The 15 May movement caught most everyone by surprise. The Spanish millenials had been dismissed as apolitical and apathetic, certainly incapable of starting a movement of mass revolutionary consciousness. But change was coming. In the early days of the fiscal crisis, Spain’s Creative Commons community politicized, expanding their mission away from the internet and towards […]
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Il ne suffira pas de trouver de nouveaux mots pour parler de la bonne vieille souveraineté si on veut convaincre les jeunes. Ce n’est pas à un problème de marketing auquel fait face le mouvement souverainiste. Le défi est bien plus fondamental: c’est la nature de notre démarche que nous devons accepter de remettre en […]
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Fin aux paradis fiscaux. Fin à l’évasion fiscale. Fin de la corruption des petits amis du régime. Lumière sur le scandale des PCAA. Voilà une vision courageuse pour une société juste et financièrement viable. Ce sont les bandits qui nous coûtent cher, et surtout, leur avocat. —Petits rappels aux riches de ce monde (via Québec […]
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Mettra-t-on autant de diligence, d’enthousiasme et de centaines de milliards à reconstruire Port-au-Prince qu’on en a mis à sauver les banques, l’industrie automobile? —Pays sans chapeau
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Awesome post by Allistair Croll about money, reputation and attention, the Three economies of online currency.
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Not surprisingly, Wall Street ran with these opportunities. From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, […]
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Umair Haque is probably the closest thing to a maître à penser I have right now. His examples in this presentation are, like the ones Malcolm Gladwell uses, sometimes too simplified or tweaked to better fit his theories but they don’t invalidate what he is saying. Some fascinating stuff about innovation and the 21st century […]
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The second way to look at things is that we are not in a panic, but in the painful process of deflating a credit bubble. Bank assets are not trading at pretend prices that we can just dismiss as a collective case of the vapors, but at prices near their actual value. The markets are […]
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On peut souhaiter que ce scénario se réalise : il vaut mieux une sortie de crise immorale qu’une dépression. Mais, malheureusement, rien ne sera réglé : resterons intacts les risques, sur la survie des entreprises, sur l’immensité des dettes publiques, sur les retraites, sur la valeur des actifs, sur les emplois. On se demandera alors […]
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Next time the prime minister talks about every country being brought down by this crisis – or the chancellor suggests that everyone made the same mistakes – remember Canada. Nowhere is immune, but by most key measures, the Canadians are coming out of this crisis in a league of their own… Take the banking system. […]
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The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo. Oldish but I hadn’t looked at it yet.
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The Australian government said on Tuesday that it would create a publicly owned company to build a national high-speed broadband network worth 43 billion Australian dollars, or $31 billion, in one of the largest state-sponsored Internet infrastructure upgrades in the world. —Australia Moves to Build High-Speed Network
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With all the talk about restarting the economy (US) or preventing more important slow downs (Canada), a solution oft proposed is to spend on infrastructure, creating jobs. In Québec I would certainly support that, it’s an old school solution that doesn’t encourage new forms of transportation but the existing infrastructure does need a good upgrade. […]
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For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us. —Time to Reboot America
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…that the term “peak waste” is perhaps more accurate. In an analogy to peak oil, he suggested that maybe we’ve reached the pinnacle of waste in our consumer culture. I do wonder if we will look back at the past few decades as a kind of sick aberration rather than a golden age, with good […]
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