Surplus Happiness
Recent articles in the Economist and elsewhere have indicated that we like to help other people only when we have so much stuff that we can't help it.
A Short but (hopefully) growing discussion of this can be found here.
High Stake Communication
From my Smartmobs blog:
Last weekend I tried to write a coherent article about emergent cooperation in the middle east in general and Iraq in particular.
I wrote and deleted and re-wrote and just didn't get what I wanted. So I'm just going to give you a bunch of links.
The first thing I wanted to show was this article showing cooperation between the new Iraqi Government and the Italian Government. The goal here seems to be to give Iraq a stable connection from Iraq to the rest of the world that does not rely on easily sabotaged technologies.
The next thing is the meta-topic of pan-arabic cooperation internally and externally to try to get a handle on general unrest. (General Stuff). Whether we are discussing the difficulties of intra-religious cooperation or inter-everything cooperation ... there seems to be no doubt that there is movement to get somethign done.
What is fascinating is to read these articles from around the world and start counting up all the institutional issues that impact middle east cooperat
The Grokster Case - Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban has written an excellent and concise piece regarding the impacts that current litigation brought by the entertainment industry could have on our future. It strikes me that the Grokster Case is not unlike This Case Here.
