Private Fire Departments
This article would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. Look, if you want to do this, privatize core local government services, you can’t force people to pay for the privileged of not utilizing these services (taxes), then charge them when they do (cost of incident response).
What’s worse is the complete lack of transparency in how this occurs – incidence costs, public servants hiring billing companies to chase down constituents, those billing companies hiding under the banner of ‘environmental damage’. It’s a shift to the marketplace… without any of the competitiveness, innovation etc, that drive a market. It’s unethical, it’s wrong, and its bad economics. And the lack of even basic transparency for such a critical service at such a local level is just absolutely terrifying.
Keiichi Matsuda
One of my favorite visual thinkers. He does a great job of tying projecting his own take on a likely future.
For example, this video on retrofitting London to ‘work’ in the future is great:
The Technocrat Retrofit of London from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
Minxin Pei
In the words of an old mentor: “If you aren’t reading Minxin Pei on China, you’re wrong.”
Newspapers Are In A Market Now
Deep coverage, resplendent in video, infographics, and pictures, all in real-time, of evolving global stimuli rather than a broad, geographic segmented approach. In short, monopolies are dead, and all newspapers are competing.
That’s why the Miami Herald has 20 reporters in Haiti.
Idea: Listening + Location
Use a morally neutral set of processes, packaged together, to target someone for anything from charity donations, to assassination, to advertising.
Lock on.
- Find a name (pretty easy), find an address (also pretty easy), and establish this as a baseline. (You can buy this data from a deviant pretty easily if its unavailable on Google.)
- Track your target via social media (without having to read each item). Watch for activity on Twitter, blogs, Facebook.
Establish movement patterns.
- If you’re in the same area, get richer data by put a GPS transponder under their vehicle. (This kind of system, off the shelf, costs about $20 per target per year + a few bucks for hardware.) If not, just pay attention to their mobile location aware app participation.
Expand the network.
- Find who they live with, work with. Execute the same process. Build a network graph. Map out all movement in a particular social cluster. See where they interact. Drop in and listen in to their interaction if its relevant.
Note, this isn’t going to be useful for tracking assets in Afghanistan. However, this can reduce the need for human trackers to participate in the information collection process for middle to upper class individuals with the funds to move, a car, a phone, etc. Think corporate espionage more than network warfare.