The work revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships. Each of the 1318 had ties to 2 or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20% of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60% of global revenues.
tl;dr: only one company in the top 50 actually produces anything at all (china petroleum), the rest is money launderers.
2016-09-15: If you’re ever in this part of France, I highly recommend a visit to the slowest castle construction site in the history of the world.
Guédelon Castle is a project started in 1997 by Michel Guyot and Maryline Martin in the Burgundy region of France. The castle is styled on typical French medieval chateau-fort, modeled on designs from the 13th century, and is being built using techniques and materials available to masons and builders 800 years ago. The Guédelon project has now become a tourist destination, and employs dozens of workers. The castle is due to be completed in 2023.
On the verge of losing billions of $ in revenue, the US Postal Service this week is launching a new television advertising campaign designed to promote the security and reliability of snail mail. The first ad, ‘Hacked,’ reminds viewers that snail mail is safer than virus-prone e-mail, while the second ad, “Face to Face,” promotes the value of hand-delivered mail.
this would be tragically funny if not for the annoyance of getting useless statements from td bank and cigna, despite being on edelivery. they must be smoking whatever usps is smoking. good riddance, usps.
typical failure of imagination. all these technologies used to demonstrate a “future” that hasn’t changed in any meaningful way. the message seems to be: don’t worry, you will still get to do all your familiar routines, just cooler! that is not how the future works at all.
The dude is a steel-bending industrial giant in America in a time when there aren’t supposed to be steel-bending industrial giants in America, igniting revolutions in huge, old industries that aren’t supposed to be revolutionable. After emerging from the 1990s dotcom party with $180m, instead of sitting back in his investor chair listening to pitches from groveling young entrepreneurs, he decided to start a brawl with a group of 400 kg sumo wrestlers—the auto industry, the oil industry, the aerospace industry, the military-industrial complex, the energy utilities—and he might actually be winning. And all of this, it really seems, for the purpose of giving our species a better future.
Pretty Kool-Aid worthy. But someone being exceptionally rad isn’t Kool-Aid worthy enough to warrant 90k words over a string of months on a blog that’s supposed to be about a wide range of topics.
During the first post, I laid out the 2 objectives for the series:
1) To understand why Musk is doing what he’s doing.
2) To understand why Musk is able to do what he’s doing.
Technological disruptors like Elon Musk, Google and Amazon will force industries and companies to accelerate or die. Companies will have to accelerate innovation and move to bolder innovation and attempt to shift to technological leapfrogging and shoot for far more aggressive productivity gains.
Elon reiterated that he changed to steel construction for the rocket when carbon fiber was taking too long. Carbon fiber was a standard in the rocket industry.
SpaceX Falcon Heavy use of composites for the fairing (payload nosecone cover). The interstage, which connects the upper and lower stages of the rockets, is a composite structure with an aluminum honeycomb core and carbon fiber face sheets.
In December 2018, 9 months after starting construction of some parts of the first test article carbon composite Starship low-altitude test vehicle, Musk announced a “counterintuitive new design approach” would be taken by the company. SpaceX switched to stainless steel construction.
2021-02-02: This is quite good, done by Sandy Munroe
2023-04-04: Master Plan 3.0, sustainable global energy economy
A sustainable energy economy is technically feasible and requires less investment and less material extraction than continuing today’s unsustainable energy economy. While many prior studies have come to a similar conclusion, this study seeks to push the thinking forward related to material intensity, manufacturing capacity, and manufacturing investment required for a transition across all energy sectors worldwide.
240TWh Storage
$10T Manufacturing Investment
0.21% Land Area Required
ZERO Insurmountable Resource Challenges
30TW Renewable Power
50% The Energy Required
10% 2022 World GDP
the transparent society is nearly here. from the conclusions of the paper:
it is possible to infer someone’s SSN by taking a picture of them and then correlating with public facebook profiles via widely available face recognition. minority report-style personalized advertising will be here long before 2054.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 