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How cheap can you make a phone?
Recently, I paid $12 at Mingtong Digital Mall for a complete phone, featuring quad-band GSM, Bluetooth, MP3 playback, and an OLED display plus keypad for the UI. Simple, but functional; nothing compared to a smartphone, but useful if you’re going out and worried about getting your primary phone wet or stolen.
Also, it would certainly find an appreciative audience in impoverished and developing nations.
Plant-based products meant to resemble animal foods are becoming even more convincing and delicious – and lowering the barriers to a vegan lifestyle
Some of the most anticipated and iconic promises of the future have come up empty. There are no flying cars, interstellar teleporters, floating hoverboards, or fully functional, live-in robotic house cleaners. Not only have we not colonised Mars – we haven’t even set foot on it.
Erik Olin Wright. Envisioning Real Utopias (London and New York: Verso, 2010).
Although this book covers much of the same ground, and does much of the same work, as autonomist and post-capitalist theories like Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth and Mason’s Postcapitalism, Olin-Wright comes from the entirely different tradition of analytical Marxism. This school approaches Marxist theory from a background of analytic philosophy and public choice theory; Wright himself is a sociologist, rather than a political economist.
This may explain why he rules out any comprehensive theory of history from the outset. Specifically, in Chapter Four, he rejects Marx’s model of a historical trajectory which views capitalism as a historic system with an end as well as a beginning, and of socialism as something which will fully emerge following the terminal crises of capitalism. As I will argue below, this amounts to discarding some extremely valuable tools for anticipating the course of post-capitalist transition.
A very wide range of issues have been raised in the many interesting postings and comments during the Crooked Timber seminar about my book Envisioning Real Utopias which ran from March 18-28. In what follows I will give at least a brief response to the core themes of each of the eight contributions to the seminar. I will organize my reflections in the order of the contributions in the symposium.
http://crookedtimber.org/2013/04/03/reflections-on-real-utopias/#more-28154
“Take what you need, give if you can.”
In the first of its kind, a food-rescue supermarket opens its doors in Sydney, Australia. The revolutionary food store was opened by OzHarvest, Australia’s leading food waste organisation. The food rescue operation collects surplus food from 2,000 commercial outlets and redistributes it to 900 charities.
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/first-food-rescue-supermarket-opens-in-australia/
The Nanjing vertical forest will be higher than its Milanese predecessor, with two neighbouring towers at 200 and 108 meters tall.
World Economic Forum | about a year ago
They could be the breath of fresh air that pollution-choked cities desperately need. Vertical forests – high-rise buildings covered with trees and plants – absorb carbon dioxide, filter dust from pollution and produce oxygen.
http://ewn.co.za/2017/05/05/china-is-about-to-get-its-first-vertical-forest
Bricks have been 3-D printed out of simulated moondust using concentrated sunlight – proving in principle that future lunar colonists could one day use the same approach to build settlements on the moon.
“We took simulated lunar material and cooked it in a solar furnace,” explains materials engineer Advenit Makaya, overseeing the project for ESA.
“This was done on a 3-D printer table, to bake successive 0.1 mm layers of moondust at 1000°C. We can complete a 20 x 10 x 3 cm brick for building in around five hours.”
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-05-bricks-moondust-sun.html#jCp
An important breakthrough has been made in the eradication of AIDs. Scientists have found they can successfully snip out the HIV virus from mouse cells using CRISPR/Cas9 technology.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/03/scientists-have-eliminated-hiv-in-mice-using-crispr/
This isn’t science fiction. A number of start-ups as well as big aerospace
firms are trying to build personal aircraft you could fly around town.
CLEARLAKE, Calif. — On a recent afternoon, an aerospace engineer working for a small Silicon Valley company called Kitty Hawk piloted a flying car above a scenic lake about 100 miles north of San Francisco.
Kitty Hawk’s flying car, if you insisted on calling it a “car,” looked like something Luke Skywalker would have built out of spare parts. It was an open-seated, 220-pound contraption with room for one person, powered by eight battery-powered propellers that howled as loudly as a speedboat.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/technology/flying-car-technology.html
Have you heard the line recently that grid-based battery storage is “coming”, but is not quite “commercial”, but might be in a few years time, or even a decade or two?
It’s a common misconception. But if you wondered about the overwhelming response to the recent tenders by South Australia and Victoria for the country’s largest battery storage installations, here’s why: The technology is already in the money.
Free urban transport is spreading. In his research, Wojciech Keblowski, an expert on urban research at Brussels Free University, says that in 2017 there were 99 fare-free public transport networks around the world: 57 in Europe, 27 in North America, 11 in South America, 3 in China and one in Australia. Many are smaller than Dunkirk and offer free transit limited to certain times, routes and people.
In February this year, Germany announced it was planning to trial free public transport in five cities – including the former capital Bonn and industrial cities Essen and Mannheim. In June this was downgraded to a slashing of public transport fares to persuade people to ditch cars.