Whatever you think of the new James Blake album, this is worth reading if only for this comment.

The ship" - he means the music business - "isn't just going down. There are people trapped inside, bashing on the windows trying to get out."

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This.

"What needs addressing as a matter of absolute urgency right now, however, is that Thatcher 's legacy is one of gross, almost comically staggering inequality. We are not all in this together. We are heading down shit creek while a tiny few of "them" are up on the clifftop holding all the paddles. Inequality, inequality, inequality, stupid. If there's good to come from her death, beyond a few street parties, it's that we realise that Thatcherism never died, was never truly even un-elected. It's time to shake ourselves, and others, out of the daze into which we were collectively not so much handbagged as headbutted back in the early 80s. Thatcherism was the worst thing to happen to this country since the Second World War and it'll carry on happening to us unless we do something about it."

We need some better analysis beyond the uncritical hagiography or the rant of hatred. Perhaps this is it.

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30 years on and Alexie Sayle's comments about Stoke Newington are still as relevant as ever. Hard to believe this was 1982. It feels like yesterday. 

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I know we live in a TL;DR culture and you haven't got time to properly express what you think and feel or add much value to the link you shared. But if it's too long, either read it anyway and attempt to comprehend it, or don't pass comment at all.

Language is the ultimate technology In fact, I'll go so far as to say: It's not okay to fail at written language as a modern, technologically-empowered human being.

And no, recording yourself talking about the idea and then posting it on Youtube is not an acceptable alternative to writing it down. TL;DV is also a problem made worse because it's much harder to skim and speed-read video.

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With the end of Yahoo! Messages, Yahoo! succeeded in destroying the most amount of history in the shortest amount of time, certainly on purpose, in known memory.
http://ianmilligan.ca/2013/04/03/yahoo-sucks-historians-wake-up/

Dream on. The industry doesn't do hundred-year periods, and that's why digital archives are no more stable than, say, the finance industry.
http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2013/04/dead-media-beat-speculating-about-migration-hell/
"Unless we reach a stage where archival technology becomes as stable as paper and printing had been for decades, centuries even, then we cannot, unquestioning, keep all the data we digitally collect."

Total data is growing faster than total storage. So we're not just creating data faster than ever, we're also forgetting it faster than ever.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. 

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If I mute a person and mute their post, don't keep putting that post back into my notifications each time somebody else comments on it. Duh!
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Without RSS all we'd have is pictures of cats and breakfast.

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March came in like a Lion, it should have gone out like a Lamb but actually went out like a Tiger. And now Spring has arrived.

No. April Fool. It's still Winter.
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It's more important to not buy in than to not sell out.

R.U. Sirus for president!

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If you share a post with circles, you can't share it with a community as well. Really, why not? I want to.
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So how much did the other fast food burger chain pay to get a product placement name check in tonight's episode of the BBC's Dr Who? I know it's now a global franchise, but, really? 

And they couldn't name Jammy Dodgers?

Is it reasonable to think that the BBC making money from things like Dr Who like this makes the license fee money go further and help to fund all the properly good things the BBC does, like the Afghanistan pashtun World Service (yes, I know it got cut.). Or, is that argument flawed?

Meanwhile USians have been complaining of not being able to listen to Neverwhere on iPlayer due to region restrictions. Well, I'm very happy for my license fee to pay for them to hear it. Please make it so.
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Out soon (Apr 8?). Whole EP works nicely.

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Two excellent reviewers
http://thequietus.com/articles/11760-hyperspecific-21-electronic-music-review-dj-rashad-matmos-covered-in-sand
Rory Gibb's Hyperspecific column on The Quietus is always good value.

http://whitenoisereview.blogspot.co.uk/
White Noise has his finger on the pulse of UK Armchair Dance, or whatever it's called.

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Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, The Jagged Orbit, Shockwave Rider should be required reading. They all resonate well with the world in 2013.
http://www.themillions.com/2013/03/the-weird-1969-new-wave-sci-fi-novel-that-correctly-predicted-the-current-day.html

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Yay! Crutchlow on pole with the fastest combined time for the three days.

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Sub-pontian idea of the day for G+
1) Collect all the most annoying people you can find in one circle
2) Give the circle an un-threatening name like, say, Sci-Fi 
3) Share the circle widely with your followers
4) Sit back in the knowledge of a job well done
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Marquez on a damp track. What is he doing? How does he do that?
http://pix.crash.net/motorsport/710/PA1296054.jpg
http://www.crash.net/motogp/picturearchive/0/126/2013+motogp/4876/photos.html

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Another example of why I find Charles Stross' blog to be essential and thought provoking reading.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/03/the-permanent-revolution.html
Today's rant is about the ideological flavour of a belief in endless exponential growth and what it means for society. 

My own thoughts are too confused here to be offer much comment. But this. Robert Wilson's and Terence McKenna's ideas about accelerating change proved to be too strong. The novelty curve didn't go vertical in an exponential growth singularity in Dec 2012. So the model was too simplistic. But a sigmoid curve where we're past the steepest part and rate of change is levelling out is also too simplistic a model. And so back to Limits to Growth again. 
http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2846/28462101.jpg
That model recognises global macro economics as a whole series of interdependent variables, all with implications and all with major lags. Almost every single run results in exponential growth, sigmoid slowing and then a catastrophic correction.

Then there's Buckminster Fuller and Thermodynamics. The laws of thermodynamics and especially the second law are usually quoted without the words "in a closed system". So one approach for dealing with the downsides of exponential growth and this statement "Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist - Kenneth Boulter, Economist." is to look for ways in which the system can be changed so that it is no longer closed. In 17th Century England, this would avoid the resource limitations of sheep and wool via imperialism. In the 21st century this might be post-industrial knowledge work, the industrialisation of space, much greater and direct exploitation of solar power and others. That doesn't nullify  the resource limits of oil energy or minerals, or the negative drivers such as pollution, but it does perhaps allow us to sidestep them.

Meanwhile, 99.9% of the population of the earth has a long way to go before it has the lifestyle and comforts of Louis XIV so explonential change, improvement and the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.

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