A few years ago we were thinking about a consumer product that encapsulated all the stuff you had to think about when making a purchase: is it ethically made, does it harm the planet, does it contain peanuts or seafood, were there any endangered species involved, does it contain a carcinogen, will it make me fat, … It’d be driven by multiple sources of reliable data about what goes into all the products that are on the shelves.

Now, someone has made significant progress to the back end machinery, by making it possible for business to integrate this sort of analysis into their supply chain. Nice.

Terrific, just great. From The Guardian, Jan 23:

With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people’s mind, the world’s super rich are already preparing for the consequences. At a packed session in Davos, former hedge fund director Robert Johnson revealed that worried hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes. “I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway,” he said.

Free speech vs. hate speech: Why is it legal to insult Muslims but not Jews?.

Good points. Either speech is free, or anti-Muslim speech (including derogatory cartoons) should be illegal in the same way that anti-Jewish, anti-gay, anti-anything speech is.

Isn’t it our position that the correct response to expression of a hateful opinion is the airing of contrary opinion? “More speech”, not censorship and prosecution?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/congresss-first-act-was-to-declare-war-on-math.html

And am impressed with his relevance. How familiar does this sound, in his intro to Part Two about the Industrial Revolution:

“Nowhere has liberal philosophy failed so conspicuously as in the understanding of the problem of change. Fired by an emotional faith in spontaneity, the common-sense attitude toward change was discarded in favor of a mystical readiness to accept the social consequences of economic improvement, whatever they might be. The elementary truths of political science and statecraft were first discredited then forgotten. It should need no elaboration that a process of undirected change, the pace of which is deemed too fast, should be slowed down, if possible, so as to safeguard the welfare of the community. Such household truths of traditional statesmanship, often merely reflecting the teachings of a social philosophy inherited from the ancients, were in the nineteenth century erased from the thoughts of the educated by the corrosive of a crude utilitarianism combined with an uncritical reliance on the alleged self-healing virtues of unconscious growth.”

The guy has incredible mastery with analog gadgetry

Google euthanized the Auckland Cat. It wasn’t me, I swear.

Dave Winer nails it for the open self-propelled internet.

From entry # 51 on my reddit today: “Why We Should Give Free Money to Everyone”, a riff on the goodness of basic income.

From entry # 55, “2040’s America will be like 1840’s Britain, with robots?”, a despairing look at how AI will put us all out of work.

But: put the two ideas together, solution.  Automation makes the cost of making things lower, so more money generated.  Basic Income decouples the money you need to live from paid work.  We’re wealthy enough now to start a basic income scheme, and the cheaper things get to make the more our basic income provides.  Won’t be long ’til we’re all doing the Green Mars thing, working on what we’re good at and what interests us, and living on the shared wealth.  We’ve talked about this before on this blog.

Funny how those two complementary ideas ended up next to one another in my reddit feed.

Seeking a Level Playing Field. Serious discussion of issues relevant to both women, and women in general, and all of us in the universal. But relegated to the Style section, NYT? Really?