The World Bank released a big report on the Internet as a force for Economic Development. (more)

A New Populism Spurs Democrats on the Economy. Democratic Party, Presidential Candidates 2008, anti-GlobalizatIon. Populism is hardly new in the Democratic Party. Al Gore vowed to fight for “the people versus the powerful” in his presidential campaign seven years ago, and Republicans have long accused the Democrats of practicing “ClassWarfare.” But the latest populist resurgence is deeply rooted in a view that current economic conditions are difficult and deteriorating for many people, analysts say, and it is now framing debates over tax policy, education, trade, energy and health care.

Zed Shaw on the Failure of Freehackers Union. The major purpose of FU was to help geeks get the power. Pure and simple. One of the things that prevents geeks from having the power in the whole "founder + geek" dynamic is that they aren't good at public speaking. They don't know how to perform with their geekness. I felt I could teach some of that and maybe have some fun at the same time... Really, the only rule should have been, "No fucking biz dudes."... people have in their mind that there's some special genetic difference between a "founder" and a "geek". In my experience the only difference is Luck and Fo Cus. (See 2012-09-04-RaoEntrepreneursAreTheNewLabor - Hacker and Hustler) (more)

*Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister, activist, humanitarian, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent CivilDisobedience based on his Christian beliefs. (more)

It's hard to believe in Natural Law for me, just as it's hard to believe in anything else. So for the moment I perceive the supposed elements/conclusions from Natural Law to qualify as Game Rule rather than Absolute Truth. (more)

Cory Doctorow Young Adult Novel ISBN:0765333848 (more)

inventor of the Hexayurt (more)

Vinay Gupta novella written 2012 (more)

The Culture of the Network Society? (more)

aka Intelligence Augmentation (Augmenting Human Intellect) (more)

Charlie Stross has a "Down on the Farm" story set in the LaundryFiles/AtrocityArchives world. Visiting the Funny Farm isn’t a job for an old hand, Bob. It has to be someone new and fresh, who isn’t likely to attract their professional attention.

American science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic,[1] which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. The Skeptics Society currently has over 55,000 members.[2] Shermer also engages in debates on topics pertaining to pseudoscience and religion in which he emphasizes scientific skepticism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shermer (more)

Michael O Church envisions a Culture like The Craft as an alternative to Silicon Valley/Venture Capital. (more)

Sept'2014: Giles Bowkett on Scrum. Scrum, the Agile methodology allegedly favored by Google and Spotify, is a mess... Consider Story Points... If it had a name, this informal (Planning Poker) game would be called something like "the person with the highest status tells everybody else what the number is going to be.".. Planning Poker isn't the only aspect of Scrum which, in my experience, seems to consistently devolve into something less useful. Another core piece of Scrum is the Stand Up Meeting... I've twice seen the "15-minute standup" devolve into half-hour or hour-long meetings where everybody stands, except for management... At this second company, virtually everything landed in the parking lot, and it became normal for the 15-minute standup to be a 15-minute prelude to a much longer meeting... Scrum's ready devolution springs from major conceptual flaws... there's a fundamental cognitive dissonance between "sprints" and "sustainable development," because there is no such thing as a sustainable sprint... Another core idea of the Agile Manifesto, the allegedly defining document for Agile development methodologies: "working software is the primary measure of progress." Scrum disregards this idea in favor of a measure of progress called "VelocIty.".. Story points, meanwhile, are completely made-up numbers designed to capture off-the-cuff estimates of relative difficulty. Developers are explicitly encouraged to think of story points as non-binding numbers, yet velocity turns those non-binding estimates into a number they can be held accountable for... If you're tracking velocity, your best-case scenario will be that management realizes it means nothing... I don't think highly of Scrum, but the problem here goes deeper. The Agile Manifesto is flawed too. Consider this core principle of Agile development: "business people and developers must work together." Why are we supposed to think developers are not business people?.. The Agile Manifesto might also be to blame for the Scrum standup. It states that "the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation." In fairness to the manifesto's authors, it was written in 2001, and at that time git log did not yet exist. However, in light of today's toolset for distributed collaboration, it's another completely implausible assertion, and even back in 2001 you had to kind of pretend you'd never heard of Linux if you really wanted it to make sense. Well-written text very often trumps face-to-face communication... In addition to defying logic and available evidence, both these Agile Manifesto principles encourage a kind of babysitting mentality. I've never seen Scrum-like frameworks for transmuting the work of designers, marketers, or accountants into cartoonish oversimplifications like story points. People are happy to treat these workers as adults and trust them to do their jobs. I don't know why this same trust does not prevail in the culture of managing programmers. (more)

Music Streaming service

Paul Jacobson: How Instapaper could be an even better research tool (more)

food-processing company known for its Self Organization efforts (more)

Robert Neuwirth: What happens in all the unregistered markets and roadside kiosks of the world is not simply haphazard. It is a product of intelligence, Resilience, Self Organization, and group solidarity, and it follows a number of well-worn though unwritten rules. It is, in that sense, a system. It used to be that System D was small -- a handful of market women selling a handful of shriveled carrots to earn a handful of pennies. It was the economy of desperation. But as trade has expanded and globalized, System D has scaled up too. Today, SystemD is the economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments of 30 of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting free-market institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world -- close to 1.8 billion people -- were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes. (Gray Market for the Network Economy?) (more)

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