2020:
One for the Ever-fresh Grocery of the future
(via emergentfutures)
untitled on Flickr.
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After dragging 46 bodies from the streets near his hometown on the Syrian coast, Omar lost count. For four days, he said, he could not eat, remembering the burned body of a baby just a few months old; a fetus ripped from a woman’s belly; a friend lying dead, his dog still standing guard.
Omar survived what residents, antigovernment activists and human rights monitors are calling one of the darkest recent episodes in the Syrian war, a massacre in government-held Tartus Province that has inflamed sectarian divisions, revealed new depths of depravity and made the prospect of stitching the country back together appear increasingly difficult.
That mass killing this month was one in a series of recent sectarian-tinged attacks that Syrians on both sides have seized on to demonize each other. Government and rebel fighters have filmed themselves committing atrocities for the world to see.
Footage routinely shows pro-government fighters beating, killing and mutilating Sunni rebel detainees, forcing them to refer to President Bashar al-Assad as God. One rebel commander recently filmed himself cutting out an organ of a dead pro-government fighter, biting it and promising the same fate to Alawites, members of Mr. Assad’s Shiite Muslim sect.
That lurid violence has fueled pessimism about international efforts to end the fighting. As the United States and Russia work to organize peace talks next month between Mr. Assad and his opponents, the ever more extreme carnage makes reconciliation seem more remote.
Nadim Houry, the director of Human Rights Watch in Beirut, said he sensed “a complete disconnect between diplomacy and events on the ground.”
“The conflict is getting more visceral,” he said. Without concrete confidence-building measures, he said, and with more people “seeing it as an existential struggle, it’s hard to imagine what the negotiations would look like.”
” — The New York Times, “An Atrocity in Syria, With No Victim Too Small” (via inothernews)
[video]
Hot Cannes Trailer: 'The Congress' -
I do not know what the hell this movie is, but goddamn I want to watch it.
Dmitri Kasterine Kurt Vonnegut, London 1981
“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.” Kurt Vonnegut
(via stoweboyd)
[video]
Square Stand turns your iPad into a cash register, on pre-order for $299 -
“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 14,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?” —
Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class - Salon.com
I like Jaron Lanier a lot, but this illustration as some sort of evidence of the internet hollowing out the middle class is, forgive me for saying so, idiotic. A child could figure out where those jobs went.
1) Instagram SHOWS the photos. We have to include all of the people who work on the cloud that supports that.
2) Kodak made cameras and film. Cameras are still being made - even moreso. At the very least, we should include the current #1 camera maker’s employees. At this point, that’s apple. Fifty thousand employees. Pro rate it to only the apple devices that have cameras, ignoring their mac business. 30,000 employees.
3) The film business still exists. It was just lost to Fujichrome, who still makes film and has over 30,000 employees. This has nothing to do with the web, but rather something called “Globalization.”
The internet didn’t kill a single job in photography. There are more cameras now than ever. There are still tens of thousands of people making film.
Take the market cap of JUST these three companies - facebook, apple, fujifilm, and we’re looking at $500 billion market cap, and nearly 90,000 employees.
Think that’s unfair? Canon has nearly 200,000 employees. Nikon has 24,000. 10,000 more than Kodak. Shit, ZEISS has 24,000 employees.
Never mind every single camera in an android phone.
Those jobs went overseas, and they went to computer companies, Mr. Lanier. They still exist. The internet didn’t kill a single one of them.
(via rickwebb)
(via emergentfutures)
$120 Egg Sandwich Features Decadent And Pricey Ingredients (PHOTO)
Some nuggets: Charting technology’s new directions: A conversation with MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson -
You’d like to see that happening again now. But the data show that it just isn’t happening as fast. We’re having the automation and the job destruction; we’re not having the creation at the same pace. There’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to find these new jobs. It may be that machines are better than that.
That said, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, because ultimately the purpose of economic progress and technological progress is to be able to create more wealth with less work. I mean, isn’t that what we want? More wealth with less work? So, if we are in a Star-Trek economy, where replicators create all the essentials that we need, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing if we can have an economic system that matches to it and find a way that people can share in that benefit. And people can still continue to find meaning and value in life.
(via emergentfutures)
at Beacon Hill Neighborhood – View on Path.