Articles

Affichage des articles du avril, 2016

When was the last time you read 2 times the same book?

Every hour, the internet produce more content we can consume in dozens of lives. Our purchase power allows most of the people to buy every month, more films they can see and more books they can read in their entire life. Plethora is the new black. With that said, when was the last time you read two times or more the same book? I remember when I was a kid. I knew by heart my books because I did not have a lot, so I was re-reading them a lot of time. Same for VHS videos.  I knew by heart Tintin, Disneys because I had only a few ones. I still remember them pretty well. Now we read dozens of books, thousand of web pages a day. We see thousands of videos and hundreds of films. Re-reading or re-seeing stuff seems anachronic. Or maybe it's a way to stand up against content deluge and consumption spree...

The notion of country is over, cities rule the world

Cities are mankind’s most enduring and stable mode of social organization, outlasting all empires and nations over which they have presided. Today cities have become the world’s dominant demographic and economic clusters.  It is, of course, very difficult if not impossible to neatly disentangle the interdependencies between city and state, whether territorially, demographically, economically, ecologically, or socially. That is not the point. Across the world, city leaders and their key businesses set up Special Economic Zones and directly recruit investors into their orbit to ensure that their workers are hired and benefits accrue locally rather than nationally. This is all the sovereignty they want. To that end, entire new districts (sometimes called aerotropolises) have sprung up around airports to evade urban congestion and more efficiently connect to global markets and supply chains. From Chicago’s O’Hare and Washington’s Dulles to Seoul’s Incheon Airport, such sites

Pas de lutte des classes en matière de pollution

L’argent peut acheter de quoi s’alimenter, vivre confortablement, être en bonne santé, en sécurité, protégé de toute précarité, un certain sentiment de tranquillité et de quiétude. Elle ne peut permettre d’échapper à la pollution. Les riches Chinois vivant en ville en souffrent, leurs enfants aussi. Mark Zuckerberg qui s’est fait prendre en photo faisant son footing sur Tiananmen en plein FOG aussi. Quand Paris subit un pic de pollution, les familles du VIIIe et XVIe sont touchés de la même façon que les classes plus populaires du XIXe. Un nuage radioactif traite tout le monde avec une une parfaite équité. La pollution est universelle. Elle rend malade et tue de la même manière tout le monde. Elle ramène chaque individu au statut d’être humain qui respire pour vivre. Cette universalité est relativement implacable, à moins de créer des bulles de vie pour personnes aisées sous atmosphère purifiée, de créer des masques à oxygènes high tech au tarif inabordable

Japan is involuntarily solving global warming and makes the notion of GDP useless

Japan has a way to limit drastically global warming: cutting the number of Japanese by 25% till 2050 without any genocide. Source Japan is just disrupting (involuntarily) the way we think global warming. Indeed, we try to lower carbon footprint, consumption but we rarely think of lowering the number of inhabitants on the planet. I wrote a lot about it! I think Japan is an example to follow. - - - Japan seems to have a very bad economy. Taking into account that  Japan population decreases, it's not right. Their economy is as bad as other developed countries ones. Taking into account the revenues of the country, e.g. the difference between imports value and export value, t's not right, Japan is getting richer. Source  (French) Japan is just disrupting the way we measure our country economies. The aggregated GDP is out of date in our open economies with very different demographics and people population distributions.

People are discovering that life can be simple (as simple as Google)

You find everything on Google, learn everything on Wikipedia, buy everything on Amazon, have the best taxi service on Uber, Apple make the best phones, Dyson the best hoovers, Telsa the best electronic cars. Some will say it’s not true. Google is not perfect and Duckduckgo is cool too! Wikipedia is not as great as real sources of info we have to pay. Amazon is not always cheap and don’t sell everything. Uber is expensive when price surges. Apple is playing with programmed obsolescence, running the planet. Dyson is a thing of the past, now Rumba is the thing. Tesla is a trap for rich techies. Moreover, some will say that these companies are overvalued, that they loose tons of money, that they kill jobs, that’s they don’t pay country taxes. They are right. Totally right. But what is frictionless, riskless and thus simple nearly always win.