Philip Morgan's Tumblr

Writer, photographer.

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

– Kahlil Gibran (via quote-book)

“You mean the generation that paid three times as much for college to enter a job market with triple the unemployment isn’t interested in purchasing the assets of the generation who just blew an enormous housing bubble and kept it from popping through quantitative easing and out-and-out federal support? Curious.”

– When comments are better than the article, Atlantic edition (“The Cheapest Generation: Why Millennials arent’ buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy”)

“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 14,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”

–

Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class - Salon.com

I like Jaron Lanier a lot, but this illustration as some sort of evidence of the internet hollowing out the middle class is, forgive me for saying so, idiotic. A child could figure out where those jobs went. 

1) Instagram SHOWS the photos. We have to include all of the people who work on the cloud that supports that. 

2) Kodak made cameras and film. Cameras are still being made - even moreso. At the very least, we should include the current #1 camera maker’s employees. At this point, that’s apple. Fifty thousand employees. Pro rate it to only the apple devices that have cameras, ignoring their mac business. 30,000 employees. 

3) The film business still exists. It was just lost to Fujichrome, who still makes film and has over 30,000 employees. This has nothing to do with the web, but rather something called “Globalization.” 

The internet didn’t kill a single job in photography. There are more cameras now than ever. There are still tens of thousands of people making film. 

Take the market cap of JUST these three companies - facebook, apple, fujifilm, and we’re looking at $500 billion market cap, and nearly 90,000 employees. 

Think that’s unfair? Canon has nearly 200,000 employees. Nikon has 24,000. 10,000 more than Kodak. Shit, ZEISS has 24,000 employees. 

Never mind every single camera in an android phone. 

Those jobs went overseas, and they went to computer companies, Mr. Lanier. They still exist. The internet didn’t kill a single one of them. 

(via rickwebb)

Stowe Boyd: What Drives Us? »

stoweboyd:

I’ve been researching some background materials for the Socialogy book I am working on, and was digging into various theories on personality, organizational fit, and human motivations. This started as a modest collection of others’ ideas, but as you can imagine, it led to the outpouring of my own…

perscientiamlibertas: Image: Invelox Invelox wind turbine claims 600% advantage in energy output News on the wind power front! The US-based energy technology company SheerWind claims that, during tests, their “Invelox” wind turbine generated six times as much energy as its traditional equivalent, as well as with cheaper costs that allow it to compete with natural gas and hydropower. According to a news release by SheerWind the Invelox wind turbine can also: operate at wind speeds “as low as 1 mile per hour” features an installation cost of “less that $750 per KW” increases “energy production capacity to record high of 72%” minimised environmental impacts What makes Invelox different? According to gizmag: “Invelox takes a novel approach to wind power generation as it doesn’t rely on high wind speeds. Instead, it captures wind at any speed, even a breeze, from a portal located above ground. The wind captured is then funneled through a duct where it will pick up speed. The resulting kinetic energy will drive the generator on the ground level. By bringing the airflow from the top of the tower, it’s possible to generate more power with smaller turbine blades” As with all emergent energy technologies, especially those claiming a performance breakthrough, there results need to be treated with caution. Especially as “SheerWind makes the claim based on its own comparative tests, the precise methodology of which is not entirely clear.” Large-scale availability of the Invelox turbine is slated for 2014.  Continue reading / SheerWind Press Release Further reading: Rethinking wind power - Harvard research suggests real-world generating capacity of wind farms at large scales has been overestimated Japan to replace nuclear plant with world’s largest wind farm Wind, solar power paired with storage could be cost-effective way to power grid Japanese breakthrough will make wind power cheaper than nuclear

perscientiamlibertas:

Image: Invelox

Invelox wind turbine claims 600% advantage in energy output

News on the wind power front! The US-based energy technology company SheerWind claims that, during tests, their “Invelox” wind turbine generated six times as much energy as its traditional equivalent, as well as with cheaper costs that allow it to compete with natural gas and hydropower.

According to a news release by SheerWind the Invelox wind turbine can also:

  • operate at wind speeds “as low as 1 mile per hour”
  • features an installation cost of “less that $750 per KW”
  • increases “energy production capacity to record high of 72%”
  • minimised environmental impacts

What makes Invelox different? According to gizmag:

“Invelox takes a novel approach to wind power generation as it doesn’t rely on high wind speeds. Instead, it captures wind at any speed, even a breeze, from a portal located above ground. The wind captured is then funneled through a duct where it will pick up speed. The resulting kinetic energy will drive the generator on the ground level. By bringing the airflow from the top of the tower, it’s possible to generate more power with smaller turbine blades”

As with all emergent energy technologies, especially those claiming a performance breakthrough, there results need to be treated with caution. Especially as

“SheerWind makes the claim based on its own comparative tests, the precise methodology of which is not entirely clear.”

Large-scale availability of the Invelox turbine is slated for 2014. 

Continue reading / SheerWind Press Release

Further reading:

“As soon as the star hits the 56 nucleon (total number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus) cutoff, it falls apart. It doesn’t make anything heavier than 56. What does this have to do with red paint? Because the star stops at 56, it winds up making a ton of things with 56 neucleons. It makes more 56 nucleon containing things than anything else (aside from the super light stuff in the star that is too light to fuse). The element that has 56 protons and neutrons in its nucleus in its stable state? Iron. The stuff that makes red paint. And that, Zunger explains, is how the death of a star determines what color barns are painted.”

– Barns Are Painted Red Because of the Physics of Dying Stars | Smart News

stoweboyd: How the Postnormal era will change everything  Organizations are becoming fast-and-loose, reconfiguring around social networks instead of business processes, becoming more decentralized and as autonomy increases, more egalitarian. We will completely drop the pretense of objectivity — a tension that is eating away at journalism and old school media like hydrochloric acid — and accept the inherent need for partiality as the grounding of all belief. We will belong to our networks — which are our own — and not to institutions that require us to subordinate our interests and selves. Families will become less Leave it to Beaver and instead we’ll embrace a broad spectrum of alternative living arrangements that include the growing numbers of people who live alone but are very social, groups of friends sharing space and other intentional communities, and non-traditional families with multiple generations living together, gay and lesbian families and all sorts of extended arrangements. The corner on the postnormal is when we actively work to build an economy that is not fueled by growth and globalism and instead is local and steady-state oriented. Today’s political boundaries make no sense: they are the outgrowth of royal treaties, conquest, and the misuse of resources. We should start with the natural ecological unit — the watershed — and replace the notion of provinces (US states) with those. I for example, live in the Hudson River Watershed. Locale is still relevant, so people still would be tied to San Francisco, or Beacon NY. And regionalism is still meaningful, but not necessarily the way today’s borders fall. And finally, we need to consider the world and its resources as a shared commons, and not spoils to be owned by the fortunate or wealthy. Participative media not mass media. A major transition to restorative and sustainable relationship to the environment is essential, or we will all boil. And a relaxing of the failed dogmas of orthodox religions, and a more taoist reorientation of our spirituality toward the enigma of life and the universe, and a greater acceptance of the myriad ways in which people might choose to express their awe and faith.

stoweboyd:

How the Postnormal era will change everything 

Organizations are becoming fast-and-loose, reconfiguring around social networks instead of business processes, becoming more decentralized and as autonomy increases, more egalitarian.

We will completely drop the pretense of objectivity — a tension that is eating away at journalism and old school media like hydrochloric acid — and accept the inherent need for partiality as the grounding of all belief.

We will belong to our networks — which are our own — and not to institutions that require us to subordinate our interests and selves.

Families will become less Leave it to Beaver and instead we’ll embrace a broad spectrum of alternative living arrangements that include the growing numbers of people who live alone but are very social, groups of friends sharing space and other intentional communities, and non-traditional families with multiple generations living together, gay and lesbian families and all sorts of extended arrangements.

The corner on the postnormal is when we actively work to build an economy that is not fueled by growth and globalism and instead is local and steady-state oriented.

Today’s political boundaries make no sense: they are the outgrowth of royal treaties, conquest, and the misuse of resources. We should start with the natural ecological unit — the watershed — and replace the notion of provinces (US states) with those. I for example, live in the Hudson River Watershed. Locale is still relevant, so people still would be tied to San Francisco, or Beacon NY. And regionalism is still meaningful, but not necessarily the way today’s borders fall. And finally, we need to consider the world and its resources as a shared commons, and not spoils to be owned by the fortunate or wealthy.

Participative media not mass media.

A major transition to restorative and sustainable relationship to the environment is essential, or we will all boil.

And a relaxing of the failed dogmas of orthodox religions, and a more taoist reorientation of our spirituality toward the enigma of life and the universe, and a greater acceptance of the myriad ways in which people might choose to express their awe and faith.

“The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive. They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions—sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear. Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments—both physical and emotional—unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss—another person’s shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.”

– Susan Cain  (via bluishtigers)

8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance

disquietingtruths:

  1. Student-Loan Debt.
  2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance.
  3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy.
  4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.”
  5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously.
  6. The Normalization of Surveillance.
  7. Television.
  8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism.

Read More