First telecommunications, then financial services, finally education

What the digital world and the internet touches must bow to the power of the law of diminishing marginal cost. Telecommunications have already passed through that first phase where it is now possible to communicate with anyone around the globe for an effective cost of zero. Not long ago, realtime communication would cost in the order of $'s per minute. Bank financial transaction costs are also near to zero with accounting compliance costs ready to follow suit. With powerful new tools, creative ideas and growing bandwidth per user, the way education is delivered & consumed is on the verge of a revolution. This is ultimately good for humanity but will feel like a crushing blow for every educational institution that relies on massive physical infrastructure.

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Posted On: 1/1/0001
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Explore the radical potential of your mind

Modifying your own mind for impacting positive outcomes is a real possibility. The implications for how we learn work & care for eachother is profound.

Mind & its Potential 2009 - A Unique Event to be held in Sydney

Speakers include - The Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Dr Martin Seligman, best selling author of Authentic Happiness, amongst many others.


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VIDEO: Good, clean internet censorship?

The power of the internet is in collaboration. So, having asked you to submit your ideas for a TV ad turning up the heat on the Government's internet censorship plan, we're proud to announce the result: a sharp parody video that highlights how ridiculous the plan is - Censordyne!

Luckily, we know where every politician, their advisers and political journos will be - on a plane to Canberra for the next sitting week of Parliament. With your help, we'll have this video playing on every Qantas flight in the country for that entire week:

www.getup.org.au/campaign/Censordyne

Imagine that: every politician will be a captive audience; strapped into their seats and transfixed on the screen in front of them. We can even make sure our ad plays in the middle of the news bulletin - which they're sure to be watching.

That's also over 340,000 passengers who'll find out about the Government's unpopular and ineffective plan to censor the internet while flying around the country. What's more, they've got plenty of time to discuss the issue with those sitting around them.

Let's harness the power of the internet to save it - your contribution, matched by thousands of others like you, can take our campaign sky high. And it couldn't be at a more crucial time, with trials of the filter about to finish the Government will soon make a decision:

www.getup.org.au/campaign/Censordyne

 


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Why Western Australia Will Eclipse Dubai

We’ve all marvelled at the mega scale engineering projects that have defined Dubai and the United Arab Emirates over the past decade including artificial islands, massive skyscrapers rising up out of the desert sand and huge indoor snow ski fields but much of this development has been nothing more than an outpouring of the egotism of a bunch of middle eastern would-be-kings and a complete misallocation of resources. Not only are these megaliths a symbol of excess & misallocation, they are also the product of an exploited and downtrodden expatriate workforce.

 

It is the people of a nation that hold all the promise for the future and Dubai is now an emptied out husk with their airport littered with cars left behind by fleeing citizens and foreign workers afraid of the terrors of Sharia law as the leave behind unpaid loans in the wake of the recent financial meltdown.

 

Hopefully we the citizens of Western Australia will have watched and learned from the downfall of the UAE and Dubai. Perhaps we will invest wisely in educating our young people and refrain from exploiting the poor and the downtrodden. After all, when the minerals are leached from the ground we will have to make do with the imagination of our citizens.

 

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The Curse of Religion - why progress will be compromised in Western Australia

And here is the problem: the religions think they have much greater rights than anyone or anything else – rights to be heard, to be exempt from laws, to be awarded special privileges, to be given our tax money to run their own schools, to have representatives in the House of Lords (26 bishops plus all those retired bishops and archbishops who are now life peers), to be given hours and hours of air time on publicly funded radio every week, to have charitable status, to have their hospital chaplains paid for by the public purse, and so on and endlessly on, getting a huge slice of the pie out of all proportion to the realities: which – as an indication of the overall picture – are that about 3% of the population go to Church of England services every Sunday, less than 10% of the population going weekly to any church, temple, mosque or synagogue. And the state goes along with it!

How can this be tolerable? All religious organisations should be relegated to the status of private self-selected and self-constituted NGOs like trade unions and other lobby groups, should survive on what money they can raise from their adherents, should have the same and no more than the same rights and entitlements as any other such organisation and should stop getting privileges, money and an amplification for their views (views, never forget, derived from the beliefs of illiterate goat-herds in ancient times) from government.

What would we think if the Labour party or Conservative party received taxpayers' money to run Labour party or Conservative party schools to teach 3- and 4-year-olds their party principles? Or astrologers, crystal gazers, voodoo merchants, druids, witches – all self-described and self-selected as such, and all parti-pris in their own way?

Let us note how the archbishops and rabbi stand together to block progress towards more humane laws. Technically, of course, each archbishop is doctrinally obliged to regard the other one and the rabbi as one or more of heretic, infidel or apostate; their organisations spent most of history fighting, persecuting and executing each other; indeed all religions have to regard all other religions as getting it wrong and misleading their votaries.

But when the religions are after a common goal, as with getting our tax money for their faith-based schools, or exemption from discrimination laws, or seats in parliament, they are a united front. This used to be called hypocrisy, but no doubt modern theology has come up with a convoluted polysyllable to redefine it.

Not that a new name helps much; rubbish smells as bad no matter what you call it. Read the complete article by AC Greyling


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Comment: Get real, drug czars - New Scientist article

ELEVEN years ago, the UN pledged to win the war on drugs within a decade. It has failed.

At this year's meeting of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, held in Vienna in March, there was a two-day session to evaluate the progress since 1998. In his opening remarks, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, claimed "measurable progress". The drug problem has been "contained", he said, and drug use has "stabilised".

Costa's position flies in the face of the evidence, and by the end of the meeting he was on the defensive. But he said the goal remains the same, and he reiterated the UN's position: that the choice for the world's nations is either to apply strict prohibition or concede to total legalisation.

Soon after the meeting, the US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, acknowledged the failure to stamp out poppy farming in Afghanistan. Of the US expenditure of over $800 million a year on counter-narcotics, Holbrooke said: "We have gotten nothing out of it, nothing."

Those in charge of the world's drug control system seem more committed to maintaining the existing policy than to addressing its failures. International discussions on the subject have become absurd, and nowhere is this more apparent than with cannabis. Although cannabis amounts to perhaps 80 per cent of total global illicit drug use, there was scarcely any mention of it in Vienna. Read on about the failed drug war


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Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

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How to stop the drug wars

Drugs impose a terrible cost on society and Western Australia is no different in this respect to the rest of the world.

In the following article, Economist.com argues that legalisation is the 'least bad' option. A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008. That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.Read on about the drug war at economist.com


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