Read moreA nicked iPhone and credit card lets you buy criminal [Augmented Reality] layers that establish where CCTV is densest in relation to regions with the wealthiest demographic, establishing the easiest predation.
Quotes
Read moreAll portable items must be either tied to the walls or stuck to your body. This fact accounts for the design of your new pants, space life’s primary contribution to futuristic fashion. Your space pants have thick Velcro strips across the thighs so you can stick your favorite toys to your legs and fly around barnacled with notepads, pens, and cameras. Ditch your shoes—you’ll nearly never be standing on anything. You’ll need, however, warm socks since your feet will lack proper blood flow and will always be cold.
The sun rises or sets through the portholes 16 times a day. Because the sunlight in outer space is cruelly bright you’ll need a baseball hat and some sunglasses. You might also opt for an open-collar golf shirt in an unnatural color, usually decorated with some nifty astro-industrial logo—–a tech college or European space agency.
Read moreToday there are 793 people on our list of the World’s Billionaires, a 30% decline from a year ago.
Of the 1,125 billionaires who made last year’s ranking, 373 fell off the list–355 from declining fortunes and 18 who died. There are 38 newcomers, plus three moguls who returned to the list after regaining their 10-figure fortunes. It is the first time since 2003 that the world has had a net loss in the number of billionaires.
Read moreThe number of U.S. households with a net worth of $1 million or more, not including first homes, fell by 2.5 million to 6.7 million in 2008, according to the Spectrem Group report, as reported by Rueters
…there isn’t going to be any turning point…there isn’t going to be any next-month-it’ll-be-better, next fucking year, next fucking life. You don’t have any time to wait for. You just got to look around you and say, So this is it. This is really all there is to it.
Janis Joplin (via louobedlam) (via theremina)
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Read moreSeafaring ships of the great age of exploration were largely wooden, and — with the aid of their human crew — self-repairing; subject to the availability of raw materials, there wasn’t much aboard a 16th or 17th century sailing ship that couldn’t be made on board. Aside from carpentry, the inhabitants of even a relatively small port could make the necessities to keep a ship at sea on a voyage of years — a smithy, a pottery, a glass-blower, weavers of sailcloth and makers of hardtack. Shipbuilding was by no means easy (it was an economic activity born on the backs of the large numbers of peasant farmers and fisherfolk it took to provide the surplus to feed the workers in the shipyards) but it wasn’t anything like the Apollo project, which sucked up the labour of a third of a million skilled engineers and technicians for a decade. The word ship therefore comes freighted with connotations of autonomy and sustainability that are inappropriate to space travel as we know it today. And one of the most perfidious, misleading, damning, unconscious associations of the word “ship” is the word “destination”.
Read moreyes, I think human interstellar exploration (and yes, maybe even colonization) might be possible, after a fashion. But to get there, we’re going to have to master at least two entire technological fields that don’t yet exist, even before we start trying to blast compact disc sized machines up to relativistic velocities.
Read moreWaypoints located on the surface of the Earth are usually defined in two dimensions (e.g., longitude and latitude); those used in the Earth’s atmosphere or in outer space are defined in at least three dimensions (four if time is one of the coordinates, as it might be for some waypoints outside the Earth).
Read moreThe moratorium and dream pursuing type of freeter deliberately chooses not to join the rat race in the usually strict and conservative companies (see: Culture of Japan) but instead wants to take a time-out to enjoy life or have specific dreams incompatible with a standard Japanese career
Read moreThe sense of stasis in many Western countries is reminiscent of Japan, where talk of a lost generation has been around since as long ago as 1995. Some 3.1 million Japanese aged 25 to 34 work as temps or contract employees—up from 2 million 10 years ago, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Many Japanese blame the young people themselves, saying they are spoiled, alienated “freeters"—a term meaning job-hopping part-timers
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 