1–20 of 22
If you give people a tool and tell them it will perfectly solve an important problem, any imperfection in the tool is going to make them angry. If you give someone a toy and say “Look what I made! Isn’t it fun? It kinda does this thing.” then you’ve set yourself up for a positive reaction. It’s much easier to beat low…
We are all good consumers. We buy countless products that we don’t really need, and that until yesterday we didn’t know existed. Manufacturers deliberately design short-term goods and invent new and unnecessary models of perfectly satisfactory products that we must purchase in order to stay ‘in’. Shopping has become a…
Scienti
Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and
Such findings have led some political scientists to entertain a heretical idea called the Capitalist Peace.243 The word liberal in Liberal Peace refers both to the political openness of democracy and to the economic openness of capitalism, and according to the Capitalist Peace heresy, it’s the economic openness that…
Inequality of information- find a place where you know something that many undervalue. Having this inequality of information can give you, your first piece of leverage. Be an unrelenting machine- Brick walls are there to show you how bad you want something. Commit to your goals and do not waver from them a one bit…
Pretty soon, it will be possible to buy artificially brained robots that perform useful tasks around the house. If the price of such robots can be made affordable, then the demand for them will be huge. I believe in time that the world economy will be based upon brain-based computers. Such devices will be so useful…
And Mallow laughed joyously, "You've missed, Sutt, missed as badly as the Commdor himself. You've missed everything, and understood nothing. Look, man, the Empire can replace nothing. The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. They've calculated everything in planets, in stellar systems, in whole…
Someone had to run the harvesters in the rice and sugarcane fields, check the irrigation canals or robots, install things, fix things. Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and…
More and more ordinary people are thrust into a winner-take-all economy. It is a 21st century reprise of the Horatio Alger stories from the 19th century. A token few will find success on Kickstarter or YouTube, while overall wealth is ever more concentrated and social mobility rots. Social media sharers can make all…
At this point the Wall Street lawyers and Strauss persuaded Eisenhower that the United States Bureau of Standards' scientists were in competition with private enterprise and must be curbed. Strauss assured Eisenhower that the corporations would take on all the bureau's discarded scientists. What the Wall Street…
In 1800 Thomas Malthus, later professor of political economics of the East India Company College, was the first human in history to receive a comprehensively complete inventory of the world's vital and economic statistics. The accuracy of the pre-Trafalgar 1800 inventory was verified by a similar world inventory taken…
Given that 143 million people visit accredited zoos and aquariums each year, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums is entitled to the claim that the association is building North America's largest wildlife conservation movement. Zoos and aquariums are mainstream environmental organizations. Their supporters, some 48…
Corporate America is also evolving as it adjusjsts busineiess practices to embrace conservation. Many American banks, for example, have committed to the World Wildlife Fund's Equator Principles, limiting investment only to companies and projects committed to environmental protection. WalVlart now only sells fish it…
There is fundamentally no business case for private enterprise to advance a space frontier. When you advance a frontier, you are making mistakes that the capital markets choose not to value. You have to create patents to enable things that you don't know will work. Anytime you are the first person to do something on…
The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state. The expense of government to the individuals of a great…
In the very largest way of looking at planet Earth's socioeconomic-evolution events, we must observe that humans are designed with legs and not roots. Yesterday, humanity developed temporary roots as it cultivated its life-support food root-grown on the land. The metals made possible metal canning of food and…
When individuals shunt the comprehensive cosmic regeneration into exclusive advantaging of only their own survival and enjoyment and succeed in prolonged local short-circuiting of cosmic regenerativity, they disqualify the invention "human" as a reliable function of regenerative Universe. They are just as…
Finding the right balance between cooperation and competition has been the goal and bane of Western politics for centuries. Adam Smith recognized that the economic needs of the individual are better met by unleashing the ambitions of all individuals than by planning to meet those needs in advance. But even Adam Smith…
Working Assumptions Here is a partial list of assumptions that we are making as we go about the development work of this wiki. These assumptions help one to understand our motivations and approach. Underlying dynamics of human civilizations are related to peoples' resource base. The resource base, and its control…