All posts by Paul Raven

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North Dakota vs Minnesota: interstate economic warfare

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To a nominal Brit like myself, reading about the American governmental system is a constant stream of surprises. It’s one thing to understand that a country comprised of fifty-odd states (which are themselves the size of some sovereign countries) will have baked a certain degree of local independence into its legislature, but entirely another to read about the ways that such an arrangement can manifest itself. Case in point: North Dakota is suing Minnesota over its newly-introduced carbon taxation laws, which (so North Dakota claims) “unfairly discourage coal-powered electricity sales in favor of renewably powered electricity”. [via BoingBoing]

I’m seeing this legislation described as the first real-world example of a carbon tariff, which suggests that such measures are going to have a rocky reception when they become more widespread… but that was a given, I suppose. What’s rreally interesting as an outsider is the way this case highlights the increasingly fragmentary nature of the United States; I have no idea how it looks from within, but from this side of the pond, some form of religio-econo-political schism splitting the US into geographically-defined factions (remember the Jesusland map?) doesn’t seem like a massive leap of the imagination.

But that’s massively uninformed armchair punditry on my part, so it’s over to Futurismic‘s American readership: to a citizen of the United States, does it feel like the Union is becoming increasingly strained by hyperpolarised political ideologies and economic difficulties? Or are we just seeing something that has always been there? (Feel free to sound off on political issues, but keep it friendly, please.)

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Citizen status for dolphins?

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Well, maybe not… but researchers who work with dolphins have long proclaimed their high level of intelligence, suggesting that they’re the second smartest critter on Earth (after ourselves, natch). Now some are saying that they should be granted a suite of basic rights as befits “non-human persons”. [via @fabiofernandes; image by Just Taken Pics]

If this sounds familiar, then you’ve been paying attention – a little over a year ago we mentioned the Great Ape Project, a pressure group pushing for human rights for our primate cousins, and there was a court case in Austria a while back in which campaigners attempted to get a court to rule that a chimpanzee called Hiasl should have parity of rights with human beings.

Given the number of other more pressing issues on our collective plate at the moment, I can’t see human-level rights for higher animals becoming a hot-button issue any time soon. But the activities of the more radical (and, for my money, seriously misguided and hypocritical) animal rights groups have begun to nudge into the realms of terrorism; as the centralised political power of nation-states continues to fragment under the pressure of networked special-interest groups, we can probably expect to see more drastic demonstrations of discontent from those who would see some other species join humanity at the top of the ladder. Enumerating the deep ironies implicit in that (and in all other types of terrorism, state-sanctioned or otherwise) is left as an exercise for the reader.

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What will publishing look like a decade from now?

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Via a whole bunch of sources comes this piece by former publisher Richard Nash at Galleycat – an eight-point bullet list of the changes he expects to see in the publishing industry over the next ten years. [image by adactio]

There’s nothing in there that you’ll not have heard from various prophets of hegemonic disruption, but to have a former publisher repeating it on a site which is very much a core industry organ (at least in the online sphere) suggests a certain degree of grudging acceptance of the changes coming down the pike. Here’s a couple of my favourites:

6. In 2020 we will look back on the last days of publishing and realize that it was not a surfeit of capitalism that killed it, but rather an addiction to a mishmash of Industrial Revolution practices that killed it, including a Fordist any color so long as it is black attitude to packaging the product, a Sloanist hierarchical management approach to decision making, and a GM-esque continual rearranging of divisions like deck chairs on the Titanic based on internal management preferences rather than consumer preferences.

7. In 2020 some people will still look back on recent decades as a Golden Age, just as some now look back on the 1950’s as a Golden Age, notwithstanding that the Age was golden largely for white men in tweed jackets who got to edit and review one another and congratulate one another for permitting a few women and the occasional Black man into the club.

I believe the appropriate phrase is “zing”.

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Protective workwear supplied: cleaning the Burj Dubai

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File under science fictional employment opportunities: the Burj Dubai (that ludicrously huge tower in Dubai which we’ve mentioned here before) is finally open for business (if there’s any business left, natch), which means they need to keep the thing clean for tourists and visiting dignitaries – quite a challenge when you’re talking about a building that clocks in at over 800m in height. [image courtesy Wikipedia]

There are 23,000 glass panels on that thing, most of which will be cleaned by BMUs (robot Building Maintenance Units), but some of the uppermost sections just can’t be reached without using old-fashioned meatworkers with ropes and harnesses… and to protect them from the harsh sun up there, the workers wear a get-up much like a spacesuit, complete with a backpack full of electrolytic “sports beverage” to keep them hydrated.

Certainly not a job for anyone with phobias of heights. Or claustrophobia, for that matter… [via @Ballardian]