I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a couple of years ago… The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.
SHOOT: Think 7 billion people is no big deal? Look around you. It's happening. Volatility, shortages, unemployment, resources becoming more expensive, currencies becoming increasingly worthless.
In 2011, check your mirrors - by Nick van der Leek
I hope in 2011 you will be a more responsible person than you were in 2010. That's also my wish for me. Let me start by offering a personal example.
Me
Earlier this year, when my lease in Johannesburg was coming to an end, a 60 year old lady invited me to stay with her in Summerstrand PE. She presented herself as someone who believed in my writing talent and wanted to help me succeed. The agreement was that I should pay only for my food and I'd have a chance to pursue my freelancing career [with its sometimes marginal income] without being stressed by financial burdens etc. I was reassured that there was a garage for my car and cupboard space for my clothes. This was a chance to take my freelancing to another level!
When I arrived it turned out that there wasn't really any arrangement for my car, and very little space for my clothes [or even for me]. One month later, her noble sentiments had evaporated entirely, and following my not inviting her on a trip to J-Bay, the 60 year old wanted me to evacuate the premises virtually immediately. I had left a pile of personal possessions in Johannesburg, including TV, DVD player, microwave, refrigerator, and plenty of furniture. Of course there was no sense of responsibility that she had instigated and encouraged the move; her response was simply to avoid the consequences of that decision. Dishonest, and illegal, but none of these matter when you feel...well, inconvenienced. Even if that feeling is all your own doing. And never mind if you're inconveniencing someone else by an order of magnitude greater than yourself, what matters is that you feel absolutely comfortable. All other considerations are secondary.
In order to make the situation unrelated to her own actions [in other words, to absolve herself of responsibility] she told lies, presumably to herself as well. She complained that rent wasn't paid etc etc when, of course, this was explicitly never part of the original arrangement. She had been fixated on some feeling which she hoped to get out of my occupying the premises, and when that feeling didn't materialise, a new feeling [just as compulsive] I don't want you here replaced it. The context, the practicalities, the previous commitments and understandings were irrelevant. All that was relevant was: I want my own space back.
Trouble is, people enter into these sort of engagements all the time. Getting married, having children, starting a business - with very little imagination or critical thinking into the reality of it.
But I am also guilty of a certain amount of irresponsibility: not asking myself, what's the catch in this arrangement? And why does she want me to move there - what's in it for her? And what if it goes sour? And when it does go sour what will you do? And what precautions can I take? In this sense I was irresponsible, although I have to say, I knew I was taking a calculated risk, and all things considered, the rewards were worth the risk. The humiliation associated with the arrangement though wasn't much fun.
Old or Young, responsibility is equally valid
I've been told that a doctor from around here [Cape Town] recently had his children tested for AIDS. Inexplicably, the test for his twelve year old daughter came back positive. He asked her how this was possible. Turns out she had been having sex with a married man in the toilets of a nearby shopping centre. Who is more irresponsible, the married man with AIDS, or the twelve year old girl voluntarily engaging in sex with him?
Why are people in larger numbers than ever before getting cancer these days? Why are vast swathes of the world population mall-visiting whales? Why are there so many dark troubles in the world today - from economic black holes, to a climate picture no one wants to face to the new possibilities for pandemic disease?
The answer is that all of us, you and me, are motivated more by feeling than meaning. As a result we have made a world for ourselves which has become pornographised. In other words, consumed by pseudo-life, painted in a veneer of plastic and faux appearances, a world of spin and soundbytes, virtual, manipulated, socioeconomic, or otherwise hallucinated status rather than actuality. A world where important activities like having children and being part of a family have been hijacked by the porn version of them. Which is to start families in order to have sex, or to have relationships, however shallow, for the same reason. This may not be true of every individual, but it is certainly true of the average.
Responsibility Crutches
In this world it is easy to gravitate to religion, the ultimate resource where things that are wanted or needed can be created out of thin air [for a world that believes 'stuff' comes out of thin air, is created instantaneously]. Meaning can thus also be created out of thin air. But most important of all, responsibility can be given to God, whose job it is to judge us, to sort out the world [which He created] and decisions on our fate and the world's fate are entirely his. Really? This means the implications of our own actions are never borne out while we are alive on earth, a convenient excuse to act without fear of consequence whilst we're alive. In fact, a very convenient license to indulge - which is exactly what we have been doing. We act like children running amok, but that's fine, because our Superparent, God, is watching and taking care of us. Eventually, you have to wake up, and grow up. Or if you don't, face the consequences, or hide from them - either way they're out there.
When I see an extremely obese person in a gym [a rare occurence] I wonder how the person managed to divorce him or herself from their own personal reality to be able to reach such a state. Wjat did people around them say? Or not say? Yes, wonderful that they have stepped into the gym. Can they maintain the new habit? Or will they eventually drown in their own adipose and despair? Much better to have never gone down the garden path beyond all the warning signs to transform from human being to a whale. Was the difficulty in walking, getting those tree trunks past each other, not warning enough?
I heard about a priest who had a heart attack and died at the pulpit whilst giving a sermon. I wonder how the congregation respond to this vivid glimpse of the reality of life - that there is no insurance from death, for anyone, anywhere.
Blame
The true test of consistent failure to take responsibility is someone who always finds something or someone to blame. It is when you accept and acknowledge your part, your role in response to your situation, that you can change your life. When you blame, you actually give power to something outside of yourself, and you rob yourself of strength and the capacity to do anything. Furthermore, it tends to create emotional tensions, and an internal dialogue, which reinforce a drama - one of your own creation. In this way you [or I] perpetuate an energy flow away from yourself re-making a situation worse, not better.
We are living at a time where there is a profound lack of clarity, or consensus, to describe who we are and what we are actually doing. Our political leaders, let's face it, are professional liars. Perhaps they are told to lie because it is in our best interest, or theirs, and maybe they believe it. But they are not the only one's telling lies. There is a certain amount of consensual denial, when faced with the environment and resource limits. These are based on our own interests, and so the denial is really rooted in an attempt to perpetuate our indulgent lifestyles. To the extent that we can manufacture a postponement of reality, we see economies deform and twist the way mirrors can be made to transform reflections. There is some semblance of reality in these squewed reflections, but not much.
Check your mirrors
At the gym I go to the mirrors make me look slimmer and more muscular than I actually am. I know this because someone took photos of me at a triathlon and the reality was, well, both painful and disconcerting. The response then is to make the painful decision to change, to undertake new and difficult actions - eat less, move more. Or I can spend more time in the gym, admiring myself in front of mirrors that lie to me.
We are living in a time, right now, where we're starting to bump against the planet's limits to growth. This is reflected in food and fuel prices. But it's also reflected in climate systems, disease and environmental systems that are rapidly changing. Most people will only change when they are forced to do so. The change that is coming is, in a sense, a natural rebalancing. We should try to find a way to welcome it and embrace it. And those who can respond best to the coming change will do better than those who are disconnected from their own realities, and the Greater Realities. That was always so, but perhaps never truer than now.
Now is a chance for us to be better than we are. Change is about making new choices. I hope you will join me in 2011 in being more connected to the world and its creatures, and to do that, we have to be connected to ourselves in a real way. Hold yourself accountable to your thoughts, words and deeds. Be disciplined and be an honest asset rather than a liability to the world in 2011.
Krugman: The rise in commodity prices are a sign that we’re living in a finite world, one in which resource constraints are becoming increasingly binding. This won’t bring an end to economic growth, let alone a descent into Mad Max-style collapse. It will require that we gradually change the way we live, adapting our economy and our lifestyles to the reality of more expensive resources.
SHOOT: To some extent I agree with Krugman. He seems to think the USA are bystanders to current economic moves, notably the Dollars value dive. Really? And the USA doesn't care about emerging economies [er...like China, really?] He's on the money that we are starting to face the consequences of too many people living in a world with just so many resources, and not quite enough energy to go around. Put another way, there probably isn't enough cheap energy to fuel 1/7th of the world's population driving cars [that's 1 billion vehicles]. In other words, not everyone in the world is going to be able to afford a car, a suburban house or the dream of middle class living.
Interestingly, Krugman points out that current prices were last at this level 2.5 years ago. I recently spoke to an energy economist who said that when oil prices reach 3 year highs, expect a recession to kick in. We're far into that territory now, however way you want to spin it.
SHOOT: Excellent article! The article poses a crucial question: there's a high-stakes conflict between corporations that have grown fat and powerful off the web over nearly 2 decades and the 1st generation to grow up with the modern internet as a daily element in their lives.
Question is, is the internet and facebook just there for companies to promote themselves, and advertise, or do we - people, intelligent users - maintain control?
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gives a statement on the WikiLeaks document release on November 29, 2010, at the State Department in Washington, D.C. Photo: AP
It was a year without parallel. Threat Level’s bread-and-butter themes of censorship, hacking, security, privacy, copyright and cyberwar were all represented in tug-of-war struggles with unprecedented outcomes.
Google defeated China’s censors, but caved to corporate censorship in the United States. The largest computer-crime case ever prosecuted ended in the nation’s longest prison term. A small-time Xbox modder who advertised his services online beat the federal rap. And a mysterious computer virus called Stuxnet finally put proof to decades of warnings that malware will eventually be used to kinetic effect in the real world.
A myriad of court decisions seemed to be a boon for online rights, while others clearly were a step backward. The year 2010 saw the rise of the newspaper copyright troll, and judges pushed back on absurd jury verdicts for music file sharing and outdated electronic spying rules.
And a secret-spilling website flirting with insolvency and dissolution suddenly burst onto the world stage. WikiLeaks was without a doubt the biggest 2010 development in Threat Level’s world.
WikiLeaks Takes On World Powers
As the year began, the project appeared to be on its last legs — just another cypherpunk fever dream destined for the same dustbin as digital cash and assassination politics. Site founder Julian Assange had abandoned the wiki portion of the concept, after crowds of volunteer analysts failed to congeal around WikiLeaks’ impressive, but not yet explosive, trove.
Bradley Manning as he appeared in his Facebook photo.
Assange also experimented with auctioning early access to leaks for news outlets, without immediate success. By January, the site had hit financial bankruptcy, and its homepage and archive were replaced by a public plea for donations.
Then came Bradley Manning, a disaffected 22-year-old Army intelligence officer who wanted “people to see the truth.” With one disturbing video and nearly a million leaked U.S. documents later, WikiLeaks had raised more than $1.2 million, and ignited a battle over the meaning of journalism, national security and censorship.
The WikiLeaks saga began in earnest with the April release of the “Collateral Murder” video showing more than a dozen people in Iraq being killed in three U.S. Apache helicopter attacks.
Victims included two Reuters employees, one carrying a camera that was apparently mistaken for a weapon. The partial release of 92,000 reports from the war in Afghanistan followed in July. Then came 400,000 Iraq war reports in October, and finally the slow, steady disclosure of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables that kicked off just after Thanksgiving.
The "Collateral Murder" scene shortly after the 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Iraq was exposed by WikiLeaks.
The State Department said Assange’s publication of U.S. diplomatic cables was “illegal.” But Assange bills WikiLeaks as a media organization, and no media outlet has ever been prosecuted for publishing classified information in the United States.
Above: Manda Reyneke
Age: 47 years
Pursued her daughter's boyfriend and then tried to have him killed when he failed to reciprocate her feelings of 'deep affection' by hiring two Nigerians and paying them R10 000 for the 'hit'. Was later ordered to serve time in a mental institution.
Attractiveness level: -1/10
Above: Dora Smith
Age: 59 years [although is likely to tell you 51, 54 etc] Believes she has what it takes to compete with models and ladies as much as 40 years younger than herself.
Excels at drama, stretching the truth [to put it mildly] and exaggeration. Likes to call the police [see left] on accusations of intimidation/violence when her advances are spurned.
Attractiveness level: -3/10 [Notice the curled up smile on the left side of her mouth. Is that a cougar snarl? GRRRRRRRRR!] Actual non-photoshopped real life image below:
In the 1850s, a New York publisher announced that newspapers were dead: he had seen a telegraph in action. In fact, the immediacy of the telegraph made people much hungrier for news from hundreds of miles away, and proved a major catalyst in the growth of newspapers.
The telegraph story is told by Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the publisher of the New York Times, in a new book called Designing Media. His interlocutor is Bill Moggridge, the man who designed the first laptop in 1980, went on to found IDEO, the largest design firm in the world, and is currently the director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. Sulzberger is one of 37 people that Moggridge interviews in the book, from editors and TV producers to the founders of Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. It's a veritable Who's Who of the people who have revolutionised media in the last decade.
Reading the interviews (excerpts of which you can also download and watch on video), I had one question at the front of my mind: what, exactly, is the relationship between design and the media revolution we are experiencing? Or, to put it another way, why is this book – which contains many fascinating insights into the way media work, some of them design-related but most of them not – entitled Designing Media? I didn't find the explanation in the book, so I called up Moggridge to ask him. His answer was simple: because media is a form of design. In fact, he argued, everything is a form of design.
To be honest, I suspected he would say that. Most people may still think that "design" refers to manufactured objects – chairs, telephones and cars – but designers have become far more expansive in their worldview. They now design customer experience and services, from internet banking systems to patient flow in a hospital. Businesses are rapidly latching on to the notion of "design thinking" – the idea that the creative problem-solving used by designers can be applied outside of traditional design – as a means of becoming more effective. Moggridge himself is a paragon of the designer dissolving the boundaries of his discipline. He is the godfather of interaction design, which started out as the design of electronic interfaces but now refers to the design of any form of user experience, from navigating a BlackBerry to paying at a checkout.
From there, it takes no great leap of imagination to understand media as design. After all, many of the new media moguls are software designers. Indeed, Chad Hurley, the founder of YouTube, started out as a graphic designer (probably the only graphic designer in history to become a billionaire). I buy the argument that design thought processes can be applied to almost anything – whether that means we call those things "design" is a semantic discussion we'll save for another time. But I find it easier to understand the argument in relation to new media rather than traditional media. It doesn't seem far fetched at all to describe social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and user-generated content sites such as Wikipedia and YouTube as forms of design.
Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales actually describes what he does as "community design". It sounds like a form of social engineering, but what he means by the phrase is that Wikipedia is not just an anarchic piece of crowd-sourcing: it's a carefully designed eco-system.
If people are going to work on an encyclopedia for free, you have to create the conditions in which they're willing to do so, by giving them recognition and not profiting from their labour. It was important to Wales to make Wikipedia an open system, and so it was designed around the principle that most people are honest and well-intentioned, rather than making it a closed shop to exclude the few bad apples who want to write false or slanderous entries – in truth, he tried the closed system first with Nupedia and it failed. Yet, while it's true that anyone can write or edit an entry on Wikipedia, everything there is carefully monitored. It's often described as "democratic", but Wales himself thinks of it more as a monarchy, with the writers overseen by moderators who are in turn overseen by the king – King Jimbo, as he's known. So the design aspect isn't just how the website looks, it's how users create the content.
Immediately you can see how different design rules suggest different ideologies. Like Wales, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is also fixated on the idea of openness. He fervently believes that designing a platform for people to share personal information helps make the world a more open place. And he found that making things human – "just seeing someone's face" – works best. It could have all looked like email, with its Spartan text-only interface that betrays its origins in the military. But it doesn't. It's designed to make people feel more present, and engaged with a community rather than an individual. Moggridge is right to suggest that the secret to Zuckerberg's success – you may have seen him on the cover of Time this month – lies in having designed a social network where there is no layer of technology getting in people's way.
However, here's the question. We all know that the media are in a turbulent state of flux, but in what way does reading the situation as "design" help? Is it just semantics, down to the fact that the word "design" is just so malleable? Paola Antonelli, senior design curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art, doesn't think so. She recently predicted in the Economist that in the near future designers would be involved in everything from science to politics. She sees design as the uber-profession, with a skill-set that transcends all boundaries. "For a simple reason: one of design's most fundamental tasks is to help people deal with change," she says.
The design world is in confident mood, but for these predictions to come true the rest of the world needs to buy into the argument. If I was Arthur Sulzberger Jr, I'd be thinking about how designers could get me out of a massive dilemma that was costing my company hundreds of millions of dollars a year. There's only one reason why newspapers haven't yet gone the way of the telegraph and that's because they still make about 20 times more advertising revenue than websites. If you were to grant Sulzberger just one wish, I have no doubt that he would reply: I wish someone would design a way for us to make as much advertising revenue from the website as we used to make from the newspaper. Banner ads? Forget it. The fact that you can't give over most of a webpage to an ad the way you could a printed page is simply because we've all been conditioned by the early days of the web when everything was free. There's a design challenge that everyone's trying to crack.
SHOOT: South Africa's future is looking brighter than ever. Being a resource broker for Africa is going to make some South Africans very wealthy.
Original story here.
By Nasreen Seria - Dec 24, 2010
South Africa has been formally asked to join the BRIC group of major emerging markets, including Brazil, Russia, India and China, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said.
Chinese President Hu Jintao wrote a letter to his South African counterpart, Jacob Zuma, to inform him of the decision and inviting him to the BRIC’s third heads of state meeting in Beijing next year, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said in a statement on his ministry’s website today.
South Africa, which has a population of 49 million compared with China’s 1.36 billion, is betting on raising its clout on the world stage by joining BRIC, while also strengthening political and trade ties. South Africa, accounting for about a third of gross domestic product in sub-Saharan Africa, offers the group access to 1 billion consumers on the continent and mineral resources including oil, platinum and copper.
“South Africa as a country is small, but if we go there as a regional market, that’s a different story,” said Martyn Davies, chief executive officer of Johannesburg-based Frontier Advisory, which provides research and corporate finance services on emerging markets. “For South Africa, it’s nice to be associated with the big boys.”
Zuma has made state visits to all of the BRIC nations since coming to power in May last year. South Africa is a “powerful country,” even though it’s small compared with the other BRIC nations, Alexei Vasiliev, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s envoy to Africa, said on Dec. 22.
Importance, Not Size
South Africa has an economy of $286 billion, which is less than a quarter of that of Russia, the smallest of the BRIC nations. South Africa’s population is also dwarfed by India’s 1.2 billion, Brazil’s 191 million and Russia’s 142 million.
South Africa has asked to join BRIC because of its importance in Africa, rather than its size, Trade Minister Rob Davies said on Dec. 14. Africa’s biggest economy is a “systemically important” nation on the continent, he added.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economist Jim O’Neill coined the BRIC term in 2001 to describe the four nations that he estimates will collectively equal the U.S. in economic size by 2020. At their first summit in Russia in June last year, the BRIC heads of state called for emerging economies to have a greater voice in international financial institutions and for a more diversified global monetary system.
“South Africa’s economy is very small,” O’Neill said in an interview from London today. “For South Africa to be treated as part of BRIC doesn’t make any sense to me. But South Africa as a representative of the African continent is a different story.”
SHOOT: I'm trying to picture how to drive a vehicle sobre with 15 sheep running around...
East London - A drunk motorist was arrested near Queenstown in the Eastern Cape after allegedly being found to be 32 times over the alcohol limit, the department of transport said on Thursday.
The motorist was driving a Mercedes-Benz Vito at about 23:00 on Wednesday when he was stopped by police.
Blood tests were conducted on him and he was found to have an alcohol content of 1.6g/100ml.
This is 32 times over the limit of 0.05g/100ml.
Five boys and a woman, who were also in the vehicle with 15 sheep allegedly stolen from nearby farms, were also arrested.
Consumer behaviour seems to respond to oil price hikes more quickly than in the past.
Oil has re-entered the US$90s price range in spite of occasional strengthening of the dollar. The reasons include record- setting winter weather in the northern hemisphere, boosting demand for heating oil. What are the implications of these higher energy prices for tottering national economies this time around?
In 2009, economist Nouriel Roubini stated that “oil at $145 a barrel was a tipping point for the global economy as it created negative terms of trade and a disposable income shock for oil importing economies. The global economy could not withstand another contractionary shock if similar speculation drives oil rapidly to $90 a barrel.”
Economist Tony Twine says oil prices are behaving more like a currency, but laughs off concerns about oil prices curbing economic growth, suggesting that only at $200- $300/barrel would these concerns be valid.
But according to oil industry commentator Andrew McKillop, the tipping point is lower and closer than most people think. Calling this level “the $63trillion question” [a ballpark value for global GDP], McKillop suggests $90/barrel is the trigger price for quite high Keynes-type multiplier effects across the global economy. Beyond $125 there are increasing negative feedback processes, which become very strong at $135/barrel.
A source from one of SA’s largest retail banks echoes this figure, but points out current oil expenditures account for only around 8% of gross national spending.
While various world economies may show different absolute tipping points, some companies, notably in the airline industry, have more specific and easily identifiable margins. Airline industry expert Michael Boyd calls $100/barrel the critical level where “every airline in the world is obsolete”. McKillop sees “ritual shudders” for world economies starting as low as $100.
According to energy economist James Hamilton, oil prices “only start to matter when they make a new three-year high. We probably won’t have to worry about crossing that threshold until June 2011, which would put the big spike in oil prices three years behind us.” When oil expenditures exceed 6% of GDP the US economy tips into recession, he adds. “My guess is $90/barrel would likely put us back above 6%.”
The day Coetzee was attacked - December 7 - they saw three little crocodiles on the water, just 0.9m long. It had been raining for two days, so hard they didn't try to cook a meal. They had just finished more than 48km of whitewater. And they faced 320km of flat water, winding through rolling elephant grass-covered hills, before their final takeout.
They were in the middle of a stretch about 30m wide, paddling so close their blades would touch if they got out of synch. Coetzee was in the centre, Stookesberry a little in front on the left, and Korbulic a little behind on the right.
"I glanced over to measure that we were not paddling towards or away from each other. And just in my periphery I saw the crocodile come out of the water, and he got onto Hendri's left side - just the left shoulder with its mouth," Korbulic said.
Talking to villagers later, they figured the crocodile was at least 4.5m long and weighed up to 2 tons.
Stookesberry and Korbulic watched the overturned boat shaking for about 20 seconds as the crocodile pulled Coetzee from the tight-fitting cockpit. They then got off the river, composed themselves, and continued downstream to a village.
Coetzee's body has never been found, and he is presumed dead.
SHOOT: Very unlucky. Since they were side by side any one of the three could have been taken. Coetzee was in the middle, in a way the unlikeliest victim. Read more here.
With One Shot, tell a story of the landscapes of our past, present and telling future. Our surroundings are constantly altered, sculpted and have evolved in irreversible ways by humans and nature alike. The ever-changing surface of this world… how have you captured what is, was or will be?
