Comin' at ya . . .

WHEN THE JOBS DISAPPEAR it's going to be really tough on capitalism. This video is an accurate forecast without the hype of what kind of changes are coming for your children to deal with. The next thirty years are going to be so interesting . . .

Bill Hicks . . .

ON THIS THANKSGIVING, give a listen to the late, great Bill Hicks. Thanks to Rusty Idols for drawing attention to this brilliant wit who died way too soon. Like Rusty says, "NSFW as fuck".

Freedom fighters . . .

MAYBE STUPID INSECTS aren't so stupid. According to George Dvorsky's article in io9, "Enslaved worker ants fight back through acts of sabotage", there are species that have developed effective resistance to slavery. 

The ant has been a creature respected by various cultures, and appears in the Bible in Proverbs 6:6 —

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise

Which John Wyndham used as the title for a rather fine novella, now forgotten, "Consider Her Ways", which is worthy of your perusal (Alfred Hitchcock thought so, adapted it for his TV show). 

The story is mostly a first-person narrative. It begins with a woman who has no memory of her past waking up and discovering that she is a mother of some description, in a bloated body that is not her own. After some confusing experiences her memory gradually returns and she recalls that she was part of an experiment using a drug to see if it enabled people to have out-of-body experiences. It seems that the drug has worked far better than anyone could have anticipated: she has been cast into the future. She also realizes that she is in a society consisting entirely of women, organized into a strict system of castes. Her initial contacts have never even heard of men.

Perspective and time . . .

James Burke's The Day The Universe Changed: "The Way We Are". A series worthy of your consideration, as is "Connections". Why? Because change is going to make today seem like a scene from a Jane Austen novel sooner than you might believe.

And the world changed . . .

JANUARY 26, 1983: Lotus begins selling its spreadsheet application for Microsoft DOS, called 1-2-3 and how business is run changed forever. The advent of 1-2-3 and cheap PC's allowed the re-organization of business world-wide.

For example, their appearance allowed all the contracting-out that started in the late 80's, because sole proprietors could now conveniently keep a set of company books. On the government side, it allowed the rise of the VAT, which would have been almost impossible to administer without PC's and 1-2-3. WIRED magazine has a commemoration of this by Dylan Tweney, "Jan. 26, 1983: Spreadsheet as Easy as 1-2-3", that's worthy of perusal.

Spreadsheet software, which seems commonplace and rather boring today, was a major breakthrough for personal computing. Sure, it made it easy to keep track of columns of numbers, such as sales receipts, paychecks, expenses or even athletic records.

But the real power of the spreadsheet was the ability it gave business people to run quick and easy “what-if” calculations. What if we lowered the price of our widgets by $10? What if mortgage rates drop to 5 percent and we refinance? What if we laid off 5,000 workers and shuttered our Kalamazoo plant, then outsourced manufacturing to a Chinese company for less than half the price?

Technology pundit John C. Dvorak has lamented the effects of the “what-if society,” saying that corporate executives have become slavish devotees of spreadsheet scenarios, failing to make decisions based on what customers actually want. But there’s no doubt that the spreadsheet has given companies, both large and small, a far better picture of their bottom lines. For better or worse, that power has transformed American business and the economy.