. Our next game was at home to Rushden & Diamonds and it was the first time we’d meet after their rumoured interest in me the previous season. I was determined to impress. We lost the game 1–0 but I felt I had been our most effective attacking player throughout.


pages: 419 words: 119,476

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain by Robert Verkaik

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alistair Cooke, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, G4S, gender pay gap, God and Mammon, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, loadsamoney, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Piers Corbyn, place-making, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, school vouchers, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Suez crisis 1956, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trade route, traveling salesman, unpaid internship

Or he may have thought that he was unlikely to win a second term and was planning to stand down shortly anyway. Whatever the reason for this apparently off-the-cuff remark it was to alter the course of British history. Its most immediate impact was to make Cameron vulnerable to a leadership challenge from an emboldened Boris Johnson. It kick-started a fourteen-month Tory leadership race which turned the Referendum campaign into a beauty contest to choose his successor. Cameron had gambled that he would win the EU referendum, like he had successfully gambled on the Scottish referendum, and Boris, in so many ways a europhile, had gambled that he stood a much better chance of succeeding his school friend as prime minister if he threw his weight behind Brexit.


World Cities and Nation States by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen

active transport: walking or cycling, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, business climate, clean tech, congestion charging, corporate governance, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, driverless car, financial independence, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gentrification, global supply chain, global value chain, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, managed futures, megacity, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent control, Richard Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Key actors and mechanisms that enable Paris to make progress with the nation state Paris’s major development challenges are often highlighted and addressed by individuals and agencies within the central Paris city government. The metropolitanisation (métropole) process was partly spurred by former Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë appointing a deputy mayor with responsibility for relations with the wider region. The city government then put forward a proposal for a ‘metropolitan pole’ which kick‐started the governance debate. Actors within the State itself have been key to mobilising its institutions. When faced with the region’s proposed master plan in 2008, the then government thought it was not commensurate with what a global city region such as Paris could achieve. This continued in 2012 with the new Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, taking a personal involvement in the project with the support of his representative in the region, the prefect Jean François Carenco.


pages: 627 words: 127,613

Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990 by Kristina Spohr, David Reynolds

anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, computer age, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, guns versus butter model, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nixon shock, oil shock, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shared worldview, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The ideas in the package still worked, both as policy and as propaganda, Yakovlev contended, but ‘the “package” in its present form only ties our hands’ because the Reagan administration could represent it as ‘our final position’ and thereby continue the deadlock on arms control. The following day Gorbachev and the Politburo agreed to ‘untie the package’, planning a dramatic speech by the Soviet leader in mid-March to win over world opinion and kick-start negotiations. ‘As difficult as it is to conduct business with the United States,’ Gorbachev lamented, ‘we are doomed to it. We have no choice.’ He cautioned his colleagues that ‘we should not build our policy on illusions. We should not count on capitalism suffering an economic crisis’, as Marxism-Leninism predicted, adding that ‘competition will continue in any case…Our main problem is to remove the confrontation.


Cyprus Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, New Urbanism, place-making, Skype

History buffs can make an archaeological detour southwest to visit Ancient Vouni and Ancient Soloi; otherwise, hit the road to North Nicosia, spending a day here visiting the sites, before continuing to Famagusta and the captivating surrounds ofthe Karpas (Kιrpaşa) Peninsula. Enjoy the beaches and stay overnight at the unspoilt fishing village of Boğaz (Bogazi) before returning to Ercan, via Ancient Salamis, for your flight home. eat & drink like a local Top of section When to Go: Food Seasons October–December Kick-start this serious foodie season with the olive harvest at the annual Kyrenia Olive Festival (Click here), then look for freshly harvested wild mushrooms, artichokes, avocados and winter greens on your meze menu. Closer to Christmas, bakeries overflow with kourabies and melomakarona (almond and honey cakes), while strawberry guavas and pomegranates are, justifiably, the fruity favourites.


pages: 413 words: 120,506

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi

Bernie Sanders, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Kickstarter, mass immigration, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

Most of these dictatorial rulers are beholden to the US and are valuable clients of American defense, aerospace, oil, banking, and real estate interests, which have vast influence in Washington. These potent forces also lobby for Arab kleptocrats, but not for “the Arabs,” if by that is meant the peoples of these countries. Still, another hopeful sign was Obama’s quick appointment of George Mitchell as special envoy for Middle East peace in January 2009, charged with kick-starting direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for a final settlement. Mitchell was a negotiator in the mold of Cyrus Vance and James Baker: an independent-minded and experienced Washington hand, who at that late stage of his career was not beholden to Israel or its lobby. He had served as governor of Maine and as Senate majority leader; as special envoy for President Bill Clinton, he had successfully negotiated the Northern Ireland Good Friday agreement in 1998, bringing the IRA in from the cold and involving them in a settlement.


Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

Only when these circumstances change does consciousness begin to stream; it does not flow, as in Descartes, independently, of its own accord. Bergson does not think about consciousness in quite this way. In Proust’s famous tasting of the madeleine, a sustained memory from the past is triggered by a momentary physical sensation – a small cookie kickstarts the vast project of conscious recovery of a territory of experience far, far away. Bergson’s idea of durée is sometimes likened to this cookie-consciousness, but is just the opposite. Durée is all about consciousness of the present, and of living wholly in the here and now; it differs from feeling, as in the phrase of the novelist L.P.


pages: 444 words: 124,631

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay by Jonathan Shapiro, James Eyers

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple Newton, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, book value, British Empire, clockwatching, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial deregulation, George Floyd, greed is good, growth hacking, index fund, Jones Act, Kickstarter, late fees, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, managed futures, Max Levchin, meme stock, Mount Scopus, Network effects, new economy, passive investing, payday loans, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Rainbow capitalism, regulatory arbitrage, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, short squeeze, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, tech bro, technology bubble, the payments system, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

The frenetic work on a public holiday paid back in spades when Kim Kardashian uploaded an Instagram post to her 120 million followers; she also endorsed Afterpay to her 60 million followers on Twitter, via a post on 28 November: We added #AfterPay to our sites to make purchasing easier! Choose AfterPay at checkout to purchase your #BlackFriday favs and the Must Have #GlamBible in 4 easy payments. Our 30–50% off site wide #KKWBeauty sale and 30% off site wide #KKWFragrance sale ends tonight at 11:59 pm PST It was just what the young business needed to kickstart further growth. By the end of March, Afterpay hit 1 million customers in the United States, just ten months after its launch—an impressive growth rate even by Silicon Valley’s lofty standards. The Kardashian camp intuitively understood the product, and the fortuitous connection helped put Afterpay on the radar of America’s millennial generation, those aged between 22 and 37 in 2018—of whom there were 63 million.


pages: 466 words: 116,165

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History by Casey Michel

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, forensic accounting, Global Witness, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Jeffrey Epstein, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, too big to fail

“We call it,” Zwonitzer adds, “‘business-friendly.’”77 * * * AND ALL OF those developments began attracting serious flows of dirty money to the state in the mid-1990s. Many of those funds came, unsurprisingly, from the shattered Soviet Union, which had fractured only a few years prior. One of those attracted to the state was Pavlo Lazarenko, whose corruption placed Wyoming on the global kleptocratic map—and kick-started a flow of dirty post-Soviet money that people like Ihor Kolomoisky, whom we met in the prologue, would soon take full advantage of. Lazarenko—jowly, often seen wearing ill-fitting suits—served as Ukraine’s prime minister for a few years in the mid-1990s. Like many of that initial post-Soviet generation, he was more interested in dipping into state coffers, extending his links of corrupt networks, and entrenching his own power bases through whatever crooked means he could.


pages: 476 words: 121,460

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, cloud computing, Conway's Game of Life, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DeepMind, deferred acceptance, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Georg Cantor, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jean Tirole, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, P = NP, Paul Samuelson, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, second-price auction, side project, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological singularity, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

‘The Soviet political leadership interpreted the new intelligence documents on the superbomb … as a sign that the USA had, possibly, made considerable progress,’ Goncharov says, ‘so they … decided to launch a comprehensive programme officially supported by the central authorities.’49 A year before testing their first fission bomb, and well before Truman decided to accelerate America’s Super programme, Russia started briskly down the path leading to the test of its first fully fledged thermonuclear weapon on 22 November 1955. Determined to help the United States keep Stalin in check, von Neumann had inadvertently helped to kick-start the Soviet H-bomb programme. Von Neumann’s trips to Los Alamos continued long after the war was over, when he and Klári would work on Teller’s ‘Super’. The design for this was even more complex than the implosion weapon, requiring the explosion of a fission bomb to trigger a fusion reaction within.


Northern California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, gentrification, gigafactory, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, Port of Oakland, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the built environment, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The miner forty-niners are gone, but a ride along Hwy 49 through sleepy hill towns, past clapboard saloons and oak-lined byways is a journey back to the wild ride that was modern California’s founding: umpteen historical markers tell tales of gold rush violence and banditry. Many travelers hardly hit the brakes while rushing between California’s coasts and mountains, but those who do are rewarded with a taste of the helter-skelter era that kick-started the heartbeat of this state. When to Go Apr–May Pan for gold after the snowmelt washes the treasure into Jamestown's hills. Jul As temperatures rise to scorching, plunge into a refreshing South Yuba swimming hole. Sep–Nov When crisp, heritage apples are ripe for the picking, head to Apple Hill's sprawling ranches.

The legislature has attempted to address the state's housing woes by introducing more than 100 bills on the issue, but in 2017 the outlook for reform remained dim. Northern California may be an achingly beautiful place to visit, but for the vast majority of residents, it's an increasingly difficult place to afford. Roots of Environmentalism Californians originally kick-started the world’s conservation movement in the midst of the 19th-century's industrial revolution, with laws curbing industrial dumping, and protections for pristine wildernesses that helped establish the national parks system. In the 1970s, the modern-day environmental movement was born, when then-President Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, following an oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast.


The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 by John Darwin

anti-communist, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, cognitive bias, colonial rule, Corn Laws, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, labour mobility, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, railway mania, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, Scientific racism, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

At Rhodes’ direct request,49 Milner pleaded for his grandiose scheme to build a new railway beyond the Zambezi and open a vast new northern extension. Britain's strategy in South Africa, he urged, depended upon the gamble of Rhodesia's development. Capital would be attracted by the sheer scale of Rhodes’ project; a great new railway empire, pivoted on Bulawayo, would kick-start the Rhodesian economy as a counterpoise to the Transvaal.50 Two weeks earlier, Milner had warned Rhodes against ‘worrying’ Chamberlain with this scheme.51 But in the course of the year the prospects of direct imperial action grew steadily fainter. The British press was distracted by other imperial excitements in the Sudan and China.

There the Progressive leaders, George Farrar and Percy Fitzpatrick, were closely identified with the Randlords, whose prime aim was to drive down the cost of mine labour. Their alliance with Milner to delay self-government and ‘solve’ the labour problem affronted the tenets of Britannic nationalism. For, at the Randlords’ behest, Milner proposed to bring in indentured labour from China to kick-start recovery. ‘Lord Milner is our salvation’, wrote Lionel Phillips, head of the largest mining house on the Rand.106 The result was uproar. ‘Chinese slavery’ offended humanitarian feeling in Britain. Much more dangerously, it roused the fear of English labour on the Rand that it would be displaced by ‘Asiatics’ – the same kind of fear that lay behind ‘White Australia’.


pages: 444 words: 138,781

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

affirmative action, Cass Sunstein, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, dumpster diving, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, housing justice, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jobless men, Kickstarter, late fees, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, payday loans, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, statistical model, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, working poor, young professional

Nurses and social workers bustled past patients strolling the hallways, doing nothing while they waited. Scott wouldn’t mind working at the clinic, being one of the fast-walkers. But on that day, he was there for drugs. To him, what the AA converts didn’t understand, because none of them were heroin users, was that his body was physically in need of something that would give him a boost and kick-start his motivation. His fingers were crossed for Suboxone, which was used to treat opiate addiction. After almost three hours, Scott’s name was called. He stood up, relieved to be seen. The psychiatrist was a skinny Asian man with a flattop and a voice just above a whisper. He led Scott into a drab, rectangular room that resembled an oversized closet.


pages: 890 words: 133,829

Sardinia Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Skype

The effects are still being researched. 1950–70 Sardinia benefits from the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, a development fund for southern Italy. But improvements in agriculture, education, industry, transport and banking cannot prevent widespread emigration. 1962 The Aga Khan forms the Consorzio della Costa Smeralda to develop a short stretch of northeastern coast. The resulting Emerald Coast kick-starts tourism on the island. 1985 Sassari-born Francesco Cossiga is elected President of the Republic of Italy. He was Minister of the Interior when the Red Brigade (extreme-left terrorists) kidnapped and killed ex-PM Aldo Moro in 1978. 1999 The EU identifies Sardinia as one of a handful of places in Europe in dire need of investment for ‘development and structural upgrading’. 2004 Self-made billionaire Renato Soru is elected president of Sardinia.


pages: 431 words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Enthralled by the lessons he’d learned at Ayn Rand’s knee, where he was taught it was the capitalist’s very profit-seeking that was the ‘excelled protector of the consumer’, he pushed for a dramatic expansion of the neoliberal game by advocating the deregulation of the financial industries. In 1999, Clinton repealed the laws that had been brought in, in 1933, to control the banks following the crash – laws that had helped kick-start the now long-vanished period of Great Compression. This wave of deregulation brought into being the highly unstable derivatives market that was made up, in the words of superstar investor Warren Buffett, of ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’. From a starting position of almost nothing, those weapons of mass destruction quickly became a $531tn industry.


pages: 419 words: 130,627

Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business logic, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, interest rate swap, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk/return, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

A few years later, Joanne Lipman at Conde Nast Portfolio gave me a job. Others warranting mention are Jason Pontin of Red Herring, Tony Keller of Canada’s National Post magazine, and Michael Hogan of Vanity Fair. Former Portfolio deputy editor Blaise Zerega also knows that I will forever owe him one or two. But it was New York editor Adam Moss who truly kickstarted this project. In a meeting in his office in January 2008 he asked me which prominent Wall Street people we should write about that year. I had just one idea for him: Jamie Dimon. A March cover story in New York followed, and the rest is history. Thank you, Adam. I want to thank all the people who took time out of busy schedules to speak to me during my reporting.


pages: 494 words: 132,975

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott

airport security, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, collective bargaining, complexity theory, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, if you build it, they will come, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, means of production, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, public intellectual, pushing on a string, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

It was all right to have him at Chicago so long as he was not associated with the economists.”42 In the fall of 1950, at the suggestion of Nef, Hayek became professor of social and moral science in the Committee on Social Thought, a chair funded in part by the Volcker fund. Despite the rebuff, Hayek accepted the post. Hayek wanted to kick-start his counterrevolution by writing a work that would be as popularly received as The Road to Serfdom. As his biographer Alan Ebenstein explained, “He hoped The Constitution of Liberty would be [Adam Smith’s] The Wealth of Nations of the twentieth century.”43 Over the next nine years he worked on and off on a work that would explain why the rule of law is the best way to safeguard individual liberties from governments.


pages: 476 words: 144,288

1946: The Making of the Modern World by Victor Sebestyen

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Etonian, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, land reform, long peace, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, operation paperclip

Some were apocalyptic in their gloom: ‘There is a situation in the world, very clearly illustrated in Europe, but true also in the Far East, which threatens the very foundations, the whole fabric of world organisation, which we have known in our lifetimes and which our fathers and grandfathers knew,’ Dean Acheson told President Truman.7 Yet recovery was in fact far speedier than anyone predicted – thanks, principally, to the United States and to people such as Dean Acheson and, especially, George Marshall, who saw how it could be achieved. The post-war priority for America was to keep Western Europe from falling to the communists. The Marshall Plan, launched the next summer, was a product of the Cold War. The US provided more aid in the following four years – $13 billion – than in the rest of its history combined to kick-start economies destroyed by the war. The Plan was visionary, and self-interested, and would transform the post-war world. It was in the future. But, as so often, it is in apparently small things that first signs can be spotted. Janet Flanner made an interesting observation midway through the year: in Paris department stores frequented by women, the biggest selling goods were, unsurprisingly, underwear.


pages: 370 words: 129,096

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

The month after the Santa Monica event was the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, a famous showcase for exotic cars. Tesla had become such a topic of conversation that the organizers of the event begged to have a Roadster and waived the usual display fees. Tesla set up a booth, and people showed up by the dozens writing $100,000 checks on the spot to pre-order their cars. “This was long before Kickstarter, and we just had not thought of trying to do that,” Tarpenning said. “But then we started getting millions of dollars at these types of events.” Venture capitalists, celebrities, and friends of Tesla employees began trying to buy their way onto the waiting list. Some of Silicon Valley’s wealthy elite went so far as to show up at the Tesla office and knock on the door, looking to buy a car.


pages: 500 words: 145,005

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler

3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, impulse control, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, late fees, law of one price, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, Mason jar, mental accounting, meta-analysis, money market fund, More Guns, Less Crime, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, New Journalism, nudge unit, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, presumed consent, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

. ________________ * There are some exceptions to this generalization, such as neuroscience, where scientists from many different fields have productively worked together, but in that case they coalesced around specific tools like brain scans. I don’t want to say that all interdisciplinary meetings are a waste of time. I am just saying that in my experience, they have been disappointing. † To be clear, the field of judgment and decision-making that was kick-started by Kahneman and Tversky in the 1970s continues to thrive. Their annual meeting, sponsored by the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, attracts over 500 scholars whose work often intersects with behavioral economics. There are also a number of notable behavioral scholars in marketing, including my old friend Eric Johnson, several of my former students, and many others who do research on topics such as mental accounting and self-control.


pages: 624 words: 127,987

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume by Josh Kaufman

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business process, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, hindsight bias, index card, inventory management, iterative process, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loose coupling, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Network effects, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, place-making, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, scientific management, side project, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, systems thinking, telemarketer, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra

Instead of trying to ignore the resistance or push through it (a surefire way to experience Willpower Depletion), exploring that resistance using Mental Simulation and Reinterpretation helped me uncover a hidden Conflict: I wasn’t happy with how my work was turning out, and doing more of what wasn’t working would be a waste. Spending some time revising the structure of the book resolved that Conflict, simultaneously making the book better and eliminating the source of the resistance. Third, kick-start the Attention process by doing a “dash.” Since it can take ten to thirty minutes to get into the zone, setting aside ten to thirty minutes for a quick burst of focused work can make it much easier to get into the zone quickly. If you’re not productive by the time the dash is over, you have permission to stop and do something else.


pages: 433 words: 127,171

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

“The challenge right now,” architect John Keates enjoins us to consider, is that given that we don’t know the answer to what comes next, to also ask: “what are the ethics that we set for ourselves? And to be aware that when we venture out into untrodden territory, that we are able to ask that question and dare to act when there is no clear answer.” The dreamers and builders and kickstarters of electrical storage campaigns and components are doing an admirable job of this. CHAPTER 9 American Zeitgeist In German the word for an addict is not like our own. In English to be an addict is to have a totalizing identity, controlled by a “soul-destroying, mind-numbing obsession that makes normal functioning impossible.”


pages: 538 words: 138,544

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

Treasury’s $800 billion rescue package to stabilize financial markets in late 2008 was to protect this sacred idea of economic growth, and by 2009, Obama, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, economic czar Larry Summers, and Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke had committed an estimated $13 trillion of public funds to bailing out Wall Street and kick-starting economic growth again. What gives? Why are so few people willing to challenge, or even critically discuss, an economic model that so clearly isn’t serving the planet and the majority of its people? I think one reason is that the economic model is nearly invisible to us. “Paradigm” may be an off-putting word, but it’s an important concept when considering different ways of organizing our economy and our society.


pages: 484 words: 136,735

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Better still, the neoclassical synthesis, in contrast to the classical economics of the nineteenth-century, made room for the post-Depression political realities of welfare safety nets and active demand management to stabilize business cycles, by explaining that the Fordist economic machine needed occasional lubrication, “pump-priming,” and “kickstarting” by a benignly probusiness government. Thus the new paradigm was able to co-opt both the Left and the Right. Conservatives were happy to describe the new orthodoxy as the neoclassical synthesis, while progressives such as Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow felt able to call it neo-Keynesian economics.


City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

What is remarkable about these Phoenician cities is that their power came not from military strength, but from their skill at conducting business and from the desire of people in other lands to trade with them. Trade played a vital role in the growth of cities in medieval Europe. Fairs helped kick-start trade on the continent. Fairs were sprawling wood and canvas temporary cities, which had been held outside the walls of cities since the Dark Ages. They resembled today’s Black Rock City, created for a few weeks each year in the Nevada desert for the Burning Man festival. Fairs were great occasions in the life of the city – ‘vast and elaborate pageants’, which usually took place during religious holidays and attracted droves of traders, entertainers and visitors.25 As Richard Sennett has said, fairs helped to develop ‘the first tissues between cities, connecting market to market’.


pages: 420 words: 130,503

Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards by Yu-Kai Chou

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, functional fixedness, game design, gamification, growth hacking, IKEA effect, Internet of things, Kickstarter, late fees, lifelogging, loss aversion, Maui Hawaii, Minecraft, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, software as a service, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs

Through later on Groupon failed to realize the full potential that late investors hoped it would obtain due to operational issues, during 2013 it still generated $2.57 Billion in revenue with $1.48 Billion in profits just off the Group Quest game technique21. Similar Group Quest models such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo have also become very popular services that crowdsource funds to support the development of innovative projects that cannot raise money from institutional investors. There are so many of these fascinating concepts within games that we are just beginning to extract into the real world.


pages: 420 words: 130,714

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Boeing 747, book value, Boris Johnson, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, Necker cube, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method, twin studies, value engineering

There is no strong reason to choose Jesus as icon instead of some other role model from the ranks of the supernice such as Mahatma Gandhi (not the odiously self-righteous and hypocritical Mother Teresa, heavens no*5). I think we owe Jesus the honour of separating his genuinely original and radical ethics from the supernatural nonsense that he inevitably espoused as a man of his time. And perhaps the oxymoronic impact of ‘Atheists for Jesus’ might be just what is needed to kick-start the meme of superniceness in a post-Christian society. If we play our cards right, could we lead society away from the nether regions of its Darwinian origins into the kinder and more compassionate uplands of post-singularity enlightenment? I think a reborn Jesus would wear the T-shirt. It has become a commonplace that, were he to return today, he would be appalled at what is being done in his name by Christians ranging from the Catholic Church with its vast and ostentatious wealth to the fundamentalist religious right with its stated doctrine, explicitly contradicting Jesus, that ‘God wants you to be rich’.


pages: 493 words: 136,235

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet

Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, computer age, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, game design, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

* * * PARANOIA ADORES A network. During the summer of 1973, LaRouche was busy constructing one across a continent: connecting a constellation of tiny radical groups into a new organization called the European Labor Committees (ELC). His former girlfriend Carol Larrabee was in London, attempting to kick-start a British outpost of the organization with the help of her new British husband, Chris White. In Cologne, a knot of Greek exiles were ready for a formal alliance. In Düsseldorf, a cadre of Trotskyist medical students joined the cause. In Frankfurt and Stockholm, small groups coalesced around former members of the Next Step.


Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11 by James Donovan

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, drop ship, Gene Kranz, Hans Lippershey, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, white flight

While op-ed writers bemoaned an “education gap,” and a government report showed that Soviet children took far more science and math in high school than the fun-loving, sock-hopping American kids, who were getting dumber every day, it was clear that Soviet triumphs would continue. All this self-recrimination would result in the National Defense Education Act, signed into law by Eisenhower in September 1958, which was designed to kick-start the U.S. educational system with grants, low-interest loans, and the like. Eisenhower, in a press conference a few days after Sputnik 1 launched, insisted that it wasn’t the Russians who had built the satellite—it was “all of the German scientists” they had captured at the end of the war. This could not have been further from the truth.


pages: 545 words: 137,789

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

The financial stabilization programs that were adopted in the United States and elsewhere involved three elements: a pledge not to let systemically important institutions collapse; a commitment to use taxpayers’ money to socialize some of the losses that had been incurred; and an endorsement of unorthodox central bank policies aimed at kick-starting the credit markets. All of these policies were based on the belated recognition that if private decision-makers were left to react to market incentives on an individual basis, they would pursue collectively self-defeating actions, such as withdrawing their money from financial firms and refusing to lend.


pages: 483 words: 143,123

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters by Gregory Zuckerman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, man camp, margin call, Maui Hawaii, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, reshoring, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Timothy McVeigh, urban decay

In March 2013, Britain came within six hours of running out of natural gas entirely, the Financial Times reported, as wholesale gas prices surged to record levels. Two tremors in the spring of 2011 around the town of Blackpool caused deep unease when they were linked to fracking efforts, leading to a ban on fracking. The government ended the ban in late 2012, however, and has announced tax breaks to kick-start shale drilling. Writing in the Daily Telegraph in August 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron argued that “if we don’t back” fracking technology, “we will miss a massive opportunity to help families with their bills and make our country more competitive. Without it, we could lose ground in the tough global race.”


Canary Islands Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

AltaVista, call centre, carbon footprint, G4S, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, low cost airline, urban sprawl

If you are after Asian cuisine, there are plenty of Japanese and Chinese restaurants (and supermarkets) around Calle Valencia, southwest of Plaza España. VEGUETA & TRIANA Restaurante El Herreño CANARIAN € (Calle Mendizábal 5; mains €7; ) Don’t miss a visit to this atmospheric place with its cavernous dining rooms and well-prepared Canarian dishes at excellent prices. Kick-start your menu with a ración of mojo potatoes and then choose from a menu that reads like a book. The service is zippy and everything is freshly made – and fresh: the market is right across the street. La Dolce Vita ITALIAN €€ (Calle Agustín Millares 5; mains €10-13; closed Wed evening & Sun; ) Tucked down a narrow pedestrian street, the homemade pasta here is the real thing, with imaginative sauces like artichokes and almonds.


pages: 537 words: 144,318

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money by Steven Drobny

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity super cycle, commodity trading advisor, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, family office, fiat currency, fixed income, follow your passion, full employment, George Santayana, global macro, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, open economy, peak oil, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discovery process, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, savings glut, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, unbiased observer, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

Within that, we should see a rebalancing of growth models: rebalancing of extremely low consumption rates in Asia and rebalancing of the low U.S. savings rate. By rebalancing, I am talking about a normalization of the U.S. fiscal balance, U.S. household saving rates, Asian consumption, Asian saving rates, Asian exchange rates, and many other things that this crisis has kick-started. If the Asians strengthen their currencies and grow domestically, their buying power increases to a much larger percentage of global GDP. Again, everyone is in this one together, even though as a first pass, certain countries stand out as having had no crisis and no subprime issues at all domestically.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

32 Wall Street, on the other hand, actively punishes public firms when they make decisions that seek to enhance their long-term strategic value. There are thousands of examples that one could cite, but here’s a particularly telling one: Less than a year after Apple introduced the iPod, the company’s stock began to fall steadily.33 That was because the product that would kick-start the greatest corporate turnaround in history initially disappointed, selling under 400,000 units in its debut year. Thankfully, Steve Jobs didn’t give a fig. He stuck with the idea, and today more than 1.9 billion Apple devices have been sold. Whether Tim Cook’s Apple will be remembered in the same way is still an open question, since despite the enormous dividends, Cook’s strategy has been very much of the downsize-and-distribute kind, in which profits are handed out to investors to allay concerns over the company’s lagging stock price.


pages: 483 words: 134,062

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers) by Becky Chambers

Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt

I was faced with a two-month lull between paying gigs, and it was starting to look like finishing my book and keeping a roof over my head were mutually exclusive. I had two options: set the book aside and use the time to search for work, or find a way to keep the book (and myself) going. I went with option B, and turned to Kickstarter. I told myself that if the campaign wasn’t successful, it was time for me to focus my efforts elsewhere. Fifty-three people (mostly strangers) convinced me to stick with it. The Long Way exists thanks to their generosity and their encouragement. I am more grateful for that than I can put into words.


Fodor's Normandy, Brittany & the Best of the North With Paris by Fodor's

call centre, car-free, carbon tax, flag carrier, glass ceiling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Kickstarter, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, subprime mortgage crisis, urban planning, young professional

. | 5 pl. du General-Gouraud | 03–26–61–62–55 | www.pommery.fr | €10 | Apr.–Nov., daily 9:30–7; Dec.–Mar., daily 10–6. Most Expensive Visit Ruinart. Founded back in 1729, just a year after Louis XV’s decision to allow wine to be transported by bottle (previously it could only be moved by cask) effectively kick-started the Champagne industry. Four of its huge, church-sized 24 chalk galleries are listed historic monuments. This is the costliest visit on offer—and, if you shell out €38, you can taste the Blanc de Blancs. | 4 rue des Crayères | 03–26–77–51–21 | www.champagne-ruinart.fr | €14.50 | Open by appointment.


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Most people I spoke with wanted to know how they could convince GM to reopen a plant, or a big bank to invest cash in their town. Until then, they believed, they were all out of work. Under the false assumption that money creates jobs (instead of the other way around), they were looking for an external injection to kick-start their economy—even though it would ultimately result in a further extraction of value from their community. What most of the people I engaged with over this past year couldn’t fully grasp was that they already had all the necessary components for an economy: people with needs, and people with skills.


pages: 480 words: 138,041

The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, back-to-the-land, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, meta-analysis, neurotypical, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, selection bias, statistical model, theory of mind, Winter of Discontent

Both men had been affiliated with Harvard and lived in the Boston area, but they’d become friends only after they had both arrived in Washington and their kids started attending the same schools. On a weekend afternoon in the summer of 1998, they were eating lunch by the side of Mirin’s suburban swimming pool when Mirin asked Hyman if NIMH would give the APA money to get the next revision of the DSM up and running. Mirin’s request for taxpayer money to kick-start a project from which a private organization would reap huge profits was not as untoward as it might seem. After all, the DSM is indispensable to public health, and NIMH had helped fund the DSM-IV. Nonetheless, and despite their friendship, Hyman said no. He told Mirin that a revision was premature, not only because the ink was barely dry on the DSM-IV, but more important, because psychiatrists had yet to come up with a better way to carve up the landscape of mental illness.


pages: 455 words: 131,569

Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution by Richard Whittle

Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, indoor plumbing, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, operational security, precision agriculture, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Teledyne, Yom Kippur War

Carrying the MTS, the Predator would be able to beam back not just black-and-white infrared images but also color video of what it saw. The new ball’s laser designator could also paint a target from five miles or more away. Big Safari, viewing the WILD Predator as a successful experiment despite its limited use, had advocated development of the MTS in late 1999, after Kosovo. General Jumper had kick-started it in early 2000, after taking over Air Combat Command and learning that ACC had taken the Forty-Four balls off the three WILD Predators sent to Kosovo. Raytheon’s Casey persuaded the Air Force and Navy to make the MTS a joint project, and they pooled their money with the company’s to design, develop, and fabricate three prototypes incorporating major improvements over the Forty-Four ball.


pages: 486 words: 138,878

Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh

clean water, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, low earth orbit, messenger bag, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, space junk, urban sprawl

Igor too, leant over from the commander’s chair on the raised platform of the control deck. ‘A hydrazine leak,’ said Eliot. Hydrazine was the highly explosive fuel found inside Orlando’s auxiliary power units. Juno knew that APUs were extra engines used for functions other than propulsion. On Orlando, the APUs provided the energy to kick-start the engines that boosted the station into a higher orbit, pushing it further away from Europa and in this case allowing it to more easily dock with the Congreve. ‘The crew on Orlando reported a lower than expected tank pressure a couple of days ago,’ Eliot said. Juno remembered that. Because hydrazine was so dangerous – highly flammable and toxic to humans – the news of a possible leak, almost a month ago, had been alarming.


pages: 519 words: 142,851

Columbine by Dave Cullen

Columbine, David Brooks, gun show loophole, Kickstarter, McMansion, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Timothy McVeigh, white flight

Dylan hurled another Ericism: “I’ve narrowed it down. It’s humans I hate.” Eric raised Arlene, and aimed her at the camera. “You guys will all die, and it will be fucking soon,” he said. “You all need to die. We need to die, too.” The boys made it clear, repeatedly, that they planned to die in battle. Their legacy would live. “We’re going to kick-start a revolution,” Eric said. “I declared war on the human race and war is what it is.” He apologized to his mom. “I really am sorry about this, but war’s war,” he told her. “My mother, she’s so thoughtful. She helps out in so many ways.” She brought him candy when he was sad, and sometimes Slim Jims.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

Research shows that the proliferation of digital social signals is transforming the ebb and flow of these behaviors as well. A few examples of this hypersocialization drive the point home. The Hypersocialization of News Every seven years academics get a sabbatical, a year off, to reset their thinking or kickstart new research. In 2013 I took a year off from MIT to become the scholar-in-residence at the New York Times R&D lab. It was an amazing experience. I collaborated with resident designers, engineers, and intellectual tinkerers who were trying to “look around corners” at the technologies that would affect journalism and news consumption in the years to come.


First Time Ever: A Memoir by Peggy Seeger

belling the cat, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, Easter island, index card, Kickstarter, Nelson Mandela, place-making, pre–internet, Skype, the market place

We explored the subject to its inner-and outermost limits. Unlike men, women aren’t reputed to think of sex every seven or so seconds. How do you manage, gentlemen, carrying between your legs an organ with a mind of its own – a second brain, a third eye, an alternative beating heart below the belt line, an Achilles heel continually kickstarting you without your permission? Penis envy? Not a chance, Sigmund. How frustrating it must be to know that half the world’s population has what you want and that you can’t have it whenever you wish. You have to work or pay for it, sometimes even marry for it, occasionally resort to violence or pretend to be what you’re not in order to get it.


pages: 565 words: 134,138

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources by Javier Blas, Jack Farchy

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, book value, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, Great Grain Robbery, invisible hand, John Deuss, junk bonds, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Oscar Wyatt, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stakhanovite, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

If Jesselson and MacMillan were scions of the metals and grain trading industries that had been well established since the nineteenth century, Weisser was a maverick who invented a new business single-handedly. He had returned from captivity in the Soviet Union after the defeat of Nazi Germany only to discover that his old job at an oil company no longer existed. That was all the encouragement he needed to follow his dream of creating his own business. To kick-start his new project, he bought a dormant company called Marquard & Bahls for 70,000 Reichsmark (the equivalent of about $100,000 in today’s money), largely for its import–export licence, a thing of value in a country that was still formally under foreign occupation. By the 1950s, when Weisser travelled to Moscow, the company was already well known throughout the primitive market for refined products by its telegraphic address: Mabanaft, a contraction of its trading name, Marquard & Bahls Naftaproducts.


pages: 506 words: 132,373

The Good, the Bad and the History by Jodi Taylor

friendly fire, global pandemic, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, operational security, place-making, urban sprawl

I raced into the kitchen and slung some bacon into a frying pan and shot back again in case he’d had a relapse in my absence. He was squinting at the hypo. ‘What have you been sticking me with?’ ‘Antibiotics. And you need to finish this course.’ ‘This course? How many have I had?’ ‘I gave you a multi-­dose to kick-­start what passes for your immune system and then I’ve been shoving more down you every four hours. I’m actually surprised you haven’t exploded. I’ve killed every germ in your body and probably cleared up your lingering STDs as well.’ ‘I’m surprised I survived.’ ‘Among my patients, survival is high.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

This push for austerity was seen as the responsible thing to do in light of the mess that Wall Street had created, and the people would need to pull their weight, suffer this burden, and show their patriotism by going without so that the country would survive. This would, in turn, fuel businesses to invest more in America and kickstart the economy once again. All of this was a bunch of lies dressed up to look like an urgent and necessary step toward fiscal sanity. The banks were not going to be kicking in any money to help out the economy, in fact, they were sitting on all of what they received during TARP and refusing to lend it out to small businesses, instead opting to loan it to other banks.


pages: 643 words: 131,673

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, George Santayana, germ theory of disease, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megastructure, minimum viable product, moveable type in China, placebo effect, safety bicycle, sugar pill, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

But realism isn’t the only purpose of visual art—a fact that historically gets underlined once photography is invented. Once artists realize that and get over realism, other styles start to be explored—and here there really is no limit. Below are some examples of different styles of visual art, which will allow you to kick-start the minds of artists in your civilization. With any luck, they’ll leapfrog over what we created and generate new and astounding works of art beyond anything we’ve ever considered. Good luck! Figure 56: Art. Sidebar: Where Can You Get Pigments? You can get black pigment from coal or charcoal—add it to water or oil and you’ve made paint—but other colors can be a bit trickier.


pages: 420 words: 135,569

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

This fast response due to previous pandemic experience has been cited as the primary reason that most African countries fared much better than their Western counterparts during the first two waves of the pandemic, despite having far fewer resources.6 What I see in my simulation participants’ reactions to COVID-19 is something almost like the fortitude of having lived through a real pandemic. Their minds were prepared to act faster and adapt faster. Less shock, more resilience. And it wasn’t just because more than a decade ago they’d imagined themselves living through a pandemic. The simulation had kick-started a habit, for many, of paying closer attention to real-world pandemic news. As one participant wrote me, “I’ve been following what’s happening in Wuhan closely, you could say I’ve had my radar up for pandemic news since Superstruct. It just always stuck in my mind to keep paying attention.” I’ve observed this fascinating and common “side effect” of participating in a future simulation countless times.


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

He tried to hold a seminar at Esalen on the project, bringing together big names, including Adams, Udall, and even Buckminster Fuller; he tried to exploit a Ford Foundation grant Raymond had gotten to explore the possibilities of suburban utopias; he wanted to display a roomful of his relevant photographs to kick-start his America Needs Indians! research project. But nothing worked. In the spring he and the Loefflers created Brand & Loeffler Design as a cover to permit them to buy equipment and supplies wholesale. Brand’s VW bus was a reliable expedition vehicle, and they added a 1951 International Harvester truck to their fleet and began to convert it into a camper.


pages: 689 words: 134,457

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Its owners, the Sackler family, agreed to pay $4.5 billion in exchange for a legal shield against any further opioid litigation. A federal judge later ruled that the bankruptcy court lacked the authority to grant that protection. The real losers, of course, are the 750,000 people who died in an epidemic kick-started, the government said, by the sale of OxyContin. As of late 2021, opioid deaths showed no sign of abating. * * * — Looking back, it is easy to see how this tragedy unfolded. The FDA approved OxyContin without a proper review. Purdue exaggerated its benefit and downplayed its risk. The drugmaker bought doctor loyalty by hosting more than forty pain management training conferences, some at warm-weather resorts.


pages: 1,123 words: 328,357

Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989 by Kristina Spohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, operational security, Prenzlauer Berg, price stability, public intellectual, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, software patent, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas L Friedman, Transnistria, uranium enrichment, zero-coupon bond

There was no formal bargain but obviously an implicit linkage. This was not, however, the trade-off that Kohl had originally hoped for: an early EMU for progress towards European political union.[55] So Mitterrand could consider the Strasbourg summit a real success. He had achieved his primary objective of kick-starting the Community’s ambitious economic-integration agenda. The final declaration spelled out their agreement to call a special intergovernmental conference to launch EMU at the Rome Council in December 1990. It further claimed that ‘at this time of profound and rapid change’ the EC must act as ‘a mooring for a future European equilibrium’.

The EPU IGC would have four specific goals: strengthening the democratic legitimacy of the union; rendering its institutions more efficient; ensuring ‘unity and coherence’ of the EC’s ‘political actions’; and defining and implementing a ‘common foreign and security policy’ (CFSP).[73] Although proclaimed with due fanfare, this document was far less ambitious than Kohl had wanted. He had hoped to kick-start a process leading to an agreed constitution for a truly federal Europe that, like any state actor, could conduct a coherent foreign policy. In its stead he got some watered-down aspirations, formulated in non-committal language. Nor was there any categorical statement on the start date of the political IGC.


pages: 2,313 words: 330,238

Lonely Planet Turkey (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, James Bainbridge, Brett Atkinson, Steve Fallon, Jessica Lee, Virginia Maxwell, Hugh McNaughtan, John Noble

British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, country house hotel, Exxon Valdez, Kickstarter, megacity, Mustafa Suleyman, place-making, restrictive zoning, sensible shoes, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, yield management, young professional

Between June and September, boats offer day cruises around the bay, stopping at beaches for swimming, for about ₺55 including lunch and drinks. The mountainous, deeply indented Bozburun Peninsula is the perfect place to escape the madness of Marmaris. For a real off-the-beaten-track adventure, kick-start a motorbike or scooter and roll down the winding country roads, into a natural paradise and villages that modernity forgot. From Marmaris, take the coast road to İçmeler and then wind through the hills to Turunç, Bayırköy, Söğüt and Bozburun, returning via Selimiye, Orhaniye, Hisarönü and the main Datça–Marmaris road – a circuit of about 120km. 4Sleeping oJenny's HousePENSION$$$ (%0252-446 4289, 0507 667 8155; www.jennyshouse.co.uk; Selimiye Köyü Mahallesi; s ₺120-200, d ₺200-280; aWs) Across the road from the harbour, this charming pension counts 14 different types of rooms surrounding a lush garden.

During the Roman and Byzantine periods, Cappadocia became a refuge for early Christians and, from the 4th to the 11th century, Christianity flourished here; most churches, monasteries and underground cities date from this period. Later, under Seljuk and Ottoman rule, Christians were treated with tolerance. Cappadocia progressively lost its importance in Anatolia. Its rich past was all but forgotten until a French priest rediscovered the rock-hewn churches in 1907. The tourist boom in the 1980s kick-started a new era, and now Cappadocia is one of Turkey's most famous and popular destinations. TTours Tour companies abound in Cappadocia. Prices are usually determined by all operators at the beginning of each season. Make your decision based on the quality of the guide and the extent of the itinerary.


pages: 928 words: 159,837

Florence & Tuscany by Lonely Planet

Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, European colonialism, haute couture, Kickstarter, period drama, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, retail therapy, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning

His story is visually narrated in great detail in the stunning fresco series (1497–1505) by Il Sodoma and Luca Signorelli in the Great Cloister at Abbazia di Monte Oliveto Maggiore near Siena. One early Benedictine monastery, San Pietro in Valle, was built in neighbouring Umbria by order of the Longobard duke of Spoleto, Faroaldo II. It kick-started a craze for the blend of Lombard and Roman styles known as Romanesque, and many local ecclesiastical structures were built in this style. The basic template was simple: a stark nave stripped of extra columns ending in a domed apse, surrounded by chapels usually donated by wealthy patrons. Gone were the colonnaded Roman facades seen on earlier buildings; the new look was more spare and austere, befitting a place where hermits might feel at home and nobles may feel inspired to surrender worldly possessions.


pages: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

What did it all mean? One view is that crowds will displace traditional modes of production. By now crowd-reliant models are routine in digital worlds, where they generate opinion (on Twitter and Facebook), create videos (YouTube), evaluate internal projects (Google), expose secrets (WikiLeaks), raise funds (Kickstarter and GoFundMe), and uncover relevant information. This last application was particularly relevant to The Guardian a few years ago, when its newsroom relied on readers to filter hundreds of thousands of documents on British MPs’ expense claims and identify misconduct. In this light, it’s hard not to think that crowds represent a powerful model and promising future for content creation, deployed in more and more places and inevitably improving in quality.


pages: 464 words: 155,696

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

The cumulative effect of these revitalized iMacs was simple but profound: just three years removed from near death, Apple had reestablished itself as the most, if not the only, truly creative company in the computer business. “When we returned to Apple,” Steve told me around this time, “our industry was in a coma. There was not a lot of innovation. At Apple we’re working hard to get that innovation kickstarted again. The rest of the PC industry reminds one of Detroit in the seventies. Their cars were boats on wheels. Since then, Chrysler innovated by inventing the mini-van and popularizing the Jeep, and Ford got itself back in the game with its Taurus. Near-death experiences can help one see more clearly sometimes.”


pages: 514 words: 152,903

The Best Business Writing 2013 by Dean Starkman

Alvin Toffler, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, computer vision, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fixed income, fulfillment center, full employment, Future Shock, gamification, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, late fees, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Parag Khanna, Pareto efficiency, price stability, proprietary trading, Ray Kurzweil, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, tail risk, technological determinism, the payments system, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, wage slave, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y2K, zero-sum game

He’s now the managing editor of the Maple Leafs Central blog and a contributing editor of TheHockeyWriters.com. “As bad a rap as Bleacher Report gets, it’s really tremendous what they did for me,” he says. Hardonk wrote three years for the site but found there were only so many slideshows in his system. By 2011, he realized he’d outgrown Bleacher Report. Still, “they kickstarted my career.” It’ll be interesting to see where that career goes after the seventeen-year-old finishes his senior year of high school. Ken Auletta 13. Why India’s Newspaper Industry Is Thriving The New Yorker While the future of digital journalism may not look all that rosy, the old print world isn’t always such a terribly pretty sight either.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

As Charles Ferguson explains,113 Summers has an interesting record: a Harvard economics professor and sometime Harvard President, and a former Chief Economist at the World Bank, he • advocated cutting corporation tax and unemployment insurance; • supported (while at the World Bank) the idea of rich nations exporting pollution to poor countries on the grounds that thinly populated African countries were ‘underpolluted’; • denied anthropogenic climate change and resource limits; • suggested women were inferior to men at scientific reasoning (for which he later apologised); • actively promoted the deregulation of derivatives that turned out to be toxic (those that Harvard ‘invested’ in while he was President dropped in value by $1 billion dollars114), and endorsed the removal of barriers between retail and investment banking; • lobbied energetically for a range of financial businesses to which he gave lavishly paid speeches; in 2008 he made $1.7 million from 31 speaking engagements (Goldman Sachs paid him $135,000 for one speech); • before his appointment by Obama worked one day a week at a hedge fund for over $5 million a year, while holding his chair at Harvard. Ferguson estimates that he made $20 million from hedge funds and investment banks. Predictably he, opposed sanctions on bankers and restrictions on their income, and advocated tax cuts rather than infrastructure investment to kick-start growth. Bastions of propriety or tax dodgers’ attack dogs? Accountants and auditors tend to be portrayed in popular culture as boring and nerdy, but utterly sound individuals. External auditors of public organisations and small firms may be feared but respected. But when it comes to the big four companies that dominate accountancy and auditing for global capital – KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, and Ernst and Young, we encounter a different world.


pages: 523 words: 143,139

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, cognitive load, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, constrained optimization, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Sedaris, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, double helix, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, first-price auction, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google Chrome, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Lao Tzu, Leonard Kleinrock, level 1 cache, linear programming, martingale, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, NP-complete, P = NP, packet switching, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert X Cringely, Sam Altman, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, sorting algorithm, spectrum auction, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman, Turing machine, urban planning, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

In scheduling, it’s clear by definition that every set of tasks and constraints has some schedule that’s the best, so scheduling problems aren’t unanswerable, per se—but it may simply be the case that there’s no straightforward algorithm that can find you the optimal schedule in a reasonable amount of time. This led researchers like Lawler and Lenstra to an irresistible question. Just what proportion of scheduling problems was intractable, anyway? Twenty years after scheduling theory was kick-started by Selmer Johnson’s bookbinding paper, the search for individual solutions was about to become something much grander and more ambitious by far: a quest to map the entire landscape of scheduling theory. What the researchers found was that even the subtlest change to a scheduling problem often tips it over the fine and irregular line between tractable and intractable.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

The United Arab Emirates was a confederation of poor, unrelated sheikhs surviving on smuggling and piracy until British Petroleum financed their entire oil-sector development, which Abu Dhabi now mostly controls while distributing a fair share of the spoils to the other six emirates. The vision of Sheikh Rashid, the most powerful of the Gulf smugglers, kickstarted Dubai’s astonishing rise. Beginning with its Jebel Ali Free Zone in 1985, Dubai intentionally neglected taxes, visas, local ownership requirements, and other hassles on the premise that reexport alone would bring in vast sums of cash. Almost three-quarters of global trade is still conducted through shipping, and a significant percentage of the world’s daily oil needs passes through the narrow Straits of Hormuz.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Furthermore, countries that export lucrative services such as computer programming, back-office research, and medical X-ray consultation get the double bonus of attracting far more foreign investment into these sectors: more investment in, more exports out. The cost of financing technology companies has also plummeted. Venture capitalists and Wall Street banks now coexist in a much larger funding ecosystem alongside family offices, angel investors, and crowd-funding platforms such as Kickstarter, collectively delivering more capital more effectively than cumbersome public markets did in the past. But the new economy needs the old economy: Digital services advance through modernized infrastructure. It is the combination of improved physical infrastructure and e-commerce that makes the supply chain world an increasingly seamless physical-virtual hybrid marketplace of goods, services, payments, and delivery.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

The United States lagged far behind, even if one adjusts the official unemployment figures to count those on federal emergency relief work as employed. By a modern definition the unemployment rate was still 12.5 per cent in 1938. The problem was that totalitarian growth did not translate into significantly higher living standards. The economic model was not really Keynesian; it did not use increased public spending to kick-start aggregate demand through a multiplier effect on consumer spending. Rather, the planned economy mobilized manpower to work on heavy industry, infrastructure and arms; and it financed the process through forced saving. As a result, consumption stagnated. People worked and got paid, but because there was steadily less and less to buy in the shops, they had little option but to put the money in savings accounts, where it was recycled into funding the government.


pages: 623 words: 155,587

Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear

gravity well, Kickstarter, place-making, zero-sum game

“Never.” “He’s taken our rights away,” she said, rather irrelevantly, Martin thought. Super acceleration ceased two hours later. Martin had barely regained his wits when the ship’s voice said, “First attack repelled. We are being followed.” “What in hell has happened?” Martin asked, trying to kick-start his brain by shaking his head, stretching his body in the directionless weightless meaningless walled-in cubicle. Another voice, Hans caught in the middle of a triumphant yell. Ariel gave a small shriek like a doomed rabbit. “We’re doing it, Martin! Trojan Horse has gotten the hell away and split up.


pages: 613 words: 151,140

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

"there is no alternative" (TINA), anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, illegal immigration, index card, John Bercow, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Live Aid, loadsamoney, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sloane Ranger, South Sea Bubble, spread of share-ownership, Stephen Fry, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Winter of Discontent, young professional

This meant that the Conservatives had one MP for every 32,777 votes for their party, but it took 338,286 to elect an Alliance MP. Michael Foot immediately announced his resignation, with the words: ‘I am ashamed.’ Two trade unions, the TGWU and Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS), kick-started the ensuing leadership campaign by declaring for Neil Kinnock. Since Tony Benn was among the many ex-MPs now looking for alternative employment, the election became a contest between Kinnock and Roy Hattersley, the former secretary of state for prices and consumer protection. On paper, Hattersley was by far the better qualified candidate and had the support of the old Labour establishment, including Callaghan and Healey.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

See ‘The Labour Share in G20 Economies’, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/International Labour Organization (with contributions from IMF and World Bank) prepared for the G20 Employment Working Group, Antalya, Turkey, 26–27 February 2015, which shows that as capital’s share of national income has risen, and labour’s share has declined, investment and growth have declined. 20. For example, there are timing effects that skew the research, nearly always in the same direction. Growth rates after a recession are statistically faster than usual, and governments tend to cut taxes in recessions to kick-start economies, leading to correlations between tax cuts and growth which falsely suggest that it was the tax cuts that caused the growth. What’s more, tax cuts often attract investment within years or even months, while the costs, such as a less well-educated population or crumbling infrastructure due to lower tax revenues, will play out over decades.


The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations by Thomas Morris

3D printing, Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, New Journalism, parabiotic, placebo effect, popular electronics, randomized controlled trial, stem cell

The first operation using the new oxygenator took place in May 1955, and by the following year he and Lillehei had used it on ninety-four patients, treating a large range of conditions. The results were so good that DeWall’s report of these cases stated confidently that ‘on the basis of this experience it is predictable that reparative surgery in the open heart is destined to become a major field of endeavour.’103 This was the kick-start that open-heart surgery needed: surgeons from all over the world came to watch Lillehei and DeWall at work before returning home to construct their own devices. Soon an even simpler version of DeWall’s oxygenator was available: made from two heat-sealed plastic sheets, it cost a few cents to manufacture, could be easily mass-produced, and was intended to be disposed of after a single use.104 A significant improvement was unveiled shortly afterwards by Willem Kolff, the Dutch-American pioneer of artificial dialysis.


pages: 609 words: 159,043

Come Fly With Us: NASA's Payload Specialist Program by Melvin Croft, John Youskauskas, Don Thomas

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, crewed spaceflight, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Strategic Defense Initiative, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

Chappell informed the reporters, “So the way to study this is to look at reflexes like changes that the eyes make when the body is actually moved—it’s called counter-rolling or nystagmus adjustments that the eye makes as the body moves, which are driven directly by the vestibular organs.” In one experiment, the crew member placed “his head inside a rotating drum decorated with a random dot pattern for visual stimulation,” a device designed to disorient the astronaut and hopefully cause the onset of SAS to help pin down what kick-started the illness. Lichtenberg explained this experiment after the mission. “The small box that we’ve had on our heads is an accelerometer package,” he pointed out. “Here we are showing a rotating dome which is trying to investigate the visual-vestibular interaction that occurs either on the ground or in space.


pages: 505 words: 147,916

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, bank run, biodiversity loss, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, climate change refugee, congestion charging, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, driverless car, energy security, failed state, Google Earth, Haber-Bosch Process, hive mind, hobby farmer, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, load shedding, M-Pesa, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, microdosing, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, supervolcano, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology

Across Africa, voting in national elections with a smartphone can cut election fraud by 60%.4 In Afghanistan, the police receive their government salaries through mobile phone banking because it cuts down on fraud. Into the Anthropocene, mobile phones could even start to democratise markets. Enterprising individuals using crowd-funding tools like Kickstarter have a way to access markets that have been the exclusive domain of big corporations since the days of the East India Company. It’s no wonder that the way our species communicates globally has become fundamentally different in the Anthropocene. In 2012, the UN telecoms agency predicted that by 2014 cellphones will outnumber people on this planet, with 70% of new phone subscriptions coming from the developing world; by 2017, there will be over 10 billion networked mobile devices around the world, carrying 130 exabytes of data a year.


pages: 344 words: 161,076

The Rough Guide to Barcelona 8 by Jules Brown, Rough Guides

active transport: walking or cycling, bike sharing, centre right, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Kickstarter, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal

Also typically “Raval” is the collective called Cheb Balowski, an Algerian-Catalan fusion band, while Macaco draw on their South American heritage with their characteristic mix of rumba, ragga and hip-hop. The biggest star on the scene is the Parisian-born, Barcelona-resident Manu Chao, whose infectious, multi-million-selling album Clandestino (1998) kick-started the whole genre. He’s widely known abroad now, and has influenced many Barcelona bands, including the world music festival favourites Ojos de Brujo (Eyes of the Wizard), who present a fusion reinvention of flamenco and Catalan rumba. Other hot sounds are being hatched by the ska-tinged acoustic roots outfit Dusminguet, the Latin American dub and reggae band GoLem System, the Latin fusion merchants Radio Malanga and the rock-and-rumba duo, Estopa.


pages: 523 words: 159,884

The Great Railroad Revolution by Christian Wolmar

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, accounting loophole / creative accounting, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, California high-speed rail, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cross-subsidies, Ford Model T, high-speed rail, intermodal, James Watt: steam engine, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban sprawl, vertical integration

The sponsors were usually local people, eager to connect with the neighboring town or facilitate the transportation of local produce or minerals to the coast. Even those with state support had to find local money to help bring about their dream, and invariably self-interest was a great motivator. The Baltimore businessmen who promoted the partly state-funded Baltimore & Ohio Railroad readily put their hands in their pockets to kick-start the scheme. So did the members of the Chamber of Commerce of Charleston, who hoped to take local trade away from their rivals in Savannah by building the Charleston & Hamburg, whereas in Boston the funds for the Boston & Lowell came largely from the cotton textile manufacturers of Lowell. The key to successful promotion was the selling of the railroad, a task at which railroad sponsors became increasingly adept, given the need to persuade local people to invest.


pages: 489 words: 148,885

Accelerando by Stross, Charles

book value, business cycle, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, disinformation, dumpster diving, Extropian, financial engineering, finite state, flag carrier, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, glass ceiling, gravity well, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Kuiper Belt, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, performance metric, phenotype, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, quantum entanglement, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, satellite internet, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, slashdot, South China Sea, stem cell, technological singularity, telepresence, The Chicago School, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, web of trust, Y2K, zero-sum game

They're up to 1033 MIPS and rising, although there's a long way to go before the solar system is fully awake. Technologies come, technologies go, but nobody even five years ago predicted that there'd be tinned primates in orbit around Jupiter by now: A synergy of emergent industries and strange business models have kick-started the space age again, aided and abetted by the discovery of (so far undecrypted) signals from ETs. Unexpected fringe riders are developing new ecological niches on the edge of the human information space, light-minutes and light-hours from the core, as an expansion that has hung fire since the 1970s gets under way.


pages: 492 words: 149,259

Big Bang by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Astronomia nova, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon-based life, Cepheid variable, Chance favours the prepared mind, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, Copley Medal, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Hans Lippershey, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Index librorum prohibitorum, information security, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Paul Erdős, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, unbiased observer, Wilhelm Olbers, William of Occam

This gave rise to a dynamic and evolving model of the universe. For Einstein and his colleagues, such dynamism was associated with a universe that would be doomed to cataclysmic collapse. Therefore the majority of cosmologists found it unthinkable. For Friedmann, however, such dynamism was associated with a universe that might have been kick-started with an initial expansion, so it would have an impetus with which to fight against the pull of gravity. This was a radically new vision of the universe. Friedmann explained how his model of the universe could react to gravity in three possible ways, depending on how quickly the universe started expanding and how much matter it contained.


pages: 559 words: 155,372

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Managing a combined deal between Facebook and Twitter was like trying to engineer simultaneous orgasm between a premature ejaculator and a frigid woman: nigh impossible, fraught with danger, and requiring a very steady hand. We’ve mentioned Mick Johnson before in our narrative. His company had been in my YC batch and disappeared under mysterious circumstances a few months prior, with Mick magically reappearing inside Facebook. He had made the initial introduction to Facebook Ads that had kickstarted this soap opera. We both loved hoppy beer, so over pints of Lagunitas at the Creamery he shared the scoop on what had happened with his company.† He and his Aussie cofounder, James, had a long work history together. They’d been hacking mobile for years and trying to find something that stuck.


pages: 444 words: 151,136

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

But the cash had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere was the federal government and its tax revenue, which under Roosevelt saw income tax rates raised overall and sharply boosted for high brackets.13 The combined result would be smaller private sector consumption and expanded government take, and a more indebted consumer. After the economy emerged from the Depression era, this and the tax deductibility of interest continued to increase leverage and homeownership. Home ownership increased as the innovation of the long-term fixed-rate mortgage caught on in the postwar housing boom, which was partly kick-started by the release of accumulated savings of soldiers returning from the battlefront (and reduced down payment requirements). From 1940 to 1965, homeownership expanded from 44 to 63 percent. Note that its The Heart of the Financial System 217 good intentions were hardly felt in the 1930s when the effect was needed, but its ill effects have now reverberated generations later.


pages: 608 words: 150,324

Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code by Matthew Cobb

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, factory automation, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, post-materialism, Recombinant DNA, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology

If there were life on Mars, it would be very surprising if a Martian genome were able to pop into an Earthling cell and just start working – the cellular context would almost certainly be utterly different from that required by the Martian DNA. In the extremely unlikely event that a Martian was found, that it was based on DNA and that it could kickstart itself into life in an Earthling cell, recreating it on Earth would show that the Earthling and Martian branches of life shared a common ancestor. The most probable explanation would be that the Martian microbe came from Earth, blasted into space on a lump of rock after a meteorite strike and eventually plummeting onto the Red Planet.


pages: 496 words: 154,363

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K

We were willing to offer AOL eighty percent, a number we could afford because we kept all of the revenue for ads on Google.com. AOL noted our strategic goals and our generous gesture and demanded ninety-one percent. "We're going to make your network," AOL told Alan's team. "No, you're not," Alan responded. Everybody knew he was bluffing. Larry and Sergey were desperate to kick-start our ad-syndication program, and a deal with AOL would leap across the Internet, creating a network effect that would bring in thousands of other sites. AOL had leverage and they used it to push harder and harder. A key for Google was exclusivity for the placement of ads on AOL's pages. The more places to click on a page, the lower the odds a user would click on one of our syndicated ads.


pages: 471 words: 147,210

Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

experimental subject, gravity well, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, machine translation, microbiome, pattern recognition, post scarcity, remote working, side project, telepresence, theory of mind

I’ve said that if things go really badly they should skip over to Nod and throw themselves on your mercy. Not their fault. All mine, okay?’ ‘Disra, just tell me what the hell!’ Baltiel had already shouted over the man’s babble. The increasingly organized nature of the other signals was prickling the hairs on his neck. Has he kickstarted the ship into full AI or something? ‘Victim of my own success,’ came Senkovi into a sudden silence as the other transmissions cut off. ‘I’ve clamped down on bandwidth but I can’t keep them bottled up. I’m taking it all offline. All you need to know. Normal service will resume shortly.’ ‘That is not all I need to know!’


pages: 477 words: 144,329

How Money Became Dangerous by Christopher Varelas

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airport security, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, cashless society, corporate raider, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, eat what you kill, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Michael Milken, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, pensions crisis, pets.com, pre–internet, profit motive, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Saturday Night Live, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, universal basic income, zero day

The job for which we had initially been hired was complete, yet despite several convincing reasons to head back to New York—and against the advice of everyone at Salomon, who insisted that continuing to work on the project would be career suicide—I decided to stay and lead the efforts to steer the county out of bankruptcy. This was my home turf, and the crisis promised to offer a different sort of challenge than any I’d known. We converted the top-floor conference room into our war room and started working on potential solutions. Someone brought donuts each day to kick-start our marathon strategy sessions. Tom Hayes, the former California state treasurer and director of finance, often joined us. He’d been asked by Governor Pete Wilson to join the team as the senior county employee to help liquidate the pool and get the recovery process under way. We noticed that Hayes never took a donut.


The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Elizabeth Malkin, “To Halt Energy Slide,” New York Times, April 11, 2019; Jude Webster and Michael Stott, “Mexico: Lopez Obrador Makes a Big Bet,” Financial Times, October 3, 2019 (“technocrats” and “sovereignty”); Sergio Chapa, “Mexico’s New President Takes Nationalist Tone,” Houston Chronicle, March 21, 2019 (“transformation”). 3. Andres Schipani and Bryan Harris, “Can Brazil’s Pension Reform Kick-Start the Economy?,” Financial Times, October 22, 2019. Chapter 6: Pipeline Battles 1. Remarks by President Obama on American-Made Energy, Cushing, Oklahoma, March 22, 2012; Jane Mayer, “Taking It to the Streets,” New Yorker, November 20, 2011 (“game over”); Kevin Birn and Cathy Crawford, “The GHG Intensity of Canadian Oil Sands Production: A New Analysis,” IHS Markit Canadian Oil Sands Dialogue, June, 2020.


pages: 598 words: 150,801

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth by Selina Todd

assortative mating, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, deskilling, DIY culture, emotional labour, Etonian, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, full employment, Gini coefficient, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, school choice, social distancing, statistical model, The Home Computer Revolution, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Most of the Indian and Pakistani men in Newcastle who were refused entry to the degree courses they wanted became self-employed.37 And despite the fact that less than 10 per cent of the south Asian small business owners surveyed in the Oxford study wanted their children to follow in their footsteps, by the end of the 1980s almost a quarter had done so because of the lack of opportunity to get what they really wanted: a professional job.38 A very different, far more unpredictable route up the ladder was the dole. During the 1980s the magpies comprised about one-third of unemployed men and up to half of unemployed women.39 For a small number of them, being out of work and able to claim the dole kickstarted a new career. Few of them intended this. Some of them became involved in community arts initiatives run by local councils, often Labour controlled. The most ambitious schemes were developed by the Greater London Council, which created a £1 million budget for community arts ventures.40 At a time of swingeing cuts to the arts, it was these schemes, and the dole, that provided many aspiring artists, musicians and writers with the support they needed as they sought to make their mark.


pages: 482 words: 150,822

Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Black Lives Matter, classic study, colonial rule, COVID-19, critical race theory, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, full employment, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

Indeed, King received only lukewarm local support. By May, some Chicago activists suggested that Bevel and another SCLC worker, Al Sampson, leave the city. A rally in July at Chicago’s Soldier Field, which then had a capacity of about 100,000, attracted a crowd perhaps half that amount. The stadium event was supposed to kick-start the action phase of the operation. “This day we must decide that our votes will determine who will be the next mayor of Chicago,” King told the audience. “We must make it clear that we will purge Chicago of every politician, whether he be Negro or white, who feels that he owns a Negro vote.” But he knew the campaign was sputtering.


Lonely Planet Southern Italy by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, Google Earth, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, post-work, Skype, starchitect, urban decay, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

DuomoCATHEDRAL (map Google map; %081 44 90 97; Via Duomo 149; cathedral/baptistry free/€2; hcathedral 8.30am-1.30pm & 2.30-7.30pm Mon-Sat, 8.30am-1.30pm & 4.30-7.30pm Sun, baptistry 8.30am-12.30pm & 3.30-6.30pm Mon-Sat, 8.30am-1pm Sun, Cappella di San Gennaro 8.30am-1pm & 3-6.30pm Mon-Sat, 8.30am-1pm & 4.30-7pm Sun; g147, 182, 184 to Via Foria, mPiazza Cavour) Whether you go for Giovanni Lanfranco’s fresco in the Cappella di San Gennaro (Chapel of St Janarius), the 4th-century mosaics in the baptistry, or the thrice-annual miracle of San Gennaro, do not miss Naples’ cathedral. Kick-started by Charles I of Anjou in 1272 and consecrated in 1315, it was largely destroyed in a 1456 earthquake. It has had copious nips and tucks over the subsequent centuries. Among these is the gleaming neo-Gothic facade, only completed in 1905. Step inside and you’ll immediately notice the central nave’s gilded coffered ceiling, studded with late-mannerist art.


pages: 553 words: 153,028

The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation by Scott Carney, Jason Miklian

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bob Geldof, British Empire, clean water, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, hive mind, index card, Kickstarter, Live Aid, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, rolodex, South China Sea, statistical model

Rani took out her private set of President House keys, already knowing what she’d find inside. Yahya’s most recent object of desire was the actress Noor Jahan, to whom Rani had introduced him just a few hours earlier. In the 1950s Jahan was Pakistan’s Marilyn Monroe, but changing popular tastes meant that her career had hit a rough patch. She needed a kick-start back to the top of the charts, and the president of Pakistan’s support would do just the trick. Rani slid into the room to find Jahan fellating Yahya. She pulled Jahan off Yahya’s bulging midsection and helped him put his uniform on so that he would be fit for a diplomatic visit. The Shah got his five minutes with Yahya.


pages: 506 words: 151,753

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze by Laura Shin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Airbnb, altcoin, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, cloud computing, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, DevOps, digital nomad, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial independence, Firefox, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, hacker house, Hacker News, holacracy, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Internet of things, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, litecoin, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, off-the-grid, performance metric, Potemkin village, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social distancing, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks

Having seen what the open, permissionless internet had done to the media and music industries, they knew what happened to those who didn’t at least attempt to innovate: disruption. But before any of those private blockchains could be implemented in any meaningful way, a new idea got the attention of investors large and small: initial coin offerings (ICOs). A cross between a Kickstarter campaign, an IPO, and bitcoin, ICOs enabled projects to raise funds in cryptocurrency by giving people a new token, and they took off, showing how quickly a tsunami of economically incentivized developers could raise money to shake up financial services. In 2017, everyday people from Argentina to Zimbabwe disbursed $5.6 billion worth of digital coins into decentralized projects aiming to disrupt titans such as Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, dwarfing the paltry $558 million of venture capital investment in the space, and making these hot but speculative, and even scammy, investments more democratic than those owned by a small number of big-money firms.7 By the end of the year, an asset class that had started 2017 worth $18 billion had ballooned thirty-four times to $613 billion.


pages: 739 words: 174,990

The TypeScript Workshop: A Practical Guide to Confident, Effective TypeScript Programming by Ben Grynhaus, Jordan Hudgens, Rayon Hunte, Matthew Thomas Morgan, Wekoslav Stefanovski

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, business logic, Charles Babbage, create, read, update, delete, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, fault tolerance, Firefox, full stack developer, functional programming, Google Chrome, Hacker News, higher-order functions, inventory management, Kickstarter, loose coupling, node package manager, performance metric, QR code, Ruby on Rails, SQL injection, type inference, web application, WebSocket

Configure the IoC container (present in the src/ioc.config.ts file) so that Calculator can receive AddOperator, SubtractOperator, and so on when it asks for TYPES.AddOperator, for example. You can simplify the ioc.config.ts file further by using barrels. The code for this can be found in the operator/index.ts file. You can use the code in the aforementioned file to configure and then simplify your IoC container. Create the main.ts file that will kick-start your calculator. After solving the preceding steps, the expected output should look like the following: result is 150 Bonus Steps: As a bonus, let's say that you want some reporting on the operations performed in the calculator. You can add logging (console- and file-based) easily without too many changes: For console-based logging, you need to add a logger via DI that the calculator will write to on every expression evaluation.


pages: 483 words: 145,225

Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution by Glyn Moody

barriers to entry, business logic, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, Donald Knuth, Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation, ghettoisation, Guido van Rossum, history of Unix, hypertext link, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Marc Andreessen, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, thinkpad, VA Linux

As more and more programs were ported to GNU/Linux and placed as a matter of course on these CDs, they provided a huge boost to the nascent GNU/Linux community. They not only provided much needed tools and applications but allowed the same distributed development of software to occur beyond the Linux kernel, where it had been perfected. Already, then, the desirability of GNU/Linux was starting to kick-start an aftermarket of applications that would in turn make the operating system even more desirable. The credit for moving from floppies to CDs must be given to another company that, like Slackware, was once on everyone’s lips in the world of Linux, but which has since fallen out of view: Yggdrasil Computing, named after the world tree in Norse mythology.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

And that culture is starting to resonate across the country.” It is indeed. What began as a burst of unionizing in digital media outlets like Gawker and the Huffington Post has spread across the nation, across industries. Even tech, a field long resistant to worker organizing, started to catch fire. Employees are moving to unionize at Google, Starbucks, Kickstarter, Apple, and, of course, Amazon; and some won tentative victories. There’s a reason that this latest movement is unfurling at workplaces governed by tech giants and last generation’s start-ups; just as in the 1800s, these are the sites where technology has been used by owners to cleave through norms and push humans to the working brink, and where the divides and inequalities—whose blood run the machines, and who keeps the profit the machinery generates—is starkest.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

For the imminent next wave of English would-be Americans, however, propagating a particular set of Christian superstitions, omens and divine judgments were more than just lip-service cover for dreams of easy wealth. For them, the prospect of colonization was all about the export of their supernatural fantasies to the New World. * * * * More than a century later an English land promoter trying to kick-start Georgia was still using the same selling points: it was “the most delightful country of the Universe,” at least as nice as biblical “Paradise [and] lies in the same latitude with Palestine herself…pointed out by God’s own choice, to bless…a favorite people.” Also: it had silver mines, he was certain. 4 Building Our Own Private Heaven on Earth: The Puritans THE FIRST ENGLISH COLONIZERS’ VISIONS of gold and a Northwest Passage were not totally mad.


pages: 544 words: 168,076

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, asset allocation, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kitchen Debate, linear programming, lost cosmonauts, market clearing, MITM: man-in-the-middle, New Journalism, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, profit motive, RAND corporation, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method

The old universities had taught the European liberal arts curriculum. All of that vanished, and technology took over. Almost half of all students now studied engineering, following a fiercely utilitarian curriculum designed to feed the economy with specific skills. When they graduated, they were supposed to know everything they required to go out solo and kick-start a power station, or a metals refinery, or a rail line. Next came the pure sciences, with physics and maths leading the way, chemistry a surprising poor relation, and biology in deep ideological trouble; then medicine, disproportionately studied by women, and ‘agricultural science’, intended to provide expertise to collective farms.


pages: 1,181 words: 163,692

Lonely Planet Wales (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, Brexit referendum, car-free, carbon footprint, country house hotel, Downton Abbey, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, land reform, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, period drama, sensible shoes, trade route, urban renewal

Last HaulMONUMENT (Church St) This pockmarked slab of marble salvaged from the Bronze Bell, a famous local shipwreck of 1709, has been sculpted by local Franck Cocksey to depict three fishermen straining to haul in a catch. Dinas OleuHILL Rising behind Barmouth, rocky Dinas Oleu (258m) made history in 1895 by becoming the first property ever bequeathed to the National Trust, kick-starting a movement dedicated to preserving Britain's best landscapes and buildings. A network of trails covers the 4.5 gorse-covered acres of the 'Fortess of Light', including the popular Panorama Walk (signposted from the A496 on the eastern edge of town), which has the best views of Mawddach Estuary.


pages: 602 words: 164,940

Velocity Weapon by Megan E. O'Keefe

gravity well, Great Leap Forward, heat death of the universe, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, quantum entanglement, side project

Why don’t you use them and guess?” “Hey, don’t be shitty with me, I’m on your side.” She sighed and leaned against the wall to take some weight off the crutch. She’d have a mean-looking bruise in her armpit by the end of this. She’d be tender for weeks. “Sorry. Don’t have a lot to chat about.” He must have kick-started that spy brain of his into gear, because he nodded solemnly and didn’t push. She needed to get off this ship before the medis poked around her body and stumbled across her illegal Keeper chip. Grimly, she wondered how they’d play that. They’d have to figure out some other explanation as to why they had to kill their so-called hero.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

It’s hard to name a supposedly failed state whose economic revival was more roundly ignored by the global media than the Philippines. When I visited Manila in January 2010, I sensed a turn for the better as Filipinos were fed up with the way their country was being surpassed by neighboring economies. They were keen to give a strong mandate to a leader seen as “Mr. Clean,” who would reduce record levels of corruption and kick-start investment in a country that was using no more cement per capita than it had eighty years earlier. But the Philippines had been a laggard for so many decades, my journalist friends thought I was joking about its bright prospects. Many still do. On the other hand, I was worried about the hype that surrounded the election of Narendra Modi as prime minister of India in 2014.


pages: 780 words: 168,782

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

In the 1980s and 1990s, many countries around the world found themselves in positions comparable to that of the United Kingdom in the late 1970s. Under the well-meaning influence of “development economics” in the 1950s and 1960s, developing countries had assumed that state-led modernization, public ownership of industry, and aggressive government intervention were the only ways to kick-start growth. The results, in far too many cases, were inefficiency, corruption, and chronic inflation. The main intellectual alternative to the reigning consensus in global economics emerged from the so-called Chicago School, a term that was first applied in the 1950s to a group of free-market economists who came together at the University of Chicago.


pages: 589 words: 162,849

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent by Owen Matthews

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, disinformation, fake news, false flag, garden city movement, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, post-work, South China Sea, urban planning

And soon after French troops occupied the Ruhr valley in 1921 – after a dispute over unpaid compensation payments stipulated in the Treaty of Versailles – a Soviet sabotage cell was dispatched to Germany to try to spark a fresh wave of revolutionary violence. The team of Russian saboteurs and their German accomplices attempted to dynamite an express train from Halle to Leipzig as part of a wider ‘March Action’ of locally organised rebellions intended to kick-start a fresh nationwide uprising.43 The Soviet Army was even mobilised on the newly drawn Russian-Polish border to intervene in this latest attempt at a German revolution. But, like the Spartacist rising, the Red Ruhr and the Saxon People’s Republic before it, the March Action of 1921 ended in failure.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

But we will do better going forward than backward [which] means embracing rather than rejecting technological progress.… This will be a major debate that I suspect will define a large part of the politics of the industrial world over the next decade.”17 To avoid the technology trap, governments must pursue policies to kick-start productivity growth while helping workers adjust to the onrushing wave of automation. Addressing the social costs of automation will require major reforms in education, providing relocation vouchers to help people move, reducing barriers to switching jobs, getting rid of zoning restrictions that spur social and economic divisions, boosting the incomes of low-income households through tax credits, providing wage insurance for people who lose their jobs to machines, and investing more in early childhood education to mitigate the adverse consequences for the next generation.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

But if some major UK infrastructure rentiers are indeed self-made, having organically developed the infrastructures at the core of their business models, the majority are not. Most of the country’s infrastructure rentiers came into being through a very different and much more abrupt process. That process was privatization. Since Margaret Thatcher kick-started the programme in the early 1980s, the UK has come to be seen as the world’s undisputed privatization trailblazer, and is acknowledged as such both by those broadly supportive of the project – the Financial Times refers to ‘pioneering Britain’ – and those resolutely opposed – Joe Guinan and Thomas Hanna, for example, describing privatization as ‘a very British disease’.2 Less often recognized, though, is the fact that most major UK privatizations were privatizations of a very particular type.


pages: 687 words: 165,457

Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health by Daniel Lieberman

A. Roger Ekirch, active measures, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, death from overwork, Donald Trump, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Santayana, hygiene hypothesis, impulse control, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, phenotype, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social distancing, Steven Pinker, twin studies, two and twenty, working poor

After that, I made sure to buy new shoes every three months despite the expense. Over the next year, however, I battled an irritated Achilles tendon and other mysterious pains that I worried might sideline me permanently. Ironically, while I was obsessively buying new shoes, I was also beginning to study how people run without shoes. This research was kick-started at a public lecture on a dark and stormy night soon after Dennis Bramble and I had published our “Born to Run” paper in Nature. In the front row of the lecture hall was a bearded fellow wearing socks wrapped in duct tape. Following the talk he introduced himself as Jeffrey and asked an excellent question: “How come I don’t like to wear shoes, even when I run?”


pages: 520 words: 164,834

Bill Marriott: Success Is Never Final--His Life and the Decisions That Built a Hotel Empire by Dale van Atta

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, book value, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate raider, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, financial innovation, Ford Model T, hiring and firing, index card, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Kintsugi, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, profit motive, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, stock buybacks, three-martini lunch, urban renewal

The foundation gave Mayo $20 million for research on regeneration of damaged heart tissue. Bill also served on Mayo’s board of trustees for years, and he even accepted a daunting fund-raising task for the clinic. In 2005, Mayo asked Bill to lead a five-year campaign to raise $1.25 billion. He agreed, kick-starting it with $25 million from the family foundation. “Then I asked for a list of patients they had had with the most money,” Bill recalled. “They were appalled, but they finally gave it to me. We started calling them, and they gave generously.” When the campaign came to an end on the last day of 2009, Bill’s leadership had brought in $1.35 billion in donations—$100 million more than the goal—from more than 286,000 benefactors in the middle of the economic crisis caused by the housing downturn.14 In all, the J.


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Learning about the housing finance industry from Can Fin Homes helped me identify Aavas Financiers. Learning about the microfinance industry from Bharat Financial helped me identify CreditAccess Grameen. This is compounding knowledge in action. When we compound knowledge, we advance not only ourselves but also the world at large. It takes a small individual action to kick-start a learning revolution. This is what Confucius wrote in “Higher Education”: When things are investigated, knowledge is extended. When knowledge is extended, the will becomes sincere. When the will is sincere, the heart is set right. When the heart is right, the personal life is cultivated. When personal lives are cultivated, families become harmonious.


pages: 632 words: 163,143

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth by Michael Spitzer

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Ford Model T, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, horn antenna, HyperCard, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loose coupling, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, out of africa, planetary scale, power law, randomized controlled trial, Snapchat, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, talking drums, technological singularity, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, Yom Kippur War

Watlington’s recordings fell into the hands of the conservationist Scott McVay and a bird scientist based at Princeton University called Mark Konishi, and were then passed on to the whale experts Roger and Katy Payne, who carefully analysed them based on sonogram visualisations. The rest became history: using Watlington’s recordings, Payne and McVay produced Songs of the Humpback Whale; the album sold 30 million, and kick-started the whole global environmental movement, including the organisation, Save the Whales. It is quite a story, and it is vividly told in David Rothenberg’s Thousand-Mile Song. As Rothenberg shows, the Paynes realised that the whale songs were more than just beautiful. They were intricately structured, and they repeated with considerable accuracy every few minutes.


Insight Guides South America (Travel Guide eBook) by Insight Guides

Airbnb, anti-communist, Atahualpa, bike sharing, call centre, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, digital nomad, Easter island, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, invention of writing, Kickstarter, land reform, urban planning, urban renewal

Economic necessity also forced a move back to orthodox economic policies two years later, and ended Ecuador’s alliance with Venezuela. Courts, meanwhile, found Correa guilty of corruption, and he remains in self-imposed exile in Belgium. Amid the Covid-19 crisis, Moreno was succeeded by conservative Guillermo Lasso in the 2021 elections, who is seeking to kickstart the economy after a wildly successful vaccination campaign. Quito: Ecuador’s expanding capital Modern Quito 1 [map] spreads north, south, and east into intra-Andean valleys each year, gobbling up rural farms. For its amenities and services, many visitors stay in the Mariscal neighborhood, north of Parque El Ejido, where old Quito meets new.


pages: 673 words: 164,804

Peer-to-Peer by Andy Oram

AltaVista, big-box store, c2.com, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, dark matter, Dennis Ritchie, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, independent contractor, information retrieval, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Marc Andreessen, moral hazard, Network effects, P = NP, P vs NP, p-value, packet switching, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, power law, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, semantic web, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, slashdot, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vernor Vinge, web application, web of trust, Zimmermann PGP

That’s what I hoped to touch off at the summit, using a single picture that shows how a set of technologies fit together and demonstrates a few central themes. A success story: From free software to open source In order to illustrate the idea of a meme map to the attendees at the peer-to-peer summit, I drew some maps of free software versus open source. I presented these images at the summit as a way of kickstarting the discussion. Let’s look at those here as well, since it’s a lot easier to demonstrate the concept than it is to explain it in the abstract. I built the free software map in Figure 3.1 by picking out key messages from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) web site, http://www.fsf.org. I also added a few things (the darker ovals in the lower right quadrant of the picture) to show common misconceptions that were typically applied to free software.


pages: 741 words: 164,057

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

“He’s been written off the books of history for no reason. You can’t keep George out of that, that’s crazy.”13 But for all its potential, CRISPR-Cas—indeed the entire field of genome editing—still has to prove itself as a game-changing, life-saving therapeutic. Luciano Marraffini’s key role in helping Zhang kick-start his CRISPR program in 2012 was omitted from Lander’s “heroes” narrative. The affable Argentine’s technical expertise was central to the gene-editing discovery but, with the exception of the 2017 Albany Prize, has largely fallen under the radar. At the Albany Prize ceremony, Marraffini shared the stage with Mojica, who was asked to reflect on life as the grandfather of CRISPR.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

The incidents would swiftly multiply from there. At its core, crowdsourcing is about redistributing power—vesting the many with a degree of influence once reserved for the few. Sometimes, crowdsourcing might be about raising awareness, other times about money (also known as “crowdfunding”). It can kick-start new businesses or throw support to people who might once have languished in the shadows. It was through crowdsourcing, for instance, that septuagenarian socialist Bernie Sanders became a fundraising juggernaut in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, raking in $218 million online. Of course, like any useful tool, crowdsourcing has also been bent to the demands of war.


pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The original Marshall Plan does offer a useful overarching frame for the United States at a critical time in the country’s history. But it was a one-time injection of money, not a sustained long-term development effort. The focus was primarily on relief and recovery. Under the Marshall Plan, individual European countries drew on central resources to kick-start their own investment strategies. Local leadership and public-private efforts continued projects beyond the scope of the plan. The longer-term development goals were later picked up on a permanent basis by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—the World Bank—which established specific in-country programs that eventually expanded from Europe to the rest of the world.


pages: 1,222 words: 385,226

Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, Burning Man, clean water, colonial rule, financial independence, friendly fire, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, trade route, unemployed young men, Yom Kippur War

After a bout of bartering that invoked an august assembly of deities from at least three religions, and incorporated spirited, carnal references to the sisters of our respective friends and acquantainces, a dealer agreed to hire out an Enfield Bullet motorcycle for a reasonable rental. I paid a bond and a week’s rent in advance, kick-started the bike, and set off through the market’s maul toward the beaches. The Enfield of India 350cc Bullet was a single-cylinder, four-stroke motorcycle, constructed to the plans of the original 1950s’ model of the British Royal Enfield. Renowned for its idiosyncratic handling as much as for its reliability and durability, the Bullet was a bike that demanded a relationship with its rider.

My ride is here. I’ll see you guys later.’ I walked out, with Sanjay’s protests and his friends’ laughter rattling above the clatter of cups and glasses. ‘Bahinchudh! Gandu!’ Sanjay shouted. ‘You can’t fuck up my rave like that and then walk out, yaar! Come back here!’ As I approached him, Abdullah kick-started the bike and straightened it from the side stand, ready to ride. ‘You’re in a hurry for your workout,’ I said, settling myself onto the saddle of the bike behind him. ‘Relax. No matter how fast we get there, I’m still going to beat you, brother.’ For nine months, we’d trained together at a small, dark, sweaty, and very serious gym near the Elephant Gate section of Ballard Pier.


The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin

Apple II, Bob Noyce, book value, business cycle, California energy crisis, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, data science, Fairchild Semiconductor, George Gilder, Henry Singleton, informal economy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, open economy, prudent man rule, Richard Feynman, rolling blackouts, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Whether the “go ahead and do it” message was transmitted in this single formal meeting or instead through a series of informal conversations, the key point is that the message was sent and it was Noyce who sent it.40 The man who bore the brunt of moving the integrated circuit to the third stage, from “it’s possible” to “it’s finished,” was Jay Last. Noyce kickstarted Last’s interest in July of 1959, when he wandered into the R&D lab and told Last that he thought Texas Instruments would make much ado about its integrated “solid circuits” at an important industry conference called Wescon, held every August. Noyce said that he wanted Fairchild to demonstrate some sort of integrated device at Wescon, too.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

But with an upfront investment of $15 million, they quickly received $220 million in cash from the Fed, most of which they used to purchase student loans and commercial mortgages. The loans were set up so that Christy and Susan would keep 100 percent of any gains on the deals, while the Fed and the Treasury (read: the taxpayer) would eat 90 percent of the losses. Given out as part of a bailout program ostensibly designed to help ordinary people by kick-starting consumer lending, the deals were a classic heads-I-win, tails-you-lose investment.” (Taibbi, “The Real Housewives of Wall Street”). TARP and TALF are further discussed in chapter 5. 57 Lowenstein, “The Villain”; Krugman, “Return of Depression Economics.” 58 U.S. Government Accounting Office, “Opportunities Exist to Strengthen Policiesand Processes for Managing Emergency Assistance.” 59 Johnson, “An Institutional Flaw”; Sanders, “Jamie Dimon Is Not Alone.” 60 Bernanke, congressional testimony, 2007. 61 Bernanke, “On the Implications of the Financial Crisis for Economics.” 62 Bernanke, “Global Imbalances.” 63 This has been seconded by Yves Smith (“New York Fed Brownshirt”): “The prestigious staff roles relate to the central banking functions: economic research, macro modeling, and of course, monetary policy.


Lonely Planet Iceland (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn Bain, Alexis Averbuck

Airbnb, banking crisis, car-free, carbon footprint, cashless society, centre right, DeepMind, European colonialism, Eyjafjallajökull, food miles, Kickstarter, low cost airline, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, post-work, presumed consent, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, undersea cable

These rich deposits act like a beacon, attracting special types of mammals that are highly adapted to life in the cold subarctic waters. What species of whale visit Húsavík? Every summer roughly nine to 11 species of whale are sighted in the bay, ranging from the tiny harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) to the giant blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), the biggest animal known to roam the earth. Plankton blooming kick-starts each year’s feeding season; that’s when the whales start appearing in greater numbers in the bay. The first creatures to arrive are the humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) and the minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata). The humpback whale is known for its curious nature, equanimity and spectacular surface displays, whereas the minke whale is famous for its elegant features: a streamlined and slender black body and white-striped pectoral fin.


pages: 757 words: 193,541

The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2 by Thomas A. Limoncelli, Strata R. Chalup, Christina J. Hogan

active measures, Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, business process, cloud computing, commoditize, continuous integration, correlation coefficient, database schema, Debian, defense in depth, delayed gratification, DevOps, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, Firefox, functional programming, Google Glasses, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intermodal, Internet of things, job automation, job satisfaction, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, level 1 cache, load shedding, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine readable, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, place-making, platform as a service, premature optimization, recommendation engine, revision control, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sorting algorithm, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The future is already here, Toyota Production System, vertical integration, web application, Yogi Berra

A colocation facility is a highly reliable datacenter facility that rents space to other companies. Many colocation providers went bankrupt after building some of the world’s largest facilities. That space could now be rented very inexpensively. While these surpluses would eventually be exhausted, the temporarily depressed prices helped kickstart the era. The second trend was the commoditization of hardware components used in home computers, such as Intel x86 CPUs, low-end hard drives, and RAM. Before the advent of the web, the average home did not have a computer. The popularity of the Internet created more demand for home computers, resulting in components being manufactured at a scale never before seen.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Although trade in physical goods and financial products and services—the hallmarks of the twentieth-century global economy—has actually flattened or declined in recent years, globalization as measured by flows is “soaring—transmitting information, ideas, and innovation around the world and broadening participation in the global economy” more than ever, concluded a pioneering study on this subject in March 2016 by the McKinsey Global Institute, Digital Globalization: The New Era of Global Flows: “The world is more interconnected than ever.” Think of the flow of friends through Facebook, the flow of renters through Airbnb, the flow of opinions through Twitter, the flow of e-commerce through Amazon, Tencent, and Alibaba, the flow of crowdfunding through Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe, the flow of ideas and instant messages through WhatsApp and WeChat, the flow of peer-to-peer payments and credit through PayPal and Venmo, the flow of pictures through Instagram, the flow of education through Khan Academy, the flow of college courses through MOOCs, the flow of design tools through Autodesk, the flow of music through Apple, Pandora, and Spotify, the flow of video through Netflix, the flow of news through NYTimes.com or BuzzFeed.com, the flow of cloud-based tools through Salesforce, the flow of searches for knowledge through Google, and the flow of raw video through Periscope and Facebook.


pages: 666 words: 181,495

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

The crucial element in speeding up a browser was a component called a JavaScript engine, a “virtual machine” that ran web application code. In previous browsers, JavaScript didn’t run quickly enough to make web applications seem as nimble as desktop apps; Google felt that if it changed that, people would use the web more and thus use Google’s services and ads more. Google hoped to kick-start a new generation of web-based applications that would make Microsoft’s worst nightmare a reality: the browser would become the equivalent of an operating system. There was an ideal person to supercharge the virtual machine, a Danish computer scientist named Lars Bak, whose virtuosity in virtuality had established him as the master in the field.


pages: 728 words: 182,850

Cooking for Geeks by Jeff Potter

3D printing, A Pattern Language, air gap, carbon footprint, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, Donald Knuth, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fear of failure, food miles, functional fixedness, hacker house, haute cuisine, helicopter parent, Internet Archive, iterative process, Kickstarter, lolcat, Parkinson's law, placebo effect, random walk, Rubik’s Cube, slashdot, stochastic process, TED Talk, the scientific method

Try 2 teaspoons (10g) of melted butter with 1 cup (200g) of rum or 2 teaspoons (10g) of bacon fat (filtered!) with 1 cup (200g) of bourbon. Let rest at room temperature for 12+ hours. Longer times and higher temperatures will yield a stronger infusion, so you’ll want to experiment. Try using an immersion blender to kick-start the infusion. After infusing, place infusion in freezer until fats have solidified, and then filter through a coffee filter or other ~20-micron filter (see the filtration section in Filtration in Chapter 7). Unfiltered. 100 micron filter. ~10–20 micron filter. Notes Try this with blue cheese, nut butters, and other fats.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

More important, they’d beaten Bangalore to the punch, finishing a few months ahead of Hyderabad’s archrival in the spring of 2008. By then, Bangalore’s answer had become an abject lesson in how not to build an airport, beginning with the fact that it had been stuck on various drawing boards for seventeen years. Desperate for someone to kick-start it, the government had privatized it three years ahead of Hyderabad’s, but work had repeatedly stalled due to bureaucratic infighting. By the time it finally opened, its troubles had just begun. The old airport—which even the locals compared to a Greyhound bus station (evidently a universal complaint)—at least had the virtue of being close to downtown, not far from “Electronics City” and the gated communities of India’s outsourcing giants.


HBase: The Definitive Guide by Lars George

Alignment Problem, Amazon Web Services, bioinformatics, create, read, update, delete, Debian, distributed revision control, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fault tolerance, Firefox, FOSDEM, functional programming, Google Earth, information security, Kickstarter, place-making, revision control, smart grid, sparse data, web application

Cloudera makes the distribution available in a number of different formats: source and binary tar files, RPMs, Debian packages, VMware images, and scripts for running CDH in the cloud. CDH is free, released under the Apache 2.0 license and available at http://www.cloudera.com/hadoop/. To simplify deployment, Cloudera hosts packages on public yum and apt repositories. CDH enables you to install and configure Hadoop, and HBase, on each machine using a single command. Kickstart users can commission entire Hadoop clusters without manual intervention. CDH manages cross-component versions and provides a stable platform with a compatible set of packages that work together. As of CDH3, the following packages are included, many of which are covered elsewhere in this book: HDFS Self-healing distributed filesystem MapReduce Powerful, parallel data processing framework Hadoop Common A set of utilities that support the Hadoop subprojects HBase Hadoop database for random read/write access Hive SQL-like queries and tables on large data sets Pig Dataflow language and compiler Oozie Workflow for interdependent Hadoop jobs Sqoop Integrates databases and data warehouses with Hadoop Flume Highly reliable, configurable streaming data collection ZooKeeper Coordination service for distributed applications Hue User interface framework and SDK for visual Hadoop applications Whirr Library for running Hadoop, and HBase, in the cloud In regard to HBase, CDH solves the issue of running a truly reliable cluster setup, as it has all the required HDFS patches to enable durability.


Sweden by Becky Ohlsen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, car-free, centre right, clean water, financial independence, glass ceiling, haute couture, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, period drama, place-making, post-work, retail therapy, starchitect, the built environment, white picket fence

French and Swedish cooking collide, with fair-trade, organic and local produce transformed into the likes of boiled lobster with smoked Swedish duck, brioche and preserved plum. From Thursday to Saturday, DJs spin soul, electronica and vintage disco. Grill (Map; 31 45 30; Drottninggatan 89; starters Skr125-230, mains Skr175-310; 11.15am-2pm & 5pm-1am Mon-Fri, 11.15am-2pm & 4pm-1am Sat, 3-10pm Sun, closed early Jul-early Aug) Kick-started by culinary stars Melker Andersson and Danyel Couet, this outrageous restaurant-bar features differently themed spaces, from Miami art deco to AstroTurf garden party. The menu is a global affair, innovatively arranged by grill type. Vegetarians aren’t overlooked, service is casual and accommodating, and there’s a popular Sunday grill buffet (Skr295).


pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

He was a native son who twice plunged into the wilderness. The first foray was in 1974, to India. The nineteen-year-old Jobs did not find the holy man he was seeking, Neem Karoli Baba, a living saint known to his followers as Maharaj-ji, but the trip stirred something within him. On his return to the Valley Jobs kick-started the personal computer industry. The Apple II and the Macintosh were breakthrough products, but the Mac, at least initially, did not sell. Exiled from the company he cofounded, Jobs was a wash-up at the age of thirty. A dozen years later he was asked to come back and save the company from near-certain oblivion.


The Rough Guide to Jamaica by Thomas, Polly,Henzell, Laura.,Coates, Rob.,Vaitilingam, Adam.

buttonwood tree, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, ghettoisation, jitney, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sustainable-tourism, trade route

Meanwhile, Rasta groups have applied to the British Queen Elizabeth for reparations in compensation for slavery; the request was denied on the grounds that the UK “can’t be held responsible for something that happened 150 years ago”. 293 The development of the faith C ONTE XTS | Religion 294 After being kickstarted in the 1930s by Marcus Garvey, the Rastafarian movement quickly attracted some vociferous advocates, so provoking widespread antagonism in the broader society. One of the most provocative early sympathizers was Claudius Henry, head of the self-made Kingston-based African Reform Church and something of a charlatan.


pages: 564 words: 182,946

The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989 by Frederick Taylor

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, German hyperinflation, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, the market place, young professional, éminence grise

Wella, an international market leader in the hair-care, cosmetics and perfume business, founded in Rothenkirchen in Saxony in 1880, relocated to Darmstadt, in the American Zone of West Germany. The East Berlin brake-system manufacturer, Knorr-Bremse, moved to Munich. The examples go on and on. In West Germany, the creativity and energy of an industrious, educated population, kick-started by the Marshall Plan and bolstered by rapid transfers of human and physical capital from the East, produced the famous ‘economic miracle’. The East, which should have been even more advantaged, never really recovered under the bureaucratic, centrally directed command structure that remained, for all the talk of ‘new courses’ and so on, the basis of the GDR’s economy.


May We Be Forgiven by A. M. Homes

anti-communist, Burning Man, dumpster diving, friendly fire, if you build it, they will come, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South China Sea

Checkers, the Nixons’ famous cocker spaniel. I play with my mental footnotes—like catalogue cards. Checkers died in 1964 and is buried at the Bide-a-Wee Pet Cemetery, not far from where Aunt Lillian lives. Perhaps next time I’m out I’ll visit. Maybe this is the moment, the big break, the swift kick-start that I’ve been waiting for. Julie Nixon Eisenhower and me! Tessie is in the bathroom licking the floor, cleaning up my mess. “Good dog,” I say, aware that my mood is all too subject to the winds of change. I go upstairs to shower and get ready for class. My eye looks bad, red, bulging. I put in some kind of drops from the medicine cabinet which burn like crazy—makes sense, they are ear drops—and rinse the eye again.


pages: 618 words: 180,430

The Making of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

anti-communist, antiwork, Arthur Marwick, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business climate, Corn Laws, deep learning, Etonian, garden city movement, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, New Journalism, New Urbanism, plutocrats, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, rent control, strikebreaker, trade liberalization, V2 rocket, wage slave, women in the workforce

This meant that he believed in free trade, balanced budgets and government economy, all paid lip service to by today’s politicians but an inadequate response to the mass unemployment and slump of the inter-war years. It meant limiting socialist reforms to good times; but these were bad times. In 1924 the alternative, Keynes’s advocacy of high spending to kick-start growth, was only beginning to be debated among intellectuals. More generally, MacDonald’s insistence that Labour must be respectable was a reasonable response to what was still an essentially conservative country, so recently and violently hostile to socialists. His first government lasted only ten months, always dependent on the other parties to let it continue in office.


pages: 1,007 words: 181,911

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Blue Bottle Coffee, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital nomad, en.wikipedia.org, Golden Gate Park, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Loma Prieta earthquake, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, spaced repetition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the High Line, Y Combinator

—and I can slap the infinitive or to form of any other verb on the end (I want to eat, I’m going to read, I need to drink water, etc.).17 If you learn the auxiliary verbs in your target language, plus the all-important to be, to have, to do, and to go, you can very quickly express any idea.18 Just see the following chart. - KICK-STARTING NINE LANGUAGES WITH FOUR SENTENCES Imagine me teaching you soccer through books. I insist you memorize the physics of each possible shot, over 1–2 years, before we get on the field. How will you do? Well, first, you’ll likely quit before you ever touch a ball. Second, when you get on the field, you’ll have to start from scratch, turning that paper knowledge into practical knowledge.


pages: 593 words: 189,857

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Buckminster Fuller, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Brooks, Doomsday Book, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, implied volatility, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, Northern Rock, obamacare, paradox of thrift, pets.com, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tobin tax, too big to fail, working poor

But after the Lehman panic, when no one knew what anything was worth, these securitization markets shut down. Investors stopped buying the loans, so many lenders stopped making them. The spreads on auto loans and student loans quickly tripled. In November 2008, the Fed had announced a new program designed to bypass the banks to kick-start the securitization markets: the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility. We designed TALF to create investor demand for high-quality asset-backed securities by accepting them as collateral for Fed loans. There was also a twist: Treasury would provide $20 billion from TARP to absorb losses on the securities, and the Fed would leverage that capital to provide $200 billion in financing to help investors buy them.


pages: 816 words: 191,889

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, George Floyd, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, positional goods, post-truth, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, special economic zone, TikTok, trade liberalization, transaction costs, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, zero-sum game

Hal Brands was also enthusiastic about this book, provided advice on framing, and convened a roundtable to help me test the argument. Ashley Tellis was supportive of the project from the first time we discussed it. He brought my career full circle when he offered me the chance to write a chapter for Strategic Asia—the very same series that helped kickstart my interest in Asian geopolitics in Gilbert Rozman’s class over a decade earlier. Andrew May and David Epstein pulled me into a range of studies and projects over the years that have shaped the arguments made here. Abe Denmark brought me on as a Wilson China Fellow and introduced me to the institution’s incredible bench of Asia expertise.


pages: 608 words: 184,703

Moon Oregon Trail Road Trip: Historic Sites, Small Towns, and Scenic Landscapes Along the Legendary Westward Route by Katrina Emery, Moon Travel Guides

Airbnb, bike sharing, California gold rush, car-free, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donner party, glass ceiling, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mason jar, mass immigration, pez dispenser, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, trade route, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Works Progress Administration

It won the national Good Food Award for its huckleberry truffle—try it for yourself, and taste a few others while you’re at it, like the hot chili or the cherry amaretto. And bring home a molded chocolate cowboy hat for your friends. Accommodations and Camping Find S The Jennings Hotel (100 N. Main St., www.jenningshotel.com, $95-160) on the south end of town. Known as the hotel that Kickstarter built—per the social media campaign that funded its renovation—this hip place hosts artist residencies along with nine rooms. Each room has been designed by local Portland artists. Guests can enjoy a dry sauna, a community kitchen, and great views down Main Street. All check-ins are run through Airbnb, and there is no staff on-site, but the communal dining area and library encourage mingling.


The Rough Guide to Sweden (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

carbon footprint, centre right, congestion charging, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, large denomination, Peace of Westphalia, place-making, sensible shoes, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, WikiLeaks

The gamble paid off and shoppers from the whole of northern Scandinavia, even from as far afield as Murmansk in Russia, now travel here to get their hands on those famous flat-packs. Other companies have followed the retailer’s lead and set up business here, giving the local economy a long overdue kickstart. Other than the IKEA store, there are only two real sights in town: the train station, and the church. TWO COUNTRIES: ONE TOWN The inhabitants of Swedish Haparanda and Finnish Tornio – two towns from different countries that have joined together to create a borderless “Eurocity” – are bilingual and use both the euro and the Swedish krona; roughly half of the children in Haparanda have either a Finnish mother or father.


Germany Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sensible shoes, Skype, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Museum Brandhorst GALLERY Offline map Google map (www.museum-brandhorst.de; Theresienstrasse 35a; adult/child €7/5, Sun €1; 10am-8pm Tue, to 6pm Wed-Sun; Maxvorstadt/Sammlung Brandhorst, Pinakotheken) A big, bold and aptly abstract building, clad entirely in vividly multihued ceramic tubes, the Brandhorst jostled its way into the Munich Kunstareal in a punk blaze of colour mid-2009. Its walls, floor and occasionally ceiling provide space for some of the most challenging works of art in the city, some of them instantly recognisable 20th-century images by Andy Warhol, who dominates the collection. In fact it’s Warhol who kickstarts proceedings right at the entrance with his bolshieHammer and Sickle (1976). Pop art’s 1960s poster boy pops up througout and even has an entire room dedicated to pieces such as his punkish Self Portrait (1986), Marilyn (1962) and Triple Elvis (1963). The other prevailing artist at the Brandhorst is the lesser known Cy Twombly.

Berlin’s Schloss Charlottenburg, Potsdam’s Sanssouci Park and Dresden’s Zwinger are fine examples of the spirit of this new age. Meanwhile, Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Friedrich Händel were ushered on stage and a wave of Hochkultur (high culture) swept through society’s top sliver. For the time being, however, the masses remained illiterate. Brandenburg-Prussia became an entity to be reckoned with, kick-started by the acquisition of former Teutonic Knights’ territories and assisted by Hohenzollern king Friedrich Wilhelm I (the Soldier King) and his son, Friedrich II (r 1740–86). After the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) with Austria, Brandenburg-Prussia annexed Silesia and sliced up Poland. The name Habsburg (Hapsburg) originates from Habichts Burg (literally ‘ Hawk Castle’), the spot on the Rhine (in present-day Switzerland, immediately across the border from Germany) from which the great Swabian family first hailed.


pages: 701 words: 199,010

The Crisis of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, and the New Crash Normal by Ludwig B. Chincarini

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, automated trading system, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, business cycle, buttonwood tree, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, high net worth, hindsight bias, housing crisis, implied volatility, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, managed futures, margin call, market design, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, negative equity, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shock, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Although most people are taught that the multiplier is greater than 1, much empirical evidence suggests that it is lower than 1 and begs the question why so much emphasis is made on fiscal policy. Government Programs So what did the government actually do? We already spoke about the Economic Recovery Act of 2008, which established TARP. The government also introduced a package of tax cuts designed to increase spending and kick-start the economy. The tax plan essentially gave a tax break of $600 per individual earning less than $75,000 per year and $300 per child. The values were slightly higher for married couples and there was a phaseout as one’s income rose about $75,000. There were also tax incentives for businesses. The estimated total affect on the taxpayer over a period of 10 years was a cost of $124.4 billion.


pages: 823 words: 206,070

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

To be sure, the fact the revolutions in Cuba and Vietnam did not have a “domino effect” was in good part due to US support for the dictatorships that emerged in Asia and Latin America (the first epitomized by the mass annihilation of Indonesia’s Communists in 1965, the latter by the military coup in Chile against the Allende government in 1973), as well as to the opportunities given by the Vietnam War to several East Asian capitalist countries to kick-start their export drive into US markets. Nevertheless, the growth of economic nationalism, which Treasury Secretary Fowler had identified in 1965 as the main threat to global capitalism, was increasingly unmistakable: the average number of expropriations of foreign investments per year in Third World countries increased from eight in the first half of the 1960s to seventeen in the second half.


pages: 719 words: 209,224

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, failed state, guns versus butter model, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, radical decentralization, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, standardized shipping container, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Unlike reactors in the West, such as the one at Three Mile Island, where an accident occurred in 1979, the Soviet RBMK-1000 design lacked a containment shelter, the overarching, concrete shell to hold radioactivity inside in the event of a disaster. The rods, pumps and gears used to control and moderate the nuclear fission inside the Chernobyl reactor were dependent on electricity. If outside power were suddenly cut off, it would take forty seconds to kickstart auxiliary diesel engines. Without power for forty seconds, however, the pumps would not force water through the reactor, which would quickly overheat. This forty-second gap was something that Soviet designers knew about and worried over; they were still trying to fix it. On the night of April 26, an improvised work-around was being tested.


Nepal Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land reform, load shedding, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

These days traditional building skills are still evidenced in the periodically ongoing restoration projects in Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur. Moreover, today’s architects will often incorporate traditional features into their buildings, particularly hotels. Newari Pagoda Temples The Nepali architect Arniko can be said to be the father of the Asian pagoda. He kick-started the introduction and reinterpretation of the pagoda in China and eastern Asia when he brought the multiroofed Nepali pagoda design to the court of Kublai Khan in the late 13th century. The cultural organisation Spiny Babbler (www.spinybabbler.org) has an online Nepali art museum and articles on Nepali art.


pages: 924 words: 198,159

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, Columbine, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, independent contractor, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, multilevel marketing, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Seymour Hersh, stem cell, Timothy McVeigh, urban planning, vertical integration, zero-sum game

As fire and smoke burned from two of America’s most famous buildings, the attacks almost instantly accelerated an agenda of privatization and conquest long sought by many of the people who had just taken over the White House less than a year earlier. President Bush’s Secretary of the Army, Thomas White, a former Enron executive, oversaw the rapid implementation of the privatization agenda kick-started by Dick Cheney a decade earlier.71 The program would soon see the explosion of a $100 billion global for-profit military industry. Among the greatest beneficiaries of the administration’s newly declared “war on terror” would be Erik Prince’s Blackwater. As Al Clark put it, “Osama bin Laden turned Blackwater into what it is today.”72 “The bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, sent a ripple through the U.S.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

The outcome was multiple bank failures, an economic downturn in most Western economies that may go on for some years yet, and a protracted sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone whose economic and political consequences are likely to be profound. Central banks were under political pressure to loosen their monetary policies, and sometimes to engage in competitive currency devaluation—so-called currency wars—as a means of boosting exports and kick-starting economic recovery. As what some experts believe is a further consequence of the crisis, by a circuitous but discernible route, several governments collapsed amid political uprising in the Middle East during the first half of 2011.1 The broader ramifications of the crisis for the global economy, its effect on the emerging BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), for example, are yet to be fully discerned.


pages: 537 words: 200,923

City: Urbanism and Its End by Douglas W. Rae

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business climate, City Beautiful movement, classic study, complexity theory, creative destruction, desegregation, edge city, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, informal economy, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, open immigration, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Works Progress Administration

The yearly totals shot up from about 14,000 Model T’s in 1909 –10 to 785,000 of them in 1916–17.52 This in turn provided an incentive for the rapid expansion of oil drilling and 21 C R E AT I V E D E S T R U C T I O N refining, created a national constituency for the Highway Act of 1921, and kickstarted scores of car-related industries ranging from rubber manufacturing to automotive glass production. As a principal consumer of heavy industrial products—steel, oil, rubber—the automobile industry made itself essential to every decision about the American economy, so central that a cabinet member in Dwight Eisenhower’s mid-century administration could dare to assert that what was good for General Motors was good for the country.


pages: 716 words: 192,143

The Enlightened Capitalists by James O'Toole

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, business process, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, collective bargaining, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, desegregation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, end world poverty, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, means of production, Menlo Park, North Sea oil, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

Anita grew up helping her mother in the family café, surrounded by relatives and friends in a close-knit immigrant community culturally more Italian than British. She attended a Catholic convent primary school, where she became an avid reader. At age ten, she read a photo book about the Holocaust and was left aghast at the visual evidence of man’s inhumanity. As she later explained, “That kick-started me into a sense of outrage or sense of empathy with the human condition.”1 Indeed, she would spend the rest of her life engaged in a variety of activities motivated by either outrage or empathy, sometimes both. Even at an early age, she found the dictates of Catholicism too confining, and when she switched to a public secondary school, she blossomed into a serious student with a questioning mind.


Germany by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, computer age, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, place-making, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Berlin’s Schloss Charlottenburg, Potsdam’s Sanssouci Park and Dresden’s Zwinger are fine examples of the spirit of this new age. Meanwhile, Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Friedrich Händel were ushered on stage and a wave of Hochkultur (high culture) swept through society’s top sliver. For the time being, however, the masses remained illiterate. Brandenburg-Prussia became an entity to be reckoned with, kick-started by the acquisition of former Teutonic Knights’ territories and assisted by Hohenzollern king Friedrich Wilhelm I (the Soldier King) and his son, Friedrich II (r 1740–86). After the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) with Austria, Brandenburg-Prussia annexed Silesia and sliced up Poland. At the behest of French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte during the Napoleonic Wars, an imperial deputation secularised and reconstituted German territory between 1801 and 1803.

In the 20 years since reunification, Saxony-Anhalt has gone from humdrum to, well, not quite hip but certainly more happening than its reputation would suggest. Open your eyes and you’ll find deep wellsprings of beauty, ingenuity and historical magnitude. After all, Otto I, the first Holy Roman Emperor, is buried in Magdeburg, Martin Luther kick-started the Reformation in Wittenberg and, centuries later, the Bauhaus school revolutionised modern design and architecture from its base in Dessau during its most creative period. Saxony-Anhalt may not quite have the pulling power of other states but it still packs a punch. Don’t just travel through on your way to somewhere else.


pages: 1,993 words: 478,072

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

However, the voyages have also been unscrupulously exploited by a sensationalist writer who has woven together a vast narrative in which Zheng He’s ships went much further than Africa and Arabia, and supposedly discovered Antarctica, Alaska, the Atlantic and just about every corner of the world long before the arrival of the Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch or British; in addition Zheng He’s arrival in Italy supposedly kick-started an Italian Renaissance that was already well under way. Needless to say, this ‘research’ is utter nonsense and pure fantasy, and the truth is far more interesting.6 Equally, the claim that Marco Polo knew about, and perhaps even visited, Alaska, making him the first European since the Vikings to set foot in North America (though the other side), is unfounded, this time based on what may be sixteenth-century manuscripts rather than modern-day fancy.7 The first question is why seven massive expeditions were sent out from China between 1405 and 1434, when nothing on that scale had been tried before.

In 1457, some German settlers were allowed to plant vines and sugar and to build a chapel and houses. The Portuguese imposed few restrictions on settlers, though the Madeirans were keen to expel the enslaved Canary islanders who had been imported to work the sugar mills, and were proving extremely truculent.11 The Genoese brought capital and enterprise, and helped kick-start the sugar industry. Among them was Christopher Columbus, who visited the archipelago in 1478, aiming to buy sugar in exchange for cloth; and his business partner in Madeira was Jean de Esmerault, a Fleming. This mixed population had reached about 15,000 by 1500, which included the full panoply of priests, merchants and artisans as well as the descendants of the original cultivators of the soil.


pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

In 1981, when Sony brought out the Walkman, its personal cassette player, the Japanese company had become known for cutting-edge, small-form factors in electronics. For two decades, quality electronics had been associated with Sony specifically and Japan generally. With the iPod, the product that would kick-start the company into personal electronics, Apple challenged Sony’s dominance and firmly closed this chapter of the postwar Japanese economic miracle. • • • THE REBIRTH OF Apple and its impending rise to become the world’s most valuable corporation were incongruously rooted in the fluidity of modern communism.


pages: 773 words: 220,140

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, invisible hand, Kickstarter, moral panic, nuclear winter, Own Your Own Home, Socratic dialogue

A shadow fell over me. I looked up at Terry's naked torso. It was always impressive to see him with his shirt off. It made me wonder if he hadn't reversed the usual order of enlightenment and achieved his Buddha-like serenity from the outside in. "You ready?" Terry said. "For what?" "We're going to try kick-starting your father's motor again." I swung my legs over the hammock and followed Terry into Dad's room. He was lying on the bed stomach down. He didn't acknowledge our presence in any way. "Look, Marty, don't you find yourself a heavy weight, pinning you down?" "Look who's talking." "Don't you want instead to be a leaf blown in the air, or a drop of rain, or a wispy cloud?"


pages: 823 words: 220,581

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? by Steve Keen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, central bank independence, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, collective bargaining, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market microstructure, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, seigniorage, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, total factor productivity, tulip mania, wage slave, zero-sum game

Often, these revolutions outpace the popular understanding of a science. Astronomy provides an example of this. I expect that most lay people think that the dominant theory of how the universe came into being is the ‘Big Bang.’ In this theory, the universe originated in a ‘quantum singularity’ some 12–15 billion years ago. This explosion kick-started matter and time, leading to the immense universe we observe today. Back in the 1950s, this theory won out against its rival, that the universe had always been in a ‘steady state’ of expansion. The Big Bang was indeed the dominant theory for some time – until it was pointed out that, according to calculations from quantum mechanics, the Big Bang would have resulted in a universe consisting of a mere handful of elementary particles.


Colorado by Lonely Planet

big-box store, bike sharing, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, East Village, fixed-gear, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, megaproject, off-the-grid, payday loans, restrictive zoning, Steve Wozniak, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, young professional

In many ways, it is the perfect breakfast – packed with protein (eggs, cheese, beans), fresh veggies (or is avocado a fruit?), hot salsa (is that a vegetable?), and rolled to go in paper and foil. Peel it open like a banana and let the savory steam rise into your olfactories. Smuggle it onto the gondola, grind it in the car, hell, store it in your purse (but not for too long). When paired with strong coffee it can kick-start a morning better than a Red Bull and ease a hangover better than a Bloody Mary. Heat your system for cold mornings on the slopes better than a bandit hat. (Side note: nobody eats breakfast burritos in Mexico.) In the Aspen area, the best Mexican food (and the best margaritas) is found at the Woody Creek Tavern (Click here), Hunter S Thompson’s old haunt.


The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East by Andrew Scott Cooper

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Boycotts of Israel, energy security, falling living standards, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, interchangeable parts, Kickstarter, land reform, MITM: man-in-the-middle, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

Simon and Arthur Burns, the Fed chief, made the case against a big fiscal stimulus. They wanted to keep federal spending under control and prevent the deficit from going over $20 billion. Budget Director Roy Ash and Ford’s political advisers took the opposing view. Driven by more practical concerns—such as the president’s election—they were eager to kick-start the economy to prevent even higher job losses. Bill Simon also fiercely resisted the Kissinger-Shah proposal to establish a floor price of $8 for a barrel of oil. Kissinger’s viewpoint was represented at Vail by Under Secretary of State Thomas Enders, a man not known for his humility, and he soon got into it with the treasury secretary.


pages: 897 words: 210,566

Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Romeo Dallaire, Brent Beardsley

airport security, colonial rule, disinformation, failed state, global village, invisible hand, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, land reform, risk/return, Ronald Reagan

293 as the permanent chief of staff of the army. Bizimungu was a hard-drinking tyrant who commanded through fear. He had fully fought the RPF in earlier conflicts and hated them with a his appointment was definitely a sign that any noises the interim ment made about wanting to put an end to the killing were just It was clear he was meant to kick-start the lethargic government in the field. From that point on, when I attempted to negotiate the government side, I faced three known extremist leadersana, Bizimungu and Bagosora-and Ndindiliyimana, who was ow hanging on to his job and was no match for the hard-liners. in days, all the officers who had signed the communique were to symbolic positions and replaced by known extremists.


pages: 388 words: 211,074

Pauline Frommer's London: Spend Less, See More by Jason Cochran

Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, British Empire, congestion charging, context collapse, David Attenborough, Easter island, electricity market, Etonian, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Multics, Nelson Mandela, Skype, Stephen Fry, urban planning

But for all that, the Fountain, which is gated and switches off exactly on time (so don’t bother coming outside of its opening hours), makes lovely sounds and attracts some 1 million visitors a year. You can reach it most quickly from the Alexandra Gate at Kensington Gore, Knightsbridge, up Exhibition Road from the trio of great South Kensington museums. after all, he departed in 1839 after staying less than 2 years here. It could be anyone’s humble home. Still, his celebrity got a kick-start while he lived here: Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, arguably his biggest hits, were written while he was in residence, a short stroll from the Foundling Hospital for orphans. As you watch the half-hour biographical video and inspect the dusty spreads of his desks, his podium, and installments of his biggest books, an unpleasant realization sets in: Charles Dickens was a compelling character but also a jerk.


pages: 807 words: 225,326

Werner Herzog - a Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations With Paul Cronin by Paul Cronin

Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, classic study, Dr. Strangelove, Francisco Pizarro, Kickstarter, land reform, MITM: man-in-the-middle, out of africa, Pier Paolo Pasolini

When I finished Nosferatu I remember thinking, “Now I’m connected. At last I’ve reached the other side of the river.” The film acted almost as some kind of bridge for me; the ground under my feet felt much more solid. This might have all sounded incomprehensible to British, Italian and French filmmakers at the time – countries that kickstarted film production after the war with relative ease – but it was something that impacted on many young German filmmakers in the seventies. We all carried a certain weight that had to be cast off. Coming of age in the early and mid-sixties, we young Germans looked around for a point of reference. But our fathers’ generation either sided with the barbaric Nazi culture or had been chased from the country.


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

In 1981, when Sony brought out the Walkman, its personal cassette player, the Japanese company had become known for cutting-edge, small-form factors in electronics. For two decades, quality electronics had been associated with Sony specifically and Japan generally. With the iPod, the product that would kick-start the company into personal electronics, Apple challenged Sony’s dominance and firmly closed this chapter of the postwar Japanese economic miracle. • • • THE REBIRTH OF Apple and its impending rise to become the world’s most valuable corporation were incongruously rooted in the fluidity of modern communism.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Throughout the two volumes of this book, we have seen the role played by accident and contingency—how fortuitous leadership, the unplanned sequencing of the introduction of institutions, or unintended consequences of activities undertaken for other purposes like fighting wars—led certain countries to evolve in unexpected ways. Could it be the case that societies escaping this trap historically were simply lucky, and that others ones not similarly blessed may never develop? This view is too pessimistic. It is true that luck and accidents have played a role in kick-starting political and economic change historically. But luck and accidents may have been more important for the first societies building new institutions than for ones that come later. Today, there is a large body of accumulated experience about institutions, and a growing international community that shares information, knowledge, and resources.


pages: 857 words: 232,302

The Evolutionary Void by Peter F. Hamilton

clean water, information retrieval, Kickstarter, megacity, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, plutocrats, trade route, urban sprawl

“Its current existence, to being itself.” “How?” He was trying not to shout. “It’s stalled. Whatever it was originally meant to do hasn’t worked. It hasn’t progressed for millions, possibly billions, of years. It just sits there absorbing minds and matter; it’s become pointless and very dangerous. We need to kick-start its evolutionary process again, whether it likes that or not.” “I thought that’s what Ilanthe and the Accelerators were proposing.” “Look, kid, I know you mean well and you’re upset over your family and everything, but don’t smart-mouth me. I’ve been fighting that bitch for over two centuries now.


pages: 556 words: 46,885

The World's First Railway System: Enterprise, Competition, and Regulation on the Railway Network in Victorian Britain by Mark Casson

banking crisis, barriers to entry, Beeching cuts, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, combinatorial explosion, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, high-speed rail, independent contractor, intermodal, iterative process, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, linear programming, low interest rates, megaproject, Network effects, New Urbanism, performance metric, price elasticity of demand, railway mania, rent-seeking, strikebreaker, the market place, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration

Few doubts were expressed that the industrial system required a railway network, and that railways were superior to both roads and canals for carrying heavy loads (Alderman 1973). Steam locomotive technology was no longer in the experimental phase: the only question was how much further improvement it was capable of. This analysis suggests that while private enterprise may have been important in ‘kick-starting’ the railway system, it was unnecessary for its subsequent development. Railways could have been nationalized in 1844 (or later) without adverse eVects, provided that state purchase of existing railways had been made on reasonable terms. Provided the railways had broken even after interest charges had been paid, there would be no burden on taxation.


pages: 728 words: 233,687

My Boring-Ass Life: The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith by Kevin Smith

An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Burning Man, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, fulfillment center, G4S, Kickstarter, mutually assured destruction, post-work, pre–internet, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Wall-E, Wayback Machine

But fear not: one day, I’ll go back to blogging. Life is cyclical, and if you’re around long enough, you get to fall in love again with long-since back-burnered people and things that used to mean worlds to you. This year alone, I’ve immersed myself in all things hockey — an old passion of mine I’d been neglecting since Clerks kick-started my career — and got back into writing comics. Yes, everything’s different now... as well as the exact same. — Still only wanna fuck Jen. — Still making movies. — Still watching TiVo. — Still shitting lots. But leafing through the book now, it’s kinda quaint. The guy who wrote all those words had no idea where life was gonna take him in three short years.


pages: 1,072 words: 237,186

How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, double helix, Edward Jenner, friendly fire, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Helicobacter pylori, inventory management, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, New Journalism, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, supply-chain management, the medium is the message, Westphalian system, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zoonotic diseases

Scientific American, October 24. www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000DCB5A-9CC7-134E-9CC783414B7F0000. 2582. Butler D. 2005. Avian flu special. The flu pandemic: were we ready? Nature 425:400. nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7041/full/435400a.html. 2583. Mackenzie D, Choo K. 2005. Bird flu: kick-start vaccination or face the consequences. New Scientist, October 14. www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg18825215.900.html. 2584. Bush RM. 2004. Influenza as a model system for studying the cross-species transfer and evolution of the SARS coronavirus. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 359:1067–73. 2585.


Lonely Planet Norway by Lonely Planet

carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, centre right, energy security, G4S, GPS: selective availability, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, North Sea oil, place-making, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence

There's vinyl on the decks (often something that's ironically nostalgic), arresting photographic works on the moodily dark walls and often not a chair or stool to spare. oTim WendelboeCAFE ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %400 04 062; www.timwendelboe.no; Grüners gate 1; h8.30am-6pm Mon-Fri, 11am-5pm Sat & Sun; jSchous plass) Tim Wendelboe is often credited with kick-starting the Scandinavian coffee revolution, and his eponymous cafe and roastery is both a local freelancers' hang-out and an international coffee-fiend pilgrimage site. All the beans are, of course, self-sourced and hand-roasted (the roaster is part of the furniture), and all coffees – from an iced pour-over to a regular cappuccino – are world class.


pages: 3,292 words: 537,795

Lonely Planet China (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Shawn Low

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, birth tourism , carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, country house hotel, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, G4S, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, young professional

The charms of the province are so well known that it has attracted domestic tourists in large numbers since the 1990s, much earlier than most other places in the country. Package tourists flock to Suzhou anytime of the year, and you’re likely to be rubbing elbows with them in the gardens or any of the famous water towns. But don’t be put off. Kick-start your day early, go slightly off the main streets, and you’ll see the old-world charm and have the place to yourself. In the provincial capital and university town of Nanjing there’s a lot that remains relatively undiscovered by outsiders: Ming-dynasty heritage, leafy parks and fantastic museums.

Toilet paper was first used in China as early as the 6th century AD, when it was employed by the wealthy and privileged for sanitary purposes. Kuomintang Rule Chiang Kaishek’s Kuomintang government officially came to power in 1928 through a combination of military force and popular support. Marked by corruption, it suppressed political dissent with great ruthlessness. Yet Chiang’s government also kick-started a major industrialisation effort, greatly augmented China’s transport infrastructure and successfully renegotiated what many Chinese called ‘unequal treaties’ with Western powers. In its first two years, the Kuomintang doubled the length of highways in China and increased the number of students studying engineering.


pages: 1,909 words: 531,728

The Rough Guide to South America on a Budget (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, banking crisis, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, company town, Day of the Dead, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Francisco Pizarro, garden city movement, gentrification, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, off grid, openstreetmap, place-making, restrictive zoning, side project, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city

Stunning bar that occupies an early twentieth-century townhouse. Packed with gringos and Argentines on the prowl for good times, this is a fun if pricey place to start the night and another venue with a superb garden. Mon–Fri noon–2am, Sat noon–4am, Sun 8pm–late. NOLA Gorriti 4389, Palermo nolabuenosaires.com; map. The original gastro-pub that kick-started the scene in 2015. The in-house craft beer, delectable fried chicken sandwiches (AR$130) and spicy dishes ensure hipsters pack the joint, even spilling out onto the street. Happy hour 12.30pm–8pm. Mon–Fri 5pm–midnight, Sat & Sun 1pm–midnight. La Poesía Chile 502, San Telmo 011 4300 7340, cafelapoesia.com.ar; map.

Plaza Independencia and around A good place to start a walking tour of the Ciudad Vieja is the Puerta de la Ciudadela, dating to 1746, marking the original site of the Citadel of Montevideo on the Plaza Independencia. This square commemorates the emergence of Uruguay as a sovereign nation, and a 17m-high statue and mausoleum (under the statue; Mon noon–6pm, Tues–Sun 10am–6pm) of José Artigas, the man credited with kick-starting Uruguay’s independence campaign against Spain and Portugal, stands aptly in the centre. The area around the plaza contains eclectic architectural styles, from the rather ugly Torre Ejecutiva where the president performs his duties, to the bulbous tower of the Palacio Salvo, built on the reported site of the first ever performance of tango.


pages: 790 words: 253,035

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency by James Andrew Miller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, collective bargaining, corporate governance, do what you love, Donald Trump, Easter island, family office, financial engineering, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, obamacare, out of africa, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, stem cell, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration

Gilles, through their mutual accountants, KPMG, met with Michael Ovitz and got a totally different recommendation that was counter to all the previous meetings he had. Mr. Ovitz told him to not shutter the studio and lay off 1,200 people, particularly in light of CL’s growing operations and ambitions in the United States. He advised them to bring in a new management team, to kick-start the dormant United Artists, and to add some fresh cash. He also said that CAA would handle it all and ensure them a flow of films from all agencies and suppliers, and then CAA would help sell the entire business at the highest possible price. Ovitz recruited the respected Frank Mancuso to oversee everything and then they hired John Calley to revitalize UA.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

“Modern business does not satisfy the criteria of a profession; it is shrewd, energetic, and clever, rather than intellectual in character; it aims—and under our present social organization must aim—at its own advantage, rather than at noble purpose within itself.”4 Flexner did allow for the study of business as an academic pursuit, but he tore into HBS for its lack of emphasis on studying the phenomena of business in favor of its “unworthy” focus on kick-starting its graduates’ careers: “[It] is quite another thing—and, in my judgment, an irrelevant and unworthy thing—for a modern university to undertake to ‘short-circuit’ experience and to furnish advertisers, salesmen, or handy men for banks, department stores, or transportation companies.”5 He pointed out one of the great disconnects in the HBS model: a faculty that may have been focused on advancing that frontier of knowledge working for an administration and on behalf of a student body that had no interest in exploring that frontier whatsoever.


pages: 941 words: 237,152

USA's Best Trips by Sara Benson

Albert Einstein, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, cotton gin, Day of the Dead, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, if you build it, they will come, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, McMansion, mega-rich, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, the High Line, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

Downtown, long known for a bustling financial district that emptied at night, is in the midst of a massive Renaissance that’s attracting party animals as well as full-time residents. The symbol of the revitalization is the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the landmark that launched a thousand metaphors. Billowing ship? Blooming rose? Silver bow? No matter which comparison you prefer, it’s agreed that this iconic structure – designed by Frank Gehry and completed in 2003 – kick-started Downtown’s rebirth. Cascading escalators whisk visitors from the parking garage directly into the airy lobby, where tours highlight Gehry’s exquisite attention to detail – air-conditioning units are hidden inside smooth Douglas fir columns – throughout the building and gardens. * * * TIME 2 days BEST TIME TO GO Year-round START Walt Disney Concert Hall, LA, CA END Santa Monica State Beach, LA, CA * * * Just across Grand Ave, hard hats construct the Grand Ave Cultural Corridor, a high-end cluster of shops, hotels and restaurants scheduled for a 2011 completion.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

Coffee 495 Lorimer St, between Grand and Powers sts 718 388 7771, gimmecoffee.com; subway L to Lorimer St, G to Metropolitan Ave; map. This coffee haven is not your typical lounge-about-all-day Williamsburg café, but a bright, narrow spot to pick up a shot of espresso or cup of the house roast to kick-start your next few hours. A refreshing antidote. Daily 7am–7pm. Clockwise from top left katz’s deli; Per Se; Momofuku Noodle Bar; lombardi’s > eating Bamonte’s 32 Withers St, at Union Ave 718 384 8831; subway L to Lorimer St, G to Metropolitan Ave; map. Red-sauce restaurants abound in NYC, but this is one of the legends, which has served traditional Italian-American dishes like linguine with clam sauce ($15.50) since 1900.


pages: 1,006 words: 243,928

Lonely Planet Washington, Oregon & the Pacific Northwest by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, Burning Man, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Kickstarter, Lyft, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, remote working, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, trade route, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Each room has a TV and mini-refrigerator and there are TV lounges and communal kitchens too. Rates include access to the YWCA Health & Fitness Centre, a 15-minute walk away. Opus HotelBOUTIQUE HOTEL$$$ (map Google map; %604-642-6787; www.opushotel.com; 322 Davie St, Yaletown; d $500; paW#; bYale town-Roundhouse) The 96-room Opus kick-started Vancouver’s boutique-hotel scene and, with regular revamps, it’s remained one of the city’s top sleepover options. The designer rooms have contemporary-chic interiors with bold colors, mod furnishings and feng-shui bed placements, while many of the luxe bathrooms have clear windows overlooking the streets (visiting exhibitionists take note).


pages: 1,266 words: 278,632

Backup & Recovery by W. Curtis Preston

Berlin Wall, business intelligence, business process, database schema, Debian, dumpster diving, failed state, fault tolerance, full text search, job automation, Kickstarter, operational security, rolling blackouts, side project, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, web application

If your operating system supports it, take the time to write scripts that automatically install various services, and configure them for your environment. Put these together in a toolkit that is run every time you create a new server. Better yet, see if your OS vendor has any products that automate new server installations, such as Sun’s Jumpstart, HP’s Ignite-UX, Linux Kickstart, and Mac OS cloning features. Do you have a plan for this? The reason for describing the earlier horrible scenarios is so you can start planning for them now. Don’t wait until there’s 20 feet of snow in your front yard before you start shopping for a snow shovel! It’s going to snow; it’s only a question of when.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

As could be expected, banks particularly short of capital were the most active in playing this “extend and pretend” game.158 Low interest rates made this cozy “extend and pretend” arrangement especially convenient for “zombie” borrowers, the borrowers who were de facto bankrupt but continued operating simply because their creditors chose not to foreclose on them. Unfortunately, the low interest rates came too late to kick-​start the Japanese economy and, in particular, they did little to revive the zombie borrowers. Such borrowers stayed on life support, happy to have their loans renewed at low interest rates and play along with the fiction that they would eventually repay their debts. The distressed banks, having given priority to keeping zombie companies alive, chose to cut back on loans to productive companies.159 This incentive to allocate credit to unproductive rather than to productive companies further damaged economic growth and steadily raised the eventual cost of bailing out the distressed banks.


pages: 1,153 words: 261,418

Normandy '44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France by James Holland

Bletchley Park, friendly fire, Kickstarter, the long tail

In all, some 1,260 merchant vessels were earmarked for the invasion, including ocean-going vessels, colliers, tankers and personnel vessels. A staggering array of other landing craft had been designed and built by both Britain and America during the past three years. The evacuation of Dunkirk back in 1940, when there had been none available, and the realization that future offensive operations would require such vessels, had kick-started this new wave of landing craft design and construction. It included other landing ships for infantry, for emergency repairs, for delivering headquarters and even from where fighter aircraft control could be provided. There were barges called ‘Rhinos’ and smaller British-designed LCAs (Landing Craft, Assault) and US LCVPs (Landing Craft, Vehicle and Personnel), designed by Andrew Higgins in New Orleans and more commonly known simply as ‘Higgins Boats’.


Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, invention of movable type, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, New Urbanism, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, plutocrats, post-truth, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

To make reading easier and quicker, diacritical marks also began to be used more; inherited from Syriac, they had already appeared in Arabic at least as early as a dated papyrus of AH 22/AD 643. As we shall see, arabicizing the administration was also to have other repercussions. The need for a mass of people suddenly to learn the intricacies of a very tricky language kick-started the formal analysis of that language. Grammar, syntax and philology were the first formal Arab sciences, and they shaped the entire Arab ‘scientific method’ – a whole way of looking at and understanding complex systems. Contrast this with the beginnings of the classical scientific method, in the observation of and speculation about ‘the nature of things’ from Anaximander on, and the scene is set for divergence: two angles from which to regard the universe, one rhetorical, relying on the authority of words, of texts; the other empirical, relying Nullius In Verba, as the motto of the Royal Society would put it, ‘on no one’s word’.


pages: 1,028 words: 267,392

Wanderers: A Novel by Chuck Wendig

Black Swan, Boston Dynamics, centre right, citizen journalism, clean water, Columbine, coronavirus, crisis actor, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, fake news, game design, global pandemic, hallucination problem, hiring and firing, hive mind, Internet of things, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, oil shale / tar sands, private military company, quantum entanglement, RFID, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, supervolcano, tech bro, TED Talk, uber lyft, white picket fence

“So we look outside the toolbox, so to speak.” “If I knew of another tool set, I would explore it.” Cassie said, “Well, what’s on the fringes right now? Is there some hot new technology we haven’t yet looked to? There must be something we aren’t seeing. Some diagnostic tool, some genius with a Kickstarter, some bleeding-edge tech you hear about in Wired—” “That’s it,” Sadie said, suddenly. “Benex-Voyager is the parent company to Firesight: It’s a nanotechnology firm, fairly boutique, but they have found ways of using nanoparticles and nanodevices to diagnose certain cancers, brain diseases, and gastrointestinal disorders.


pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

If the Habsburgs had been even luckier than they actually were (if, perhaps, Luther had never been born, or if Charles V had co-opted him, or if the armada against England had succeeded in 1588 and the Dutch rebellion had then folded), perhaps they really would become the shepherds of Christendom—in which case the Spanish Inquisition might have silenced radical voices such as Newton’s and Descartes’s, and arbitrary taxation might have destroyed Dutch, English, and French trade the way it destroyed Spanish commerce in historical reality. That is a lot of ifs, though, and for all we know a Habsburg Empire might have had exactly the opposite effect, driving even more Puritans to cross the Atlantic and build cities on hills, kick-starting an Atlantic economy and scientific revolution from the far side. Alternatively, the Habsburgs could easily have fared worse than they did in reality. If the Ottomans had defeated Shiite Persia more thoroughly, the Turks might have taken Vienna in 1529; minarets and the muezzin might yet have pierced the skies over England and, as Gibbon put it, the interpretation of the Koran might now be taught in the schools of Oxford.


pages: 936 words: 85,745

Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, Andy Hunt

book scanning, David Heinemeier Hansson, Debian, domain-specific language, duck typing, Jacquard loom, Kickstarter, Neal Stephenson, off-by-one error, p-value, revision control, Ruby on Rails, slashdot, sorting algorithm, web application

Frameworks abstract away all this low-level detail and also help you structure your code into something that is both easy to write and (probably more importantly) easy to maintain. At the time of writing, Ruby on Rails3 is the leading web framework for Ruby. It has an incredibly active community and a vast set of plug-ins so the chances are good you’ll find a lot of preexisting code to help you kick-start your application. Merb4 is a lighter-weight alternative. Rails and Merb will merge and become Rails 3. Other alternatives include Camping, Sinatra, and Ramaze.5 By the time you read this, the list will have grown. And, if you fancy writing your own framework, consider making it independent of the underlying web server by building it on top of Rack.6 3.


Lonely Planet Chile & Easter Island (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn McCarthy, Kevin Raub

California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, Colonization of Mars, company town, East Village, Easter island, gentrification, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, QR code, rewilding, satellite internet, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, white picket fence

La Bicicleta Verde CYCLING Offline map Google map ( 570-9338; www.labicicletaverde.cl; cnr Loreto & Santa María, Bellavista; half-day CH$4000-9000, per day CH$9000-15,000; Bellas Artes) You can rent bikes and helmets here or choose from highly recommended guided tours like Bike at Night (CH$30,000). Courses Although Santiago isn’t the cheapest place to kick-start your Spanish, these language schools have excellent reputations. Escuela de Idiomas Violeta Parra/Tandem Santiago LANGUAGE COURSE ( 236-4241; www.tandemsantiago.cl; Triana 863, Providencia; enrollment fee US$50, single one-on-one lesson from US$20, intensive weeklong course with accommodations from US$365; Salvador) Combines an outstanding academic record with a friendly vibe and cultural activities.


Scandinavia by Andy Symington

call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, connected car, edge city, Eyjafjallajökull, full employment, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, period drama, retail therapy, Skype, the built environment, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city, work culture , young professional

Add a sleek, cocktail-savvy bar, weekend DJ sessions and a waterside location, and you’ll understand why it’s best to book. Grill INTERNATIONAL €€€ ( www.grill.se; Drottninggatan 89; daily lunches Skr110, dinner mains Skr180-475; 11.15am-2pm & 5pm-1am Mon-Fri, 11.15am-2pm & 4pm-1am Sat, 3-10pm Sun, closed Jul–early Aug) Kick-started by culinary stars Melker Andersson and Danyel Couet, this outrageous restaurant–bar looks like a furniture showroom, with various themed nooks, from Miami art deco to Astroturf garden party. The menu is a global affair, arranged by grill type. Vegetarians aren’t overlooked, service is casual and accommodating, and there’s a popular Sunday grill buffet (Skr295).


Coastal California by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, electricity market, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, Mason jar, McMansion, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Wozniak, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

But since the 1960s, Californians have trailblazed another, ‘greener’ way by choosing more sustainable foods and low-impact lifestyles, preserving old-growth forests with tree-sitting activism, declaring urban nuclear-free zones, pushing for environmentally progressive legislation and establishing the biggest US market for hybrid vehicles. That shouldn’t really come as a surprise. It was Californians who originally helped kick-start the world’s conservation movement in the midst of the 19th-century industrial revolution, with laws curbing industrial dumping, swaths of prime real estate set aside as urban green space, and pristine wilderness protected by national and state parks. Today, even conservative California politicians prioritize environmental issues on their agendas – at least as much as the state’s current economic woes allow.


Western USA by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cotton gin, Donner party, East Village, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Maui Hawaii, off grid, off-the-grid, retail therapy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

A good way to taste as much as possible without going into liver failure is to order four to eight beer samplers. Bridgeport Brewpub BREWERY (www.bridgeportbrew.com; 1313 NW Marshall St) This huge, relaxing unpretentious bar (which also sells great food) hides a small piece of history. This is where the micro-brewing industry in the US was kick-started in 1984. And yes, it’s still here working the magic. Lucky Labrador Brewing Company BREWERY (www.luckylab.com) Hawthorne (915 SE Hawthorne Blvd); Pearl District (1945 NW Quimby St) The name’s no joke. Dogs are welcome at this mild-mannered and mild-beer-ed pub; there’s even a dog-friendly back patio at the Hawthorne branch where movies are shown in summer.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

In a memo titled “NSC 68,” the secretary of state, Dean Acheson, and the chief of Truman’s Policy Planning Staff, Paul Nitze, suggested a way to spend novel amounts of government money without appearing to crowd out private industry: rearmament. By paying for peacetime arsenals in America and western Europe (and “on behalf of” Japan), they could prepare for war with the communists as Shockley theorized it and boost global demand without driving down prices, kick-starting what we now think of as capitalism’s twentieth-century golden age. This plan also rescued military contractors in the ACE sectors who were looking at peacetime layoffs. Acheson and Nitze wanted Truman to triple the Pentagon’s budget ask for 1950.15 Of all the smart-stupid state-capitalist plans, military Keynesianism, which called for the state to finance the expansion of the global economy by building machines designed to blow up the world, was one of the smartest-stupidest.


pages: 1,071 words: 295,220

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, operational security, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Close associates described the last months of his term as manic, lacking in focus, and devoid of any clear sense of direction. His governing coalition began to unravel, and in December he was forced to call for elections in February 2001. Barak was defeated by the very man whose provocation at the Temple Mount had kick-started the intifada: Ariel Sharon. Sharon had been a political pariah for almost two decades, ever since he orchestrated the disastrous invasion of Lebanon. He’d been forced to abdicate the office of defense minister in 1983, but his misbegotten military adventure—his foolhardy plan to rearrange the whole of the Middle East—dragged on for eighteen years, costing Israel 1,216 lives and more than 5,000 wounded, as well as untold thousands of Lebanese casualties.


pages: 1,088 words: 297,362

The London Compendium by Ed Glinert

1960s counterculture, anti-communist, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Brixton riot, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nick Leeson, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, union organizing, V2 rocket

In 1914 avant-garde works by Wyndham Lewis and Mark Gertler were exhibited; twenty-five years later Picasso’s Guernica, a condemnation of the fascist bombing of the defenceless Spanish town of the same name in 1937, was displayed; and in August 1956 the gallery held the This Is Tomorrow exhibition, its centrepiece being Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, a collage mocking the Americanization of Britain, which kick-started the pop art movement. Two years later the first Jackson Pollock display in Britain took place here and in 1971 Gilbert and George held an exhibition that involved the pair asking each other questions. From 1976 to 1988 the gallery director was Nicholas Serota who improved the building, raised funds and later became the main force behind the Tate Modern.


pages: 1,117 words: 305,620

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill

active measures, air freight, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, blood diamond, business climate, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, false flag, friendly fire, Google Hangouts, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, information security, Islamic Golden Age, Kickstarter, land reform, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, WikiLeaks

Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, ‘I’ve got to crack this thing and I’m tired of working through the normal chain of command. I’ve got this apparatus set up—the black special-access program—and I’m going in hot.’ So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing.” Although it got its major kick-start in Iraq, Copper Green predated the 2003 invasion and the intent was for it to go global. The program was “Rumsfeld’s answer to the CIA death squads envisioned by Cofer Black,” reported investigative journalist Jane Mayer. “Members of the squads were given aliases, dead mail drops, and unmarked clothing.


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Mamma Luisa ITALIAN $$ ( 401-848-5257; www.mammaluisa.com; 673 Thames St; mains $14-25; 5-10pm Thu-Tue) Escape the Newport crowds at this cozy restaurant serving classic pasta dishes (cheese ravioli with fava beans, spaghetti alle vongole ), as well as meat and fish entrees. Upstairs feels like eating at grandma’s house. Gary’s Handy Lunch DINER $ (462 Thames St; mains $4-8; 5am-3pm, to 8pm Fri) Newport’s working folk kick-start their day over coffee and simple breakfast fare at this old-school diner. Wharf Pub PUB $$ ( 401-846-9233; Bowen’s Wharf; mains $10-18; 11:30am-11pm) Reasonable prices, good portions and fast service. Think sandwiches, fried calamari and burgers. Wash it down with a Newport Storm ale. Drinking & Entertainment Newport Blues Café CLUB ( 401-841-5510; www.newportblues.com; 286 Thames St) Intimate atmosphere and one of the best blues and R&B scenes this side of New York City.

A good way to taste as much as possible without going into liver failure is to order four to eight beer samplers. Bridgeport Brewpub BREWERY Offline map (www.bridgeportbrew.com; 1313 NW Marshall St) This huge, relaxing unpretentious bar (which also sells great food) hides a small piece of history. This is where the micro-brewing industry in the US was kick-started in 1984. And yes, it’s still here working the magic. Lucky Labrador Brewing Company BREWERY (www.luckylab.com) Hawthorne (915 SE Hawthorne Blvd); Pearl District (1945 NW Quimby St) The name’s no joke. Dogs are welcome at this mild-mannered and mild-beer-ed pub; there’s even a dog-friendly back patio at the Hawthorne branch where movies are shown in summer.


Central Europe Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, Gregor Mendel, Guggenheim Bilbao, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Prenzlauer Berg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence, young professional

Getting There & Away Boats leave from the canal by Pionierstrasse, 400m north of the abbey. There are hourly trains to Vienna (€15.70, 1¼ hours). Linz 0732 / POP 189,000 In Linz beginnt’s (It begins in Linz) goes the Austrian saying, and it’s spot on. Linz is blessed with a leading-edge cyber centre and world-class contemporary-art gallery, both signs that Upper Austria kick-started the country’s technological industry. Beyond the industrial outskirts you’ll find plenty of culture, so much so that it gained the title of European Capital of Culture 2009. Sights & Activities Linz’ baroque Hauptplatz and sculpture-strewn Danube Park are made for aimless ambling. The Linz Card , giving entry to major sights and unlimited use of public transport, costs €15/25 for one/three days.


pages: 1,242 words: 317,903

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

In the 1930s and 1940s, economists paid little heed to central banks; indeed, they dismissed finance as an insignificant sideshow next to the farms and mines and factories that formed the “real” economy. But the economists’ indifference to monetary matters was about to be tested. In ways that neither the professor nor his student could anticipate, China’s crossing of the Yalu River kick-started the rebirth of finance. Until the time of the Chinese attack, Burns’s view had been entirely reasonable. During World War II, the Fed had played a humble support role to the Treasury. The government spent whatever it took to win the war, and the Fed’s job was to create enough money to make that spending possible.


The Rough Guide to Ireland by Clements, Paul

Berlin Wall, bike sharing, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, Columbine, country house hotel, digital map, East Village, haute couture, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, Murano, Venice glass, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

The transcriber, Edmund Bunting, was stimulated to tour Ireland collecting further airs, 77 of which were published in his illustrious collection of 1809. Cathedral Quarter The area north of Waring Street has experienced more than two decades of regeneration, a process kick-started when chef Nick Price gambled on the then mainly derelict area by opening his Nick’s Warehouse restaurant in 1989. With Price’s recent retirement, that Hill Street venue, which proved a huge success, is now The Harp Bar. His punt, meanwhile, is looking a sure thing, with an ever-increasing number of restaurants and bars and a fresh title, the Cathedral Quarter ( www.thecathedralquarter.com), for this once-scruffy patch.


The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science by J. Kenji López-Alt

coastline paradox / Richardson effect, haute cuisine, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, oil rush, place-making, the scientific method

So, if none of these three methods is perfect on its own, why settle for just one? For steaks and chops, by combining pan-searing and torching into one hybrid technique, you can avoid all the disadvantages of either one alone. I started by first searing one side of a steak in smoking-hot oil and butter (the browned butter solids help kickstart browning reactions). As soon as the browning started, I flipped the steak over and immediately started cooking that top surface with the full blast of a propane torch. The layer of oil and butter clinging to its surface helped to distribute the heat of the flame evenly, leading to excellent, all-over browning and charring and creating an unbeatable steak house broiler–quality crust in record time.


The Rough Guide to Egypt (Rough Guide to...) by Dan Richardson, Daniel Jacobs

Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, disinformation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Livingstone, I presume, satellite internet, self-driving car, sexual politics, Skype, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

They often appear standing in boats, and are frequently surrounded by ostriches, elephants or cattle. Both Hans Winkler, who did seminal research in the 1930s, and David Rohl, who made recent studies, believe the oldest boats represent “Eastern Invaders” from Mesopotamia, who reached Egypt by the Red Sea and conquered the indigenous people of the Nile Valley, kickstarting Egyptian civilization. Permits are required for visiting these sites: both Red Sea Desert Adventures and Ancient World Tours (UK 020 7917 9494, ancient.co.uk) can obtain them and organize excursions. * * * ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE: EL-QUSEIR By bus The bus station is about 3km north of the fortress; you can take a taxi (around £E10–20) or a minibus to the town centre.


pages: 1,590 words: 353,834

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican by Gerald Posner

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, book value, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, credit crunch, disinformation, dividend-yielding stocks, European colonialism, forensic accounting, God and Mammon, Index librorum prohibitorum, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, liberation theology, low interest rates, medical malpractice, Murano, Venice glass, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, power law, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

In light of the Christian Democrat victory, and the country’s firm alliance with America, they concluded it was a rare opportunity. Italy, without doubt, was in the same poor state as the rest of Europe, mired in recession, inflation, and unemployment. But the Vatican team was confident that the Marshall Plan’s massive influx of billions would fuel a reconstruction boom and kick-start the stagnant economy. Many good Italian companies were available at fire-sale prices, their stock prices having been battered. Nogara’s first significant postwar investments were in the construction industry, which he thought would be first to rebound since ravaged cities and demolished infrastructure needed rebuilding.


pages: 1,263 words: 371,402

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois

augmented reality, Bletchley Park, carbon tax, clean water, computer age, cosmological constant, David Attenborough, Day of the Dead, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, financial independence, game design, gravity well, heat death of the universe, jitney, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, lolcat, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, stem cell, theory of mind, time dilation, Turing machine, Turing test, urban renewal, Wall-E

Jessie was an acrobat. In a matter of seconds he’d flipped the boy around with his feet and kicked him at his friends, who were jumping out of the leaves in a hand-linked mass. The kick took Jessie backwards and he spun around a handy branch. He dove past them as they floundered in midair, got to his jet, and kick-started it. Jessie was off before they could regroup; he left only a rude gesture behind. Under the hostile glare of Candesce, he paused to look back. His heart was pounding, he was panting, but he felt great. Jessie laughed and decided right there to go on with his quest, even if it was too early. He turned the jet and aimed it straight at the sun of suns.


Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Mamma Luisa ITALIAN $$ ( 401-848-5257; www.mammaluisa.com; 673 Thames St; mains $14-25; 5-10pm Thu-Tue) Escape the Newport crowds at this cozy restaurant serving classic pasta dishes (cheese ravioli with fava beans, spaghetti alle vongole), as well as meat and fish entrees. Upstairs feels like eating at grandma’s house. Gary’s Handy Lunch DINER $ (462 Thames St; mains $4-8; 5am-3pm, to 8pm Fri) Newport’s working folk kick-start their day over coffee and simple breakfast fare at this old-school diner. Wharf Pub PUB $$ ( 401-846-9233; Bowen’s Wharf; mains $10-18; 11:30am-11pm) Reasonable prices, good portions and fast service. Think sandwiches, fried calamari and burgers. Wash it down with a Newport Storm ale. Drinking & Entertainment Newport Blues Café CLUB ( 401-841-5510; www.newportblues.com; 286 Thames St) Intimate atmosphere and one of the best blues and R&B scenes this side of New York City.


Lonely Planet Ireland by Lonely Planet

bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Bob Geldof, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, classic study, country house hotel, credit crunch, Easter island, G4S, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacquard loom, Kickstarter, land reform, reserve currency, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, young professional

This brought an increased measure of prosperity thanks to the benefits of the Common Agricultural Policy, which set fixed prices and guaranteed quotas for Irish farming produce. Nevertheless, the broader global depression, provoked by the oil crisis of 1973, forced the country into yet another slump and emigration figures rose again, reaching a peak in the mid-1980s. The Celtic Tiger In the early 1990s, European funds helped kick-start economic growth. Huge sums of money were invested in education and physical infrastructure, while the policy of low corporate tax rates coupled with attractive incentives made Ireland very appealing to high-tech businesses looking for a door into EU markets. In less than a decade, Ireland went from being one of the poorest countries in Europe to one of the wealthiest: unemployment fell from 18% to 3.5%, the average industrial wage somersaulted to the top of the European league, and the dramatic rise in GDP meant that the country laid claim to an economic model of success that was the envy of the entire world.


Greece Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, capital controls, car-free, carbon footprint, credit crunch, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, low cost airline, pension reform, period drama, sensible shoes, trade route, urban sprawl

oPrimoulaBOUTIQUE HOTEL€€ (%26530 71133; www.primoula.gr; Ano Pedina; d incl breakfast from €75; p)S This exceptionally friendly guesthouse in central Ano Pedina has uniquely designed rooms, some glowing in warm pastel tones and others retaining traditional stone walls. The helpful staff assists with organising outdoor activities, and a lavish, locally sourced breakfast kickstarts each day. Zagori SuitesBOUTIQUE HOTEL€€ (%6944342739, 26530 71076; www.zagorisuites.gr; Vitsa; ste from €85; pW) With ornately decorated suites and chalets, this boutique hotel at the entrance to Vitsa village is one of Zagorohoria's most sumptuous choices. In summer there's a closed playground and games for children, while adults can clink glasses at the well-stocked bar.


pages: 1,544 words: 391,691

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice by Pierre Vernimmen, Pascal Quiry, Maurizio Dallocchio, Yann le Fur, Antonio Salvi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, ASML, asset light, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, book value, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, delta neutral, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, discrete time, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, impact investing, implied volatility, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, performance metric, Potemkin village, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk/return, shareholder value, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, vertical integration, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Friends and family are often among the initial investors, probably less motivated by the idea of making money, but more by loyalty! This type of investment is referred to as love money, which usually raises a few tens of thousands of euros. Crowdfunding can be used by the entrepreneur to raise funds through specialised Internet platforms (kickstarter.com, wiseed.com, etc.) from a very large number of private investors, the most motivated of whom will invest a few hundred or a few thousand euros each. This will enable him to test his concept on a large scale. However, he will be lucky to raise a few hundred thousand euros in this way. Business angels are often former company managers and shareholders.


pages: 1,540 words: 400,759

Fodor's California 2014 by Fodor's

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, Blue Bottle Coffee, California gold rush, car-free, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Donner party, Downton Abbey, East Village, El Camino Real, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Nearly every park has its grass-roots supporters, who volunteer to raise money, volunteer as rangers, and work other jobs to keep the parks open. The Cuisine California gave us McDonald’s, Denny’s, Carl’s Jr., Taco Bell, and, of course, In-N-Out Burger. Fortunately for those of us with fast-clogging arteries, the state also kick-started the organic food movement. Back in the 1970s, California-based chefs put American cuisine on the culinary map by focusing on freshly prepared seasonal ingredients. Today, this focus has spawned the “locavore” or sustainable food movement—followers try to only consume food produced within a 100-mile radius of where they live, since processing and refining food and transporting goods over long distances is bad for both the body and the environment.


Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

Bartolomé de las Casas, big-box store, British Empire, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, jitney, Kickstarter, machine readable, microcredit, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban sprawl, white picket fence

When the slaves were tricked into laying down arms with a false promise of abolition – and 400 were hanged and hundreds more whipped – there was a wave of revulsion in England, causing the British parliament to finally abolish slavery. The transition from a slave to wage-labor economy caused chaos, with most slaves rejecting the starvation wages offered on the estates and choosing to fend for themselves. The Road to Independence A banana-led economic recovery was halted by the Great Depression of the 1930s, and then kick-started again by WWII, when the Caribbean islands supplied food and raw materials to Britain. Adult suffrage for all Jamaicans was introduced in 1944, and virtual autonomy from Britain was granted in 1947. Jamaica seceded from the short-lived West Indies Federation in 1962 after a referendum called for the island’s full independence.


Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

As the study that’s mentioned above concludes, “OAuth 2.0 at the hand of most developers […] is likely to produce insecure implementations” [237]. For this reason it might be more accurate to think of SSO as “Single-point-of-failure SignOn”. Just one single XSS vulnerability was enough to take over accounts on Foursquare, Fox News, GoodReads, Groupon, Huffington Post, IMDB, Kickstarter, Myspace, Pinterest, Slideshare, SoundCloud, StackExchange and Woot 137, at which point the attacker presumably got bored and spent his time writing a blog post about it instead [242]. As one OAuth developer puts it, “On one web site, its OAuth implementation may be secure, while on another, its implementation may be Swiss cheese […] with OAuth, the entire (complex) implementation needs to be reviewed from top to bottom by a top security professional to ensure it is secure.


Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, colonial rule, flag carrier, gentrification, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, large denomination, low cost airline, Mason jar, megacity, period drama, restrictive zoning, retail therapy, Skype, South China Sea, spice trade, superstar cities, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Red Pirates BEACH BAR $$ (Angol) Way down at the south end of White Beach, this supremely mellow bar throws funky driftwood furniture onto the sand and best captures the spirit of ‘old Boracay’. Nigi Nigi Nu Noos BEACH BAR $$ (Station 2; happy hour 5-7pm) The legendary mason jars of Long Island iced tea – they’re two-for-one during happy hour – more than capably kick-start any evening. Jungle BEACH BAR $$ (Lagutan Beach) Isolated on a cove at the back side of the island, hippie, trippy Jungle bar is known for three-day full-moon parties and its notorious ‘F*** you Archie’ cocktail. Often quiet or dead; just as often raucous. Arwana BEACH BAR $ ( happy hour 1-10pm) All-day happy hour means Boracay’s cheapest San Miguel (P30) on demand.