Blogs

The weirdness of future of wars will make us wish
we were dealing with knives and swords again.

The way I see it, the larger the death toll and the greater the path of destruction, the longer it will take to heal the deep-seated emotional wounds festering among the masses. While property damage can be repaired, and economies can be rebuilt, it is the emotional wounds that carry hatred and other significant problems from one generation to the next.

Breakfast: Chilaquiles and Tolucan Chorizo with Chipotle Sauce.
Lunch: Thai Massaman Curry with Ginger Beer.
Dinner: Korean "Fire Beef" and Kimchi Jjigae with peppery Bloody Mary.

Are you salivating after reading that menu? Want your tongue burned with bold piquant flavors? If "yes" is the answer, you're part of today's flaming addiction for hot & spicy dining.

Mobile homes usually aren't a part of futuristic images, but the Choices blog offers up seven this week and they're pretty. Some are real, others are concepts, but all offer the promise of womb-like protection coupled with high adventure.

Many of my colleagues working in the computer and information sciences are interested in sociology and anthropology. It makes me a little ashamed of my field—how many anthropologists reciprocate the attention? But, it’s what they’re interested in that is more problematic.

The 4 major American professional sports--football, baseball, basketball and hockey--require billions of dollars in financial support from sources other than ticket sales. One of the ways they get it is through full or partial public financing of stadiums.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who can’t read & write, but those who can’t learn, unlearn & relearn.” – Alvin Toffler

So what is literacy?

When it comes to sales tax, here’s what everyone get’s wrong: sales tax is not a location tax, it is a transaction tax. The transaction triggers the tax. The location just determines the amount and who the recipients will be. Without a transaction, there is no tax. This is why the sales tax is on the verge of collapse.

Personal Futures is simply a system for applying futures (or futurist’s) methods to individual lives. These methods have been used (quite successfully) by corporations and governments around the world for decades. It’s just a matter of scale. And simplicity.

When I started my research, scaling down was THE challenge. Not so much for the futures methods, they scale easily. The problem was the research, the basic information about each individual’s life. Where does an individual (you) start? What are the driving forces? What are plausible and probable events in your future?
In building a systematic approach to personal futures, I arrived at three major steps:

So, Steve Jobs presented several new Apple products on September 1 and, seemingly, everyone blogged about it in realtime. If you’re excited about “Ping,” so much the better. My concerns are with those of us in academics who are interested in the future of social technologies. Maybe we weren’t typing up vaguely obsequious blog entries about Jobs’s presentation, but we were still watching. Why?

I don't think futurists could ever be compared to psychics, but anytime a government starts regulating people who base their livelihoods on the future, it's worth taking a look. Exhibit A, the government of Warren, Michigan just passed a law that requires fortune tellers to register, get fingerprinted and submit to a background check to run their businesses.