UNHCR – Fiftieth Anniversary of the Hungarian uprising and refugee crisis.

I was watching the BBC last night, seeing video of bedraggled families being escorted under guard from a Budapest train they’d been told was heading to the Austrian border, and couldn’t help flashing back to stories my Dad tells of having almost the same experience.

My father and his family were some of the 200,000 people who escaped on foot through mid-Winter snow across the border from Hungary to Austria after the revolution of 1956.  The big difference is that, literally within days, a pragmatic and humane response had been organized to accommodate them, and within weeks they were airlifted out of Europe to all parts of the world; in the case of my Dad’s family, to New Zealand, a country they hadn’t even heard of before escaping to Austria.  And that’s how I came to be.

According to the article above, the entire response was initiated and organized by a very few people in positions of authority in Austria making it up as they went, but today we can’t seem to organize a similar response using this already-existing template anywhere in Europe.  What have we forgotten?

How Tesla Will Change The World – Wait But Why.

Wait But Why is an interesting site, the fruit of Tim Urban’s drive to understand and “unfuzz” the arguments around the big discussions going on.  Turns out Elon Musk reads it, and wanted Urban to unfuzz the arguments around what he was doing.

This article is about electric cars: why we’re where we are, why they’re important, how Tesla is forcing the issue and why it needs to be forced.  Long, but worthwhile, read.  The guy writes with a sense of humour, too 🙂

A bit of truth.

As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent “the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions,” doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment isn’t the discovery that you’re unlikely to become a billionaire; it’s the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design.

From “One Startup’s Stuggle to Survive the Silicon Valley”, Wired magazine, http://www.wired.com/2014/04/no-exit/

Timeline Photos – Occupy Democrats | Facebook.

The quote works equally well if you replace the word “America” with “Australia”.  This is how we feel about Australians.  Hmm.  Wonder if Trump has any Oz in his bloodline?  He certainly behaves that way.  Maybe his Mum was Australian?  Where’s the outrage?  I’m starting a birther movement to force Trump to produce his birth certificate.

The philosophy of privacy: why surveillance reduces us to objects | Technology | The Guardian.

Interesting take on what’s really nagging us behind pervasive tracking (govt & commerce); relinquishing choice.

Hear Terry Riley's groundbreaking 1968 remix of a soul tune – Boing Boing.

Noice.

http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.29.3.3 says there’s good reason to assume that job creation and automation won’t be coupled as I and others fear.

The lameness of King Philip II and Royal Tomb I at Vergina, Macedonia.

Why we need Arnold Toynbee's good life – Ian Beacock – Aeon.

In defense of a humanist revival in times of unthinking technological pangloss-ianism and economic rationalism.

from the Christian Science Monitor

I didn’t realize that WA had one of these bad-idea laws, which seem to lead directly to vigilantism where the victim is primarily black, and the perpetrator white. Perhaps the way to point out how destructive the laws are is to encourage arming the victims, who surely by now have a reasonable expectation that simply retreating will not prevent death or harm. If I were a young black man and a crazy white man started yelling at me, I’d feel more threatened than if it were the other way around, given the history.