Recently – and I blame twitter for this – I’ve had really bad information overload. This should not be that much of a surprise. Six and a half billion people, something over a billion of them online, many of them very, very smart with whole lifetimes of thinking and research behind them: there is no [...]
Read more →Does a really nice write up of the Hexayurt Project.
Read more →The likelihood of the penal system in the UK and other Western countries facing similar challenges in the current climate to the ones former Soviet countries faced post-collapse is moderate to high. Crime rates and imprisonment rates have no correlation – high or low use of custody is a question of political will and nothing [...]
Read more →If the World Bank was being created at the dawn of the 21st century, how would its basic model and operations differ from the mid-20th century institution which supports projects worldwide today? Since the foundation of the World Bank, two significant development have affected infrastructure financing. The first is the development of distributed infrastructure (DI) [...]
Read more →Fresh thinking is urgently needed. We can’t continue to tinker at the edges, particularly in the face of an economic downturn. Without bold new approaches, our public services will be over-stretched by the shortterm demands of the recession and overwhelmed by the long-term challenges of the future. What alternatives do we have to radical innovation? [...]
Read more →Full blog post here. Orlov-style FSU full-on collapse is the usual model people go to after “business as usual but with less money.” Three factors create new options: 1> We’ve seen the FSU stuff and can learn from their experience 2> Non-authoritarian nations are likely to be vastly more resilient because of diverse power centers [...]
Read more →There is a summary of this post here. Most of the people working on collapse scenarios are working from the current state and trying to maintain essential services at about the current level. On noting that this is impossible, in most cases a sort of Mad Max / Former Soviet Union model takes over. Dimitri [...]
Read more →Vinay Gupta is a Scottish-Indian engineer who designs low-cost homes for poor parts of the world or disaster zones, and then makes them freely available on the internet so others can do the building. His flagship is the Hexayurt shelter system, which costs around $200* (£142). It uses common building materials, including insulation boards – [...]
Read more →(from this blog post on Museum 2.0) Really, really significant implications to this model. I’ve been meaning to blog this for maybe a month and I only just got around to it, and I still haven’t crunched through all the implications.
Read more →Uncompressed video and audio, plus the presentaiton slides. It’s too big for Blip (one file is over a gig) so I’ll need to edit / sort it out later, but I wanted to make it available to interested parties now. See the presentation slides (the PDF file) for the fastest summary of what it’s all [...]
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