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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. What's amusing, you need a good stomach, is in the last decades as environmental issues have begun to rudely intrude on the future, the thinking of how do deal with them remains firmly entrenched
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Mugabe is the official mascot of “Life in the 21st Century.” A dozen years ago, Mugabe was a young bull elephant in Tsavo, Kenya. He’d hang around one of the park’s camps and what does a ten-thousand pound bull elephant do in your camp? Anything he wants, thus
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Subscribe now Technologies create their own power structures. Even the most radical new technologies very quickly create organization working to conserve the new order they established. Representative of this are America's electric utilities. A century ago bestowed with government monopolies, they become some of America's most
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Subscribe now February, 2000 The electric industry remains firmly entrenched in the 19th century. Value is derived mainly from the generation and distribution of colossal quantities of energy. However, the industry is on the verge of a great change. With the implementation of a more distributed architecture and adding digital
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Subscribe now “I use to have this thing about Link Wray I use to play him every Saturday God Bless Saturday” Searching for the link to my “Politics of Technology” (2016) paper, I came across a podcast I did in summer 2021 with Matt Payne. He approached me out of
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Subscribe now God love Sinead O’Connor
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Subscribe now The “Oppenheimer” movie is OK, entertaining. Hollywood usually disappoints on any subject you know well. The movie does a pretty good job of showing the brilliance and quirks of Oppenheimer, but as a story on science and technology, at a time when it's more important than
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“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.” - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Beyond Vietnam, 4/4/1967 Subscribe now At a young age, I was greatly influenced by
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Subscribe now (Continued from CBDC (I)) This idea of “executable objects” best illustrates what's happening. The history of money includes currency in the form of everything from shells, to specie, to paper. The BIS advocates currency as “executable objects,” a term derived from database programming – code as a
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Subscribe now The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) released their Annual Economic Report. The BIS was founded in 1930 to handle payments of German World War I reparations. It was the third attempt at squeezing the Germans in retribution for the war, one of the high points of Western civilization.
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Subscribe now This is a short well worth watching conversation with Bobby Seale, one of the original organizers of the Black Panthers. The Panthers rose out of the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1960s. What’s most interesting about Seale is how much in the American democratic tradition his politics
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Subscribe now Presley covers Berry, well. A century from now, this might be the definitive song defining the rock and roll era — 2Oth century, early electric, American folk music, created for the first time in history a small musician aristocracy that for better and worse was culturally influential. Buses, trains,