Perceptric Forum

Facebook Visualization

Chris Gilbey — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 06:46:00 +1100

All the data received by Facebook in a nifty visualization....

A Wild Prediction

Chris Gilbey — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:44:00 +1100

I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere soon after January 21st Obama announces something like this:

1. The American Green Energy Challenge - as big as the idea of putting a man on the moon - Within four years America needs to have developed a renewable electricity technology that will be able to supply 75% of America's current needs within 10 years. Key to this will be that it must also solve the potential problem of utilising the existing retail infrastructure for recharging so as to enable gas station owners and energy companies to remain in business. The investment will be 100 Billion plus.
2. The US car industry will be part nationalised, if not in name then by deed. Chrysler, Ford, GM will all be owned 75% by the government through a series of bonds that are issued the purpose of which will be to develop American electrical technology that will be utilized in all US cars and will be exportable to the world. Price of the investment in the auto industry $200 Billion.
3. The government will write mortgages of up to $350k for any household is earning less than $200k. Keep the workers happy!

I reckon that there will be a total green energy policy that will involve universities, businesses, the energy industry and they will all be on board.... He has until Jan 21st to put it all together. And I reckon that his team will have been on this for 90-180 days already. This is about making the first 100 days absolutely full of big spending, big employment stuff!

Update:

Obama and Biden have already announced the following at the Change.gov blog:

Invest in the Manufacturing Sector and Create 5 Million New Green Jobs

Invest in our Next Generation Innovators and Job Creators: Obama and Biden will create an Advanced Manufacturing Fund to identify and invest in the most compelling advanced manufacturing strategies. The Fund will have a peer-review selection and award process based on the Michigan 21st Century Jobs Fund, a state-level initiative that has awarded over $125 million to Michigan businesses with the most innovative proposals to create new products and new jobs in the state.
Double Funding for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership: The Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) works with manufacturers across the country to improve efficiency, implement new technology and strengthen company growth. This highly-successful program has engaged in more than 350,000 projects across the country and in 2006 alone, helped create and protect over 50,000 jobs. But despite this success, funding for MEP has been slashed by the Bush administration. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will double funding for the MEP so its training centers can continue to bolster the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturers.
Invest In A Clean Energy Economy And Create 5 Million New Green Jobs: Obama and Biden will invest $150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of biofuels and fuel infrastructure, accelerate the commercialization of plug-in hybrids, promote development of commercial scale renewable energy, invest in low emissions coal plants, and begin transition to a new digital electricity grid. The plan will also invest in America's highly-skilled manufacturing workforce and manufacturing centers to ensure that American workers have the skills and tools they need to pioneer the first wave of green technologies that will be in high demand throughout the world.
Create New Job Training Programs for Clean Technologies: The Obama-Biden plan will increase funding for federal workforce training programs and direct these programs to incorporate green technologies training, such as advanced manufacturing and weatherization training, into their efforts to help Americans find and retain stable, high-paying jobs. Obama and Biden will also create an energy-focused youth jobs program to invest in disconnected and disadvantaged youth.
Boost the Renewable Energy Sector and Create New Jobs: The Obama-Biden plan will create new federal policies, and expand existing ones, that have been proven to create new American jobs. Obama and Biden will create a federal Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) that will require 25 percent of American electricity be derived from renewable sources by 2025, which has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs on its own. Obama and Biden will also extend the Production Tax Credit, a credit used successfully by American farmers and investors to increase renewable energy production and create new local jobs.

Update Nov 9th

It may already be too late for GM. According to Bloomberg the company is fast running out of operating cash.

Gerald Celente

Chris Gilbey — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:45:00 +1000

I have blogged about trend forecaster, Gerald Celente, before.

This is what his current view is - a snapshot of today taken from 2012. This really is quite serious. We are all being warned of what may very well happen. And in a globalized, flat world, we have to remember that what is happening in America will almost undoubtedly be replicated in other places.

GERALD CELENTE’s latest trends alert just released looks back from the year 2012.

“2012. The future has arrived. Empire America is collapsing. The Panic of ‘08 became the Crash of ‘09. The global financial system has melted down. Most paper money isn’t worth a dime. The worst of environmental fears have been realized. What some call the “War on Terror,” others call WWIII. The onset of The Blackest of Plagues has the world’s populace terrified.

The streets are teeming with the homeless, helpless and jobless. Major cities look like Calcutta. Neither Big Brother’s surveillance, corporate security squads, or angry vigilantes can stop the pandemic crime wave. Even gated communities provide no sure sanctuary; the rich have become the targets of choice for kidnappers, gangs and organized criminals.

Food is plentiful if you can afford it, but dangerous to eat unless you grow your own or get it from reliable sources. After years of drought and mismanagement, water shortages have reached crisis levels in much of the world.

But even as this is written in 2012, the official word is still, “Take a deep breath, the fundamentals are sound.” They’re not. Yet those who didn’t see it coming, still keep telling us what to do. Seeing through the media and government spin machines and smoke screens, many sensed the seriousness of the situation, and in their gut expected the worst. But either through instinctive fear, stubborn denial, or conditioned inertia, few prepared for what was to come. They now live between the helpless states of “what-might-have-been” and “I-wish-I-did.”

A Coming Food Crisis

Chris Gilbey — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:37:00 +1000

So many crises, so little time...

Nouriel Roubini is the economist who is being credited with the clarity to call quite accurately the current global economic crisis.

On his website RGE Monitor there is now a new potential threat that has been pointed out that relates to the global agricultural economy.

I think that this is all part of the slow motion train wreck that we are living through.

Here are the key points:

The financial crisis, following hard on the heels of the soaring food price crisis, which threw 75 million people into hunger and poverty last year alone, may well deepen the plight of the poor in developing countries sending food prices soaring and pushing an extra 119 million people into hunger
Slowing commodity prices because of a slowing world economy could mean a cutback in planting followed by reduced harvests in major exporting countries. Given continuing low grains stocks, this scenario could lead to another turn of record food prices next year - a catastrophe for millions who by then would be left with little money and no credit
Diouf :The great uncertainty now enveloping international markets and the threat of global recession may tempt countries towards protectionism and towards reassessing their commitments to international development aid
FAO :World cereal production in 2008 is forecast to increase 4.9% to a record 2 232 million tonnes but despite an improvement in the outlook for global cereal supplies in 2008/09, 36 countries around the world are in need of external assistance as a result of crop failures, conflict or insecurity, natural disasters, and high domestic food prices
Ntale :The credit crunch is preventing accelerated flow of capital to long-term investments in sectors such as agriculture, undermining production growth toward a more resilient global food system the livelihoods and food security of millions of poor people, as well as the economic, ecological, and political situation in many developing countries at risk
Western governments embroiled in the financial crisis could cut aid to agriculture in developing countries and introduce protectionist trade measures

A Good Reason To Not Live In America

Chris Gilbey — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 19:52:00 +1000

I have spent a lot of time in the US over the years, but wow, is it getting weird over there...

And never so weird as during a Presidential campaign...

Now here is an article that is partly about Sarah Palin, but it is more about the fundamentalist Christian movement that she belongs to... It is worth reading, even if you don't believe it is possible, because it sums up everything that is absolutely crazy about the country and society at the moment.

It appears that Sarah Palin is a member of a beneath-the-radar fundamentalist movement called Joel's Army... and just before you say, "this is just some crap that has been cooked up by her detractors", please - have a read.... Here is some of the info on Joel's Army:

Joel's Army believers are hard-core Christian ‘dominionists,’ meaning they believe that America, along with the rest of the world, should be governed by conservative Christians and a conservative Christian interpretation of biblical law. There is no room in their doctrine for democracy or pluralism. To paraphrase George W. Bush, ‘You’re either with us or you are against us.’

Joel's Army followers are most often labile teenagers and young adults. They are taught to believe they're members of the final generation to come of age before the end of the world. Sarah Palin was twelve when she first came into these circles.

Some Stories I Am Reading Today

Chris Gilbey — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 06:18:00 +1000

Britain Faces Deflation. The D word is now out, and coming to Sydney too. We are already seeing the seeds of this in the real estate market in Sydney. There were an unprecedented number of houses for sale in Mosman this weekend - some 80 - more than in any other suburb. Ironic that Mosman is home to so many people in the upper mortgage market who have been hit most by the global financial crisis. These people are going to need to get liquid fast. What happens though when you get a glut of houses hitting the market simultaneously? Buyers sit on cash waiting for buyers to negotiate with themselves. And prices keep on plummeting. Soon you will be able to buy a mansion in Mosman for what you would normally buy a box in Bankstown for!

The Energy Cold War... Its being fought and the winner is definitely not the US..... Well that shouldn't be a surprise when you find out that Dick Cheney is doing the strategy: "Almost unnoticed in Britain, Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President, paid a near-disastrous visit to Azerbaijan last week. Its President, Ilham Aliyev, inflicted a series of public snubs, including phoning the Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, the moment that a meeting with Mr Cheney finished. A disgruntled Mr Cheney apparently then failed to appear at an official banquet. Azerbaijan seems to be ruling out supplying gas to Nabucco."

The ex-head of MI5 goes on the record about the over-reaction of the US to 9/11 and talks about how the war on terror has influenced young people to turn to terror....

Rebuilding Trust

Chris Gilbey — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 09:44:00 +1000

Trust

Over the last week we have experienced not just a massive hit on our financial wealth. More than that we have seen an even greater fracturing of trust.

It appears that it is not money that makes the world go round, but trust. Even with the most phenomenal injection of liquidity into the market by central banks in the US, the UK, Germany, and a host of other countries there has still been one primary problem: the banks don’t trust each others’ balance sheets and consequently won’t led to each other.

But it isn’t just a problem of banks.

The whole issue of trust, or the lack thereof, is something that is taking place society wide, and why not?

We are experiencing massive growth in Internet scams so we are starting to learn that we shouldn’t trust the Internet.

We see the continuing clamouring of engineers and intelligent people about the collapse of the buildings on 9/11. The message seems to be clear: jet fuel doesn’t burn at the temperature required to melt reinforced steel, so something other than the planes themselves caused the collapse. So we clearly shouldn’t trust the government inquiry into the collapse of the buildings.

Indeed the governments of Australia, the US, and UK are proven to have lied about WMD in Iraq as a rationale for going to war. Strike two for reasons to trust government.

On another front we are now seeing the decline of journalism in the media, replaced with news by press release as companies, government and bureaucracies all shape their messages with broadcast ready electronic press kits at a time when advertising revenues for traditional media are in sharp decline. So there is now little reason to trust established media in the way that we once used to.

On the other hand there is the Internet. There is no shortage of opinion out there, that’s for sure. There is also a plethora of crackpot and conspiracy theorists together with a large dollop of media counter espionage put out by the powerful to ensure that fringe views are treated with the contempt that conspiracy theorists have come to be treated with by the rational sane people in society. So how can we trust anything we find in that space either?

It’s a serious problem for our society and it can only get worse before it gets better.

It occurs to me that the primary reason that we have this massive depletion of our reserves of trust is precisely for the same reasons that we have had the massive increase in wealth and productivity – digital technology.

Digital technology has enabled some brilliant things to take place. But the problem is that it has also allowed those who seek profitability above all other things to introduce management systems and processes that ensure that people don’t make decisions based on their own judgement and their personal relationships.

Banks don’t allow the local bank manager to make a decision based on the relationship that he has with a customer any more. Now the decisions are made according to strict rules of engagement. The customer has to submit a statement of position to make sure that he or she has the capacity to repay a loan. And that is what led to the whole subprime mess. People will always tend to tell someone who is asking a question the answer that they think the questioner will want to hear to ensure that that there is a reward.

Banks have lost the art of understanding that they are only as good as their understanding of their communities.

Governments meanwhile have learned that if they move some of the key information that they put into economic data into the footnotes, they can make inflation look better than it is, even as the everyday punter finds that the weekly grocery bill is eating up more and more of the weekly budget. In doing this governments continue to drive a wedge between themselves and the people who vote them in and out of power and continue to erode trust.

It is not just the global economy that is in meltdown at the moment. It is society itself.

To change the picture we are going to have to rebuild relationships within our communities in a way that we haven’t had to address for two thousand years.

Back then there were few religions competing for our souls and the local priest’s role was pretty much as the centre of morality of the community. Of course that was substantially corrupted as soon as the money started rolling in to Rome and some of the priestly class realized that they were onto a good thing, promising eternal life, as long as the down payment was made prior to death. Somehow they managed to maintain trust – up until the last few years when the outing of paedophiles in the church became de rigeur.

So we can’t even rely on the church to act as an anchor of trust in the community any more.

The gold bugs have a view that the only currency that we can believe in is that which is backed by bullion reserves. It may get to that too.

This is going to be a time that in future years people will look back on and realize that they were shaped by.
The first thing that we have to do is to find ways to rebuild communities of trust.

Fiddling While The World Burns

Chris Gilbey — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:11:00 +1000

Here is an op ed piece written by John Gray, the author from The Observer over the weekend:

The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over.

Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over.

You can see it in the way America's dominion has slipped away in its own backyard, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez taunting and ridiculing the superpower with impunity. Yet the setback of America's standing at the global level is even more striking. With the nationalisation of crucial parts of the financial system, the American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated. In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, successive American administrations have lectured other countries on the necessity of sound finance. Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina and several African states endured severe cuts in spending and deep recessions as the price of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which enforced the American orthodoxy. China in particular was hectored relentlessly on the weakness of its banking system. But China's success has been based on its consistent contempt for Western advice and it is not Chinese banks that are currently going bust. How symbolic yesterday that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees.

Despite incessantly urging other countries to adopt its way of doing business, America has always had one economic policy for itself and another for the rest of the world. Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its over-stretched military commitments. Now, with federal finances critically dependent on continuing large inflows of foreign capital, it will be the countries that spurned the American model of capitalism that will shape America's economic future.

Which version of the bail out of American financial institutions cobbled up by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is finally adopted is less important than what the bail out means for America's position in the world. The populist rant about greedy banks that is being loudly ventilated in Congress is a distraction from the true causes of the crisis. The dire condition of America's financial markets is the result of American banks operating in a free-for-all environment that these same American legislators created. It is America's political class that, by embracing the dangerously simplistic ideology of deregulation, has responsibility for the present mess.

In present circumstances, an unprecedented expansion of government is the only means of averting a market catastrophe. The consequence, however, will be that America will be even more starkly dependent on the world's new rising powers. The federal government is racking up even larger borrowings, which its creditors may rightly fear will never be repaid. It may well be tempted to inflate these debts away in a surge of inflation that would leave foreign investors with hefty losses. In these circumstances, will the governments of countries that buy large quantities of American bonds, China, the Gulf States and Russia, for example, be ready to continue supporting the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency? Or will these countries see this as an opportunity to tilt the balance of economic power further in their favour? Either way, the control of events is no longer in American hands.

The fate of empires is very often sealed by the interaction of war and debt. That was true of the British Empire, whose finances deteriorated from the First World War onwards, and of the Soviet Union. Defeat in Afghanistan and the economic burden of trying to respond to Reagan's technically flawed but politically extremely effective Star Wars programme were vital factors in triggering the Soviet collapse. Despite its insistent exceptionalism, America is no different. The Iraq War and the credit bubble have fatally undermined America's economic primacy. The US will continue to be the world's largest economy for a while longer, but it will be the new rising powers that, once the crisis is over, buy up what remains intact in the wreckage of America's financial system.

There has been a good deal of talk in recent weeks about imminent economic armageddon. In fact, this is far from being the end of capitalism. The frantic scrambling that is going on in Washington marks the passing of only one type of capitalism - the peculiar and highly unstable variety that has existed in America over the last 20 years. This experiment in financial laissez-faire has imploded.While the impact of the collapse will be felt everywhere, the market economies that resisted American-style deregulation will best weather the storm. Britain, which has turned itself into a gigantic hedge fund, but of a kind that lacks the ability to profit from a downturn, is likely to be especially badly hit.

The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In American and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot. Like the Soviet collapse, it will have large geopolitical repercussions. An enfeebled economy cannot support America's over-extended military commitments for much longer. Retrenchment is inevitable and it is unlikely to be gradual or well planned.

Meltdowns on the scale we are seeing are not slow-motion events. They are swift and chaotic, with rapidly spreading side-effects. Consider Iraq. The success of the surge, which has been achieved by bribing the Sunnis, while acquiescing in ongoing ethnic cleansing, has produced a condition of relative peace in parts of the country. How long will this last, given that America's current level of expenditure on the war can no longer be sustained?

An American retreat from Iraq will leave Iran the regional victor. How will Saudi Arabia respond? Will military action to forestall Iran acquiring nuclear weapons be less or more likely? China's rulers have so far been silent during the unfolding crisis. Will America's weakness embolden them to assert China's power or will China continue its cautious policy of 'peaceful rise'? At present, none of these questions can be answered with any confidence. What is evident is that power is leaking from the US at an accelerating rate. Georgia showed Russia redrawing the geopolitical map, with America an impotent spectator.

Outside the US, most people have long accepted that the development of new economies that goes with globalisation will undermine America's central position in the world. They imagined that this would be a change in America's comparative standing, taking place incrementally over several decades or generations. Today, that looks an increasingly unrealistic assumption.

Having created the conditions that produced history's biggest bubble, America's political leaders appear unable to grasp the magnitude of the dangers the country now faces. Mired in their rancorous culture wars and squabbling among themselves, they seem oblivious to the fact that American global leadership is fast ebbing away. A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed, where America is only one of several great powers, facing an uncertain future it can no longer shape.

Copyrights and Mesh Networks

Chris Gilbey — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 06:05:00 +1000

Over the last couple of weeks I have been having some very interesting conversations with an old acquaintance who is one of the most savvy Internet guys in Australia. He built one of the early ISP's and made a fortune (which he subsequently lost but that's life). He is truly a geek's geek. But its probably better that I don't discuss who he is at the moment... (Some mutual friends will figure that out).

A couple of years ago we had some in depth conversations about copyright piracy and what could - or in most cases could not - be done about it. We were both clear about a couple of things back then: DRM was never going to work. And human nature being what it is, people will always go for the least expensive option.

So that led us to believe back then that the content companies were going to get into ever deeper crap as broadband penetration widened. The music companies have continued, particularly in the US, to apply a sledgehammer to a walnut strategy, pursuing the little guys and making a very small percentage of law suits stick. I imagine that their thought is that the publicity surrounding the law suits will discourage the masses.

So in the last few weeks after a hiatus of probably two years we started discussing this stuff again.

What I found interesting this time around in my discussions with the anonymous friend was to be told of the speed of the growth of the P2P networks. Not only the speed of growth of the downloads, but the growth of the number of networks. And a lot of these networks are mesh networks. That means that there is no central server necessary - your computer and my computer form part of a group where files can be easily shared and are pretty much untraceable.

Now the music companies have been playing Spy V Spy games with content for some time, placing spurious files into the more visible file sharing networks. These are files that have text titles that match with popular downloads (Madonna, Metallica etc) but when the unsuspecting consumer downloads them they find that the file is (1) empty or (2) has a virus inside it. Make no mistake the copyright police is one of the most active distributors of viruses that is out there.

But the problem is that for the most part people who are active downloaders are also very hip to changes taking place in technology. So once they realize what is happening they migrate to these very sophisticated mesh networks where there are trusted suppliers of content. Of course the copyright police are also aware of this. But they are actually conflicted. They know that their bread and butter comes from providing measurable results to their commercial clients. That comes about most easily if they catch people. Since the amount of people downloading music is growing at a geometric growth curve they don't actually have to work too hard to achieve results. Hence they focus on the tip of the iceberg rather than the mass.

All that means that the fundamental model that continues to be pursued by the content companies is flawed. But it can be fixed. Fixed by a combination of technology and understanding of human nature. And in doing so can produce huge increases in revenues for the content owners.

I would be happy to discuss it with any interested parties!

Crash On Through

Chris Gilbey — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 05:42:00 +1000

So the American economic train wreck is unfolding before our very eyes. The question is whether it truly is a flat world in every sense or whether there has been decoupling over the last few years.

The pundits in Australia seem to think that the banks have been very conservative here in terms of the way they have structured their businesses because their fundamental businesses are so profitable. Let's hope so.

Not so the players who have been largely funded by debt. Hence the decline and fall of companies like Babcock and Brown. Who knows whether the giant Macquarie Bank will survive since their model is so reliant upon debt.

While doom and gloom inhabits the boardrooms of the western world and we all sit waiting to find out whether America will finally wake up to the reasons that we are in this crisis in the first place (the cost of waging an everlasting war) I tend to think that it is time to start looking for the opportunities to emerge from the wreck.

After the storm and the mayhem comes the time to clean up and rebuild. And the ones who do best are the ones who are preparing for the rebuild as the eye passes overhead and the winds start to crank around to blow from the opposite direction. Its time to look both optimistically and opportunistically at what is happening. And let's hope that in amongst it the people of America vote for sanity at the next election.