ts amazing how much one can see the waves of public opinion forming with social media.

I think it must have been about two years ago that I first started reading about the risk of a sub prime meltdown in the US. There are a lot of people who have built significant businesses from promoting FUD. What is interesting now is that the cracks are appearing more regularly in what I would call the ’social fabric’ of the US. And since the US is in many respects the key influencer of thought on line - purely because of the sheer volume of people who blog, who spruik, etc - there is a significant amount of US thought influencing other English language cultures.

Globalization of ideas is very real. So the subprime crisis in the US has impacted Australian companies too. Look what has happened in the last few weeks to Centro and to Allco and most recently to ABC Learning. All of them have found sources of debt financing hard to get, and all have had their share prices savaged as a result.

In the press that globalization of thought has started to see the letters section of the Sydney Morning Herald featuring comments by readers about the State Government’s handling of transport referencing the concept of Peak Oil.

We are all starting to understand that we are part of a global system.

Another interesting thing that I noticed this week was on the Insight program on SBS. A representative of A.V. Jennings, the house building company, called for the Federal Government to regulate the specifications of houses so as to make them more sustainable!

I read recently that it is not the tipping point that is important - it is what caused the tipping point to take place, and what happens immediately after the tipping point has been reached that is important.  We are in the process of reaching such a tipping point right now.

Imagine for a moment that trends and fashions and public opinion is like a pendulum. Like the pendulum they reach a peak point in the swing and then change direction. With a pendulum there is a change in energy at that peak. The kinetic energy of motion turns into potential energy at the moment that the pendulum reaches its peak. I believe that society is not dissimilar. When CEO’s have margin calls that cause them to sell shares in the companies that they have built, investors change their level of confidence in the CEO and the company. Confidence energy changes to potential and then to negative. This kind of thought ripples through society causing surprising results - much of which we should be able to predict if we are looking in the right places.

This was also posted at the GRMP blog.

One of the things that I dislike about downloading music from iTunes is that there is DRM present in the file.

If you rip a CD using iTunes and set it to rip as an mp3, you get a file that is infinitely copyable. If you download from iTunes, you have a limited option. And the problem with this is that if you get some corruption of the original file for some reason, you have no alternative but to purchase the song again.

Here is a handy little widget that fixes that problem. Doubletwist extracts the DRM code from the files making them easy to synch with an infinite number of devices. It was developed by the same guy that broke the encryption on the DVD.

The amount of ink that the Financial Times is devoting to the US economic woes should be enough to make not only Ben Bernanke stay awake at night, but everyone else on the planet too, who doesn't want to be part of the meltdown.

This article by Martin Wolf argues what may well happen, and why it is ultimately unlikely. Very sane, very balanced, and very scary. Scary because at the end of the day, regardless of which scenario takes place, there is going to be a lot of pain along the road...

Here is a snippet from the article:

Well, finally, we are connected again, albeit extremely slowly...

Its a BigPond Next G wireless service and we are pretty close to the edge of the cell, but at least now I can get emails without having to either go to our neighbours next door, or into Nowra to the Internet Cafe there!

Hooray!

I moved house two weeks ago and haven't been able to get online at the new house so there haven't been any opportunities to blog.

Put it down to Telstra! They told me that I could have an ADSL connection at the new address prior to moving, and then after a week I got an SMS message on my cell phone telling me there was a problem with my account and asking me to call. So I called in last Friday - about two seconds after the SMS - and the guy at the call centre just told me that there was a problem and he didn't know what it was.

So on Monday I called in again. This time the guy I spoke to was somewhat quizzical. He said that according to the records they had explained on the previous Friday that there was no port availability in the area for ADSL. I explained that the guy I spoke to didn't have a clue as to what the problem was.... a total disconnect.

Anyway, then the guy at Telstra offered me a new solution: buy their mobile service! Now for the 5-7 gig of data that I normally consume a  month that would end up costing me about $500 per month! Now I understand why so many people in Australia are disgusted with Telstra!

Hopefully under the Rudd government things will improve.... We shall see..

Still no connectivity at home though...