Perceptric Forum

Gerald Celente

Chris Gilbey — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:24:00 +1000

Gerald Celente is the founder of Trends Institute and is one of the most accurate forecasters of trends today. He has been doing it for a long time.

This was one of the points he made in his latest newsletter:

Trendpost: The Panic of '08 is "On." Yet, the instant the Dow crashed 678 points today, Bloomberg Radio brought on an expert who declared "most of the crash is behind us" and said the market plunge presented "a good buying opportunity." We see things differently. Yesterday's lowering of interest rates and the continual Fed action to flood the markets with money will lead to an era of hyper-inflation, the likes of which no living American has ever seen.

US, Country Of Guns, Country Of Bankers

Chris Gilbey — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 06:05:00 +1000

The continuing unraveling of the US economy dominates the headlines.

I came across this interview today which is worth a look, but what is perhaps more interesting to contemplate is what happens when ordinary people realize that they have been swindled. The US, after all, is a country unparalleled in gun ownership. Will the bankers be able to protect themselves from the angry mob? I have visions of a post modern French Revolution.

George Bush tells the people to eat cake, and then the people storm the Bastille....

World Running Out Of Food?

Chris Gilbey — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:57:00 +1100

When the news is bad can it get any worse?

Supply chain efficiency has led to wheat stocks going from 3 months or more to no more than several days. Now we read that there is a famine coming...

Wheat futures prices have tripled since 2004, corn prices have almost tripled since 2005, and soybeans have tripled since 2006. Meanwhile, crude oil is up merely 60% in the past three years, which makes it seem very bearable in comparison. U.S. stock prices have barely eked out a 10% advance since 2005, underscoring the diminishment of our buying power. A large pepperoni pizza these days costs about as much as a share of Citigroup (C.N). Citigroup finished Wednesday at $22.15.

This is no joke, already, in Asia. Rice prices surged to a 20-year high this week -- more than $18 per hundred pounds -- as countries that have the most are hoarding it for their own people. Vietnam, India and Egypt have restricted exports to keep local markets stocked. Thai, Philippine and Indonesian officials are warning of civil unrest if the flow of rice does not increase.

Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan in recent weeks have restricted wheat exports as well, slapping on big tariffs to make sure shelves are stocked in their homelands amid soaring prices. A major Russian grains-company chief told Reuters that his country "is in a condition that has never happened before." Higher prices are not meeting any resistance from desperate buyers.

Most unusual about this phenomenon, according to BMO Financial Group strategist Don Coxe, is that until now, food crises in world history were regional concerns that arose from crop failures, war or pests. Once global trade of grains got going in the 19th century in a major way, food shortages in one country were ameliorated by imports, he said. What's happening now is a lack of supply everywhere at once.

Its That Time Of The Year Again

Chris Gilbey — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 10:35:00 +1100

I can't believe its going to be Christmas in a week.

I thought it might be fun to do a quick reflection on the year and the goings on... just like they do in the mainstream media.

Big impact things of the year in Australia were:

The Chaser's War On Everything APEC stunt. I wonder how much that contributed to the downfall of Howard... if at all? It certainly was hilarious!

The Federal Election itself - after the country being in lock step with the Bush White House for years it is refreshing to think that this country can ever so tentatively take steps that are not directly in line with the US. Wonderful to see Rudd make his declaration of signing Kyoto...

The Web:

Get Up's campaign in Australia to ensure that people are vectored toward simple choices in politics was extremely interesting. Their new campaign to take back the cities is a bit weak in my opinion. We shall see.

I thought that the recent visibility of Ron Paul in the US both in fundraising and in terms of the amount of buzz that is being generated online is extremely interesting. Not sure whether someone who is clearly orthogonal to the mainstream parties could ever pull off being elected, but this may be the time to do it!

Video

Surely this year was the year of the embeddable video. Video is becoming ubiquitous and YouTube is introducing new tools all the time now. Over the next two years I think that video is going to become bigger than Ben Hur. What will be truly interesting will be to see whether the copyright owners are able to put deals in place with the ISP's to stop or monitor P2P file sharing. Of course that is only one part of the problem. Its the whole business of mash ups that will continue to be an issue for them all...

Social Networks

I thought this year really did mark the coming of age of the social network. And yet there are still loads of people that I come across who have no idea about Facebook.... So maybe its still got a year to go before it starts to make real impact.

Security

The issues associated with Social Networks of course bring up the whole matter of security - or the lack thereof. The real issue of course is that in an online world you are operating almost all the time across national borders, which makes it very hard for the cops to chase down the crims. It also makes it very lucrative for the crims that operate online and live in low cost of living parts of the world.

Predictions

This coming year is going to be the big wake up year. People are going to wake up to the fact that we are facing a whole bunch of big big problems. Water is going to be the biggest issue - rising sea waters as a result of the melting of the ice caps; and lack of fresh water in a lot of the biggest cities in the world. Back in the late 90's the CIA put out a report that predicted that the wars of the early part of this century would be fought over water. So far the wars have been about oil it seems. But that will absolutely change.

The financial crisis in the US will get worse regardless of what the Fed does. Why? Because they have reached a point where trust has been broken. Ironically I believe that real estate in Australia and New Zealand will benefit from this. I suspect that well-heeled people in the US who have cash will be trying to get it out of the country and changed into stronger currencies as quickly as possible. I think they will try to find bolt holes in English speaking countries that have strong economic structure. At the moment the UK is looking a bit shaky with the runs on banks they have had there. New Zealand and Australia look pretty good.

That's all for now. Have a great Christmas everyone!

Warning From Comptroller General Of The US

Chris Gilbey — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 06:38:00 +1000

There is a sobering story in the August 14th edition of the Financial Times (excerpt below). It makes for important reading.

The US government is on a "burning platform" of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country's top government inspector has warned.

David Walker, comptroller general of the US, issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country's future in a report that lays out what he called "chilling long-term simulations".

These include "dramatic" tax rises, slashed government services and the large-scale dumping by foreign governments of holdings of US debt.

Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were "striking similarities" between America's current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including "declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government".

"Sound familiar?" Mr Walker said. "In my view, it's time to learn from history and take steps to ensure the American Republic is the first to stand the test of time."

Reality starts to set in at some time, doesn't it?

Here are a few ingredients in the collapse:

* Combine lower taxes with the cost of a war, with that cost exacerbated by the fact that most of the forces on the ground are so-called contractors, at a much higher per head cost than the 'official' soldiers.

* The continuing ripples coming from the exposure of Bear Stearns to the subprime mortgage market.

* The gradual impact on the cost of everything from increased oil costs.

* The hollowing out of most western countries' manufacturing through the move to a flat world.

The list goes on...

And while there is a refusal to deal with climate change and the laws of unintended consequences of the war in Iraq - like the rise in terrorism in other countries - it is inevitable that the train wreck is coming.

YouTube founder's success secrets, off the BBC by a VQUENCE employee

chrisbroad — Wed, 23 May 2007 23:17:00 +1000

I'm with VQUENCE and am always intrigued by the machinations of GoogleTube here on the BBC.

Taxonomies Report from Trend Monitor

Chris Gilbey — Mon, 21 May 2007 21:03:00 +1000

I was finishing up some work at home tonight and got a skype message from Jan Wyllie, who publishes Trend Monitor.

Jan has done some extremely interesting work analyzing consumer trends over the last ten or more years. He is in the process of writing a new report on the impact of Web 2.0 on business. And I have no doubt that this is going to be a pretty interesting report.

Here is part of his blog that points to where he is going this time round. Should be worth watching.

As Web 2.0 platforms migrate from the open internet enthusiasts to the worlds of business and government, the issue of information management will become a company-wide problem, rather than the problem which information professionals and taxonomists are paid to solve. Everyone will start tagging and chaos is liable to result.

Gun Bars Of Pakistan

Chris Gilbey — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 13:19:00 +1000

Here is an interesting piece of video I stumbled on...

glumbert.com - The Gun Bazaar of Pakistan

The Unreasonable Persistence of Performance - Digital Music Futures Part 1

paul bambury — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 16:22:00 +1000

Last year, on FirstMonday, I wrote:

"Many bands and artists take advantage of the net by using it to advertise their performances, at which they sell their CDs. This can be very effective and the major record companies are becoming less relevant to artists. However, despite the apparent success of aggregators like iTunes, few independent artists appear to be profiting from commercial downloads and a business model based solely on pay-for-downloads is very difficult to implement successfully."

Lately, similar notions have been been discussed by bloggers, including Chris Anderson of the Long Tail, in his Give away the music and sell the show post. There is also recognition of the need for sustainable business models for online music in the blogsphere. Much of this discussion is focused on economic matters and from the perspective of the music consumer. This is, of course, legitimate, but implications for musicians and music producers and aesthetic considerations are rarely discussed. This is a significant omission. Music is an art form.

The notion that the best way for musicians to use the net is to use their online presence to promote their performances is at odds with the general trend towards digitisation and virtualisation. It is also not good for many musicians and music producers. While some musicians are great performers and while acknowledging the powerful impact of well executed theatrical and improvisational performances, it should also be understood that the excessive dependence on performance and its analogues represents a failure of the online music market and the aesthetic impoverishment of music generally.

Let me illustrate this with some personal history. In 1980, when my New Wave band Smig Zee broke up, I purchased a TASCAM Portastudio, a Korg MS 20 Synthesiser and embarked on an amateur career as a home recording artist. I was not a natural performer and was glad to be able to simultaneously produce music and and pursue a career in the Public Service, as well as an interest in writing. I haven't performed since 1980 and if I had continued performing and pursued a professional career in music I would probably be as deaf as Pete Townsend and would certainly not have accumulated a nice superannuation fund. I deliberately mention superannuation to prick the romantic bubble that surrounds the meme of rock and roll performance and to note that few professional musicians, even successful ones, are adequately provisioned for old age and retirement.

Gigging can be very hard on musicians, even those that who are good at it and enjoy it. To musicians like myself, who are primarily interested in composition and production, there is nothing more boring and aesthetically arid that having to play the same songs over and over again. There are also opportunity costs, time spent performing reduces time spent composing and producing music.

As a home recording artist I was fortunate enough to participate in the electronic music boom of the 1990s and had techno music released by Volition Records and other labels as Alien Headspace and ambient music released by Silent Recordings as the Trancendental Anarchists. I am still producing music under these names and also electro-pop, by FutureRetro and publishing this on the net via Qualia Recordings, a virtual record company formed with my musical collaborators, Ross Goddard and Mark Van Veen. To end this excursion into personal history, I note that this approach is not at all unusual. There are millions of amateur musicians who are producing music in home recording studios and releasing it on the net and who do not perform.

Another salient point is that there are genres of music that are entirely unsuitable for performance. If you've ever seen a techno band attempt to simulate performance of their programmed productions, you know what I mean. DJs largely replaced performers of techno and dance music at dance parties and raves. Ambient music is so internal and anti-dramatic, that ambient music producers hardly ever attempt to perform it.

Despite the magnitude and significance of these trends towards the democratisation and virtualisation of music production, the music performance meme persists. Perhaps the most absurd recent manifestation of this is the simulated performance of a number of bands in Second Life. A more common manifestation is the simulation of performance in music videos. This is often extremely ritualised. Singers lip-sync in front of guitarists playing unplugged instruments, while the drummer hits a lone snare drum. This represents a singular lack of imagination and a depressing aesthetic failure. Music videos which attempt to augment the music with narrative or abstract visuals, do exist, but are vastly outnumbered by those that pay obeisance to the empty ritual of simulated performance. A brilliant example of a lateral music video which abandons the ritual of simulated performance is the Free Hugs video by the Sick Puppies. This was wildly successful and won a YouTube award.

There are also multitudes of bands and musicians who, while composing and producing their music in studios, feel they have to perform to promote it and produce income. In many cases, this is essentially the live simulation of performance, where the musicians attempt to replicate the studio production and arrangement of their music in a live performance. They give themselves little or no latitude to depart from the recorded version in the performance which is consequently devoid of the immediacy and improvisation which characterises real performance.

So what is going on here? Is this monumental failure of imagination, simply a cheap and nasty way of using visual media and live performance to a advertise digital music or is something more profound involved? There does appear to be a popular prejudice against programmed and studio production in favour of live performance. This involves the notion that anyone can produce music in a studio, but only "real musicians" can pull off live performance. The illegitimacy of this prejudice is exposed if one attempts to apply it to cinema, the canonical virtual art form. I doubt that anyone would seriously suggest that the best way to promote movies is with theatrical performances. Nor is the notion, that theatrical actors, directors and producers are necessarily superior to their cinematic equivalents, seriously supported. The movie and TV industries eclipsed theatre long ago.

This anomaly has puzzled me for some time. A possible explanation comes from cognitive anthropologist, Steven Mithen, in his recent book, The Singing Neanderthals. This excellent text examines the evolutionary origins of music and posits the theory that one of the major evolutionary functions of music is the promotion of social cohesion in groups of hominids and humans. This makes a great deal of sense when one considers the history of music making. Tribal societies clearly use musical performance, dance and ritual to cement and enhance social cohesion. More recently, before the development of recording technologies, the gathering of family and friends around the piano for singalongs can also be seen as promoting social cohesion. The emergence of concerts represents a move from group music making to the group achieving cohesion, through the passive reception of music performed by professional musicians. Significantly, the same effect is achieved in raves and dance parties without the live performance of music. It seems that the most important factor is that the group is listening to the same music, preferably at the same time.

If this theory is accepted then the social fragmentation inherent in the virtualisation of music can explain the atavistic yearning for the simulation of performance. It may also explain the apparent success of social networking approaches to online music represented by such sites as MySpace and LastFM.

As the emergent online music industry churns through business models it seems that a number of factors are involved in determining what may be viable and sustainable. I intend to write about other factors such as the adequate compensation of artists and the pernicious and outmoded nature of the Star Syndrome in subsequent parts of this series. Meanwhile I hope I have elevated aesthetic considerations related to the tension between the virtualisation of music and the traditional role of performance, in the minds of those interested in development of a market for audio/visual content of quality. There is the potential for the transcendent combination of music and visuals, which currently appears to be limited by an unthinking and aesthetically arid obeisance to the ritual of performance.

Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, March 2007

chrisbroad — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 17:59:00 +1000

-Before we get into it, allow me to back up just a bit.

First of all, the "Alternative" in the title refers to "alternatives to Google."

That is, one criteria for making it onto the list is to exhibit superiority to Google in one particular feature. For example, TheFind.com is better than Google's Froogle, in my opinion.

And that brings me to my second point: the ultimate criteria for inclusion is not empirical, it is subjective.

The Top 100 for March ended up with some of these "Scattergories":

-Three Video Search; including PureVideo.-