Articles

Affichage des articles du juillet, 2015

Profusion for free: what if people realise they already have everything?

Presupposition:  We live in profusion. With an internet connexion and a computer, we have on the web enough to read, listen, learn, discuss, watch for several lives, and it's hyper quality content. Yes, we have enough content to feed our brain for centuries. Old school writers, old films, old music, free of rights, free courses, free places to chat and discuss any topics, engage conversations. It's amazing content for nothing. Zola, Hugo, Balzac, Homère, Dumas, Fritz Lang, Kurozawa, etc. If you add Netflix and Spotify/Deezer to this, or why not Lynda for learning, you have even greater content for a couple of dollars. So: We have free or nearly free food for our brain. Food to get energy is very cheap, especially if you skip meat, restaurant and processed food. Getting dressed decently is cheap. There is definitely enough place on earth for everybody. It's quite cheap to have a place to live. I know you won't agree this one but if you accept to be isolate

In your job, do people know your name? If not, you'll be uberized

Just a follow up on my latests blog on automation of jobs, mechanical turk and Uber . I said that Uber drivers were just doing Human Intelligence tasks and thus were at risk to be replaced by machines. Well, it seems that I'm less visionary than I thought :p Rumors already spread on the fact that Uber might buy loads of Tesla self driving cars . And that Google, you know people making self driving cars, just started using its GPS system, Waze, to launch a Uber-like service  (they say it's car pooling but, honestly...). So on one side: Uber , powered by Google Money , has the algorithm to manage automatically trips of thousands of people and an army of taxi drivers. They rely on Waze (Google) for their GPS. They say they'd rely on Tesla self driving cars. Well, honestly, it's more logic if they use Google ones. I bet these rumours are pure bullshit just to explain to complaining taxi and governments that Uber's plans are bigger than what they think. Goo

Do you know what rent-seeking is? You should, it's the key of capitalism's future

I discovered this notion of " rent-seeking" recently. It's... "When a company, organization or individual uses their resources to obtain an economic gain from others without reciprocating any benefits back to society through wealth creation. An example of rent-seeking is when a company lobbies the government for loan subsidies, grants or tariff protection. These activities don't create any benefit for society, they just redistribute resources from the taxpayers to the special-interest group."  Read more I love putting the right words on difficult to explain economic things. Instead of rent-seeking people often use corruption, oligarchy, lobbying, elite domination, etc. No, it's just people doing rent-seeking. It's not something that cannot be fought, something systemic, something that is mysterious or the result of hidden groups of influence such as Illuminati, Bildeberg and co. No it's a practice perfectly identified and there is tools t