Prepare for Change

http://www.mobilisationlab.org/blooming-digital-democracy-taiwan-sunflower-movement/#.VqpWVtDGBo1 "Taiwan has been at the forefront of digital democratization for some time. In 2012, Taiwanese netizens created alternative, crowdsourced .g0v (a number 0 where an O would otherwise be) versions of Government websites where they released data in formats that helped people more easily understand what government ministries were doing. Audrey Tang (Isis Kang/CC BY-NC-ND) 'Most of the technologies we have deployed in Taiwan were neutral; they were intended to encourage people to talk, that’s all. We had a very strong code of neutrality,' said Audrey Tang , a self-professed 'conservative anarchist,' and member of g0v.tw , now a civic movement aiming for true, participatory self-government. Youth leaders, g0v.tw, and other hacktivists all came together last year when the Government’s move to limit public debate on a trade deal with China angered citizens ...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/global-wealth-inequality_56991defe4b0ce4964242e09? "The wealth of the richest 62 has increased an astonishing 44 percent since 2010, to $1.76 trillion. Meanwhile, the wealth of the bottom half of the world dropped by 41 percent. 'This is terrible,' Gawain Kripke, Oxfam's Policy Director, told The Huffington Post. 'No one credible will say this is good for the world or good for the economy.' While the wealthy might argue that their rising wealth is just a fabulous sign of economic prosperity (the "you're just jealous" rationale), the disproportionate growth at the top is keeping those on the bottom from climbing out of poverty, Oxfam notes in its report." There will be no middle class soon. This is going back to the Middle Ages, where the lords in their castles held all the wealth, and the serfs outside the wall toiled in the fields just to survive.  Progress?

http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/12/news/economy/solar-energy-job-growth-us-economy/index.html?sr=twmoney011816solar-energy-job-growth-us-economy0311AMStoryLink&linkId=20439341 "The number of solar jobs in the U.S. has more than doubled in five years. In fact, there are more people working in solar now than at oil rigs and in gas fields. The solar industry added 35,000 jobs in 2015, up 20% from the previous year, according to the Solar Foundation, a nonprofit in Washington D.C.. The group is not funded by solar companies. In contrast, oil and gas firms slashed nearly 17,000 extraction jobs in 2015 as energy prices continue to plummet. Oil prices are down a stunning 70% in the last 18 months and hovering just over $30 a barrel, a 12-year low." Wind energy is also growing fast.  Maintenance people are needed as well in this area; http://energy.gov/eere/education/explore-careers-wind-power

http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/local-homeless-man-arrested-times-twice-this-year/article_2bf875b5-22c1-59df-951a-3e1d77c3e7a5.html "Lariat Comes, a 27-year-old homeless Rapid City man, has been arrested 77 times in the last 7 1/2 years, and twice in the first five days of 2016. He has been accused of stealing everything from the boots of a fellow destitute person to the ramen noodles a man had just purchased from a convenience store at 2:30 one morning." "For a recent grant application to the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, a local consortium attempted to assemble costs associated with “chronic recidivists” and discovered that a few such as Comes cost local organizations nearly $1 million a year. The consortium includes the Police Department, Rapid City Fire Department, City/County Alcohol & Drug Programs, Regional Health, and Pennington County’s Public Defender’s Office, Sheriff’s Office, Health & Human Services, and Communi...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/07/basic-income-royal-family-living-wage-economy " The idea is so refreshingly contrary to the petty conditionality that is killing the welfare state that it began to fill me with optimism that there may be a few people lying in this political gutter still looking at the stars. Once upon a time, universality was the underpinning principle of welfare. Every mother got child benefit; every child got free school milk, until that was snatched away by … Oh, I can’t remember – I’m not one to bear grudges. In Britain we’ve already experimented with a system in which one group of people receive a guaranteed income with no obligation to work for it. But what if this was extended beyond the royal family? Imagine now if everyone in the UK started out with a guaranteed minimal amount of money each week.  All other benefits would be done away with, along with the stigma and entrapment that came with the old system of welfare (and ...

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/23/the-problem-with-self-driving-cars-who-controls-the-code "A car is a high-speed, heavy object with the power to kill its users and the people around it. A compromise in the software that allowed an attacker to take over the brakes, accelerator and steering (such as last summer’s exploit against Chrysler’s Jeeps , which triggered a 1.4m vehicle recall) is a nightmare scenario. The only thing worse would be such an exploit against a car designed to have no user-override – designed, in fact, to treat any attempt from the vehicle’s user to redirect its programming as a selfish attempt to avoid the Trolley Problem’s cold equations. Whatever problems we will have with self-driving cars, they will be worsened by designing them to treat their passengers as adversaries. That has profound implications beyond the hypothetical silliness of the Trolley Problem. The world of networked equipment is already governed by a patchwork...

http://gizmodo.com/can-these-micro-units-fix-new-york-citys-housing-proble-1749125795 "Now wait another second, you’re saying, $2500 to $3000 for a studio in Kips Bay is not affordable! That’s only the market rate (which is actually about the median Manhattan rent for a studio). The rents for the 22 affordable housing units are set at different rates based on income and need. Prospective tenants apply through a lottery and might pay anywhere from $1000 to $1500. 60,000 people applied. So yeah, no one can deny that the demand isn’t there for these types of units. But the bigger question is if these units are actually the right kind of new housing for cities to be building . If we’re talking big picture here, the building as a whole is far more responsible than tacking yet another megadevelopment on the edge of sprawl, forcing all its residents to drive. But the worry is that these tiny spaces will become the new slums of the city, mostly occupied by lower-inc...