I recently read The Chaos Point - the World at the Crossroads by Ervin Laslo.

Laslo argues that humanity has until 2012 to adapt. By then a tipping point will have been reached and we will either launch into a new holistic mode and survive, or continue in our current behaviour and sink into decline and possibly extinction. Of course, global warming, war, economic collapse and pestilence would loom large in this scenario.

While this sounds grim, the book is very positive and points to many advances towards holism in human society and generally adds energy to arguments for change. Laslo is a systems theorist and suggests that the type of positive change towards holism could be quite sudden and all encompassing.

While, I'm not generally a proponent of what might be called "spiritual" and Laslo's thesis is a little short of evidence (particularly for the 2012 date) I found this to be an important, compelling and hopeful text.

Laslo believes we can and will elevate to a new level of consciousness and survive. I hope he's right.

I tried Pandora and LastFM about a year ago and for a while got pretty excited about both of them - mainly because of my ill fated venture in 2000, "Big Fat Radio".   I listen to radio for talk rather than music so maybe I am not part of the target market.

Fred Wilson has some comments about both - including their audience numbers and the way that social networks are evolving.

Google has hit $500.

The company is now Silicon Valley's second most valuable business, behind Cisco Systems, eclipsing the likes of Intel, the world's largest computer chip maker, and Hewlett-Packard, a high-tech pioneer that also started in a garage 67 years ago.

Think about the acquisition of YouTube and the history.

Rupert buys MySpace for $600MM. Does a deal with Google to supply ads with a guarantee of $900MM. MySpace now paid for. News stock goes up 20%. How can that be bad?

So YouTube comes on the market. The potential had to be there that Rupert would buy YouTube and do another MySpace. So Google jumps in. This time pays with scrip. So no impact on their cash position and minimal dilution.

So now the acquisition in real terms is on the way to costing nothing and the guys from YouTube are on the way to being worth $2Binstead of the $1.65 Billion that they started with. Amazing.

In Australia we have seen the cyclical rise and fall of housing prices, and have been used to the terminology that has evolved around it. But in the US housing seems to have been on the rise for ever.

Over the last year, there has been a lot of speculation about how Greenspan's policies with regard to interest rates have led to a massive bubble that is unlikely to deflate quietly.

This article by Gary Shilling provides some useful background on the subject... and some predictions.

The housing bulls are hardly prepared for the 5% to 10% peak-to-trough decline in prices that other housing bears and the futures market predict. The futures market indicates that the Case-Shiller Housing price index will decline 7.5% from its June 2006 peak to August 2007. Using median existing single-family house prices nationwide, a somewhat different series, we expect the decline of 4.6% from their October 2005 peaks to September of this year to extend to 18% by the third quarter of 2007 and to nosedive over 25% from the earlier peak to the final trough in the first quarter of 2008.

What will the impact of such a decline be on the global economy, and more particularly on the national/local economy of where each of us lives?

In Australia there is a massive divergence in price increase for real estate. Perth is currently the most bullish real estate market with massive 46% increase year on year! But its hard to see it from Sydney where there is a microcosm of both price increases and decreases depending on the suburb. And the thing that continues to amaze is that in spite of the column inches devoted to global warming the area that drives the price increases the most is waterfront. Go figure.

Technology has always moved faster than legislative processes. Interesting to see that Berkeley is moving to create a register of companies and the nano materials that they are creating.

Thousands of times narrower than the width of a human hair, nanoparticles include spheres, fibers and other shapes engineered to have special properties useful in commercial, medical and military applications. They're brewed in the lab or assembled LEGO-like by moving atoms or molecules of carbon, iron or other elements.

What are the implications of start up companies, and indeed universities, and the technologies that they create? Since the legislators often have absolutely no idea of technology at all there are huge implications. Surely the time has come when governments need to have engineers and scientists within the ranks of the people who provide the framework for how society is governed rather than lawyers.....?

I'm fascinated by the proliferation of music genres over the past fifty years. The branches of the music genre tree are now so fluffy, that it's difficult to identify the full set of music genres.

A Google search on "music genres" returns a plethora of genre lists and trees provided by search engines, music download sites and list freaks. None of these lists appear to be quite the same and I haven't been able to find a comprehensive list of current genres.

Despite this, genre lists and trees have become ubiquitious music discovery infrastructure. One of the nicest lists I've found is on Wikipaedia. It has most of the top level and second level genres as well as descriptions. Looking at this, I'm struck by it's structural similarity to the Domain Name System, the tree upon which the web is based.

An interesting aspect of this phenomena is that most, if not all of the genres appear to have a sustainable number of producers and consumers. There is probably a glut of performers in some genres. This is an economy of niche markets of varying scale. An econometric analysis of music dowloads sorted by genre would probably reveal  long tail features.

Another matter of interest is the creation and use of genres by artists. There have been impressive bubbles of genre origination, in the 60s with Rock and all its sub genres, in the 80s with Punk, New Wave and Electro-Pop and the most impressive, in the 90s with Electronic and its spawn of sub genres. New genres have also arisen more recenty such as Emo and Math Rock.

While many artists choose a genre and make it their own, some of the most interesting recent music is difficult to categorise and may be a new genre, non-generic, or meta-generic. Such artists may have difficulty getting their music discovered by listeners and can languish in the generic catch-all, Alternative. Others, such as Beck, have achieved success with a post-modern approach that mixes and matches genres. For some artists, genre manipulation has become a creative element in composition and production. This is perhaps the most significant recent development in music production.

This story is about the illicit use of copybot to copy virtual objects in the Second Life virtual world. Please see this cnet report.

The relevance of this to recent debates on Long Tail about the economics of abundance is worth considering. It reflects current issues around the disruptive influence of replication tech in the real world and the internet. There is a nice fractal re-iteration of the same patterns in the real world, the net and the virtual Second Life world. These have all involved a disruption of business models dependant on certain types of scarcity, which threaten the economic status quo.

It is also interesting that the creators of copybot are open source developers. Comparisons with the development of Linux, and other open source software, spring to mind. Sci-fi scenarios of cornicopia machines also arise.

What I find most significant about the copybot story is that it suggests that the structure of the human economy is hard-wired or at least sufficiently culturally ingrained to be amenable to complete virtualisation.

We have a sense that the economy is an external, immutable reality. The copybot story suggests that the economy is actually an emanation of human behaviour.

If this is true, it may be possible to re-engineer the human economy.

Some of us think that if we drive a Prius, we have made our contribution to saving the planet. And then we can get on that 747, our conscience clear, and fly off to a meeting in Shanghai, or San Francisco for a couple of days and then fly home. Next week do it all over again...

I have been guilty of this for years.

Recently I finished reading Heat by George Monbiot, which was a real eye opener. I heartily recommend it!

When you have read it you will realize (if you don't already) that one of the largest contributions any of us make to generating CO2 is through flying. Every flight across the Atlantic or the Pacific put tons and tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

If we are going to change our ways and really contribute to fixing the problem we have to start being part of the problem. We have to stop flying. And that is just the beginning. (Ironic that as I write this there are rumours that the MacQuarrie Bank is making a play to buy Qantas).

We have to seriously understand that if we are going to fix global warming it is going to mean that we have a severe curtailment of our standards of living. That means you don't get to switch the aircon on in your house when this summer it hits 40+ degrees. Because if you do - along with everyone else - the grid will probably go down. And then we will be in worse crap. We are going to have to pull back.

We are going to have to stop driving everywhere. We need to start walking. And we need to catch the bus.

Check out this article:

Here is an excerpt:

During the last 50 years, global human population more than doubled, from 2.8 billion people to 6.5 billion (in round numbers). The U.S. Bureau of the Census estimates that global population will reach 9.4 billion by 2050, a 44% increase in 45 years. It might even grow faster than that, doubling in 35 years to 12 billion, but even 9 billion would surely stress the planet's already-stressed ecosystems mightily.

Where will we put 44% more farms (with their fertilizers and pesticides and demand for fresh water), 44% more mines, more roads, highways, parking lots, airports, cars, trucks, buses, ships, trains, planes), more cities, hospitals, prisons, ports? And of course more wastes at every step.

All this will require at least 44% more power plants, which produce their own unique wastes (among them toxic or radioactive sludges, solid residues, and global warming gases).

We're already at a point where we've had to acknowledge there's no place left to throw things "away" -- there is no "away" -- the planet has been thoroughly doused with toxicants. Fog, rain and snow now contain measurable levels of toxic waste.

Check out this great cartoon from Working For Change focusing on Global Warming and Republicans, replace Republicans with John Howard and the Liberals in Australia and all the other people who think denial is a river in Africa....