Vallejo, CA became the largest city in America to declare bankruptcy in 2008.
The working-class port city of Vallejo, California became the largest city in America to declare bankruptcy in 2008. Crime and prostitution surged as the police force was thinned by 40 percent. Firehouses were shuttered, and funding for libraries and senior centers was slashed. Foreclosures multiplied and home prices plummeted.
Unlike the contents of your inbox, bank statement, or Facebook timeline, your DNA quite literally defines you. It’s strange, then, that in an age where sequencing the genome is becoming trivial, we don’t give a second thought about the privacy issues surrounding the chemicals that make us who we are.
In fact, most states in the US have absolutely no laws whatsoever to govern surreptitious genetic testing. If that surprises you, it gets worse. Back in 2006, the particularly forward-thinking state of Minnesota passed a law demanding that written consent had to be obtained for collection, storage, use, and sharing of genetic information. In 2011, however, the Minnesota Supreme Court judged that the state’s own department of health was in violation of that very law.
So, quite literally millions of US citizen have their DNA records stored on databases, and there are few laws governing what’s done with the data. Something has to be done about that—but it’s not necessarily as easy as it sounds.
Cybersecurity and the government have been a volitile combination lately, with proposed bills like SOPA, PIPA, and the still-up-in-the-air CISPA at the center of on-and-off internet outrage. So it’s kind of a big deal when the White House replaces its chief of cybersecurity affairs.
Last week, longtime chief Howard Schmidt stepped down…
Futurist Thomas Frey: Every couple years, as the November election draws near, my wife Deb and I receive our ballots in the mail. Both of us spend considerable time studying the issues and candidates before making our final decisions. As with most couples, we don’t always agree.
Sucks for American clean tech. Never mind that the industry is pretty universally regarded as one of tomorrow’s most important drivers of job growth and innovation—the already too-meager, maddeningly scattershot government support for clean energy is about to dry up altogether. So, goodbye ARPA-E?
David Roberts points us to this graph from a newish report from the Breakthrough Institute, the World Resources Institute, and the Brookings Institution, and, as you can see, it’s not pretty. And that sad-looking $11 billion stump too will disappear unless there’s a shift in policy.
The T-Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle from Honeywell.
The FBI and the Air Force have approval to fly drones. But so does Herington, Kansas which has a population of 2,526 according to new documents that shed light on which government agencies are experimenting with the domestic use of unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones.
Restaurant workers are among those that have sued for overtime pay.
From pharmaceutical reps to home health care aides to waiters and waitresses in fancy restaurants, everyone is sick of working off the clock, and they’re looking to finally punch in.
From senior executives identifying the profit motive as an obstacle to sustainability to corporations questioning the very nature of capitalism as we know it, the plus side of the recent financial crisis and ongoing slow recovery has been that tough questions are finally being asked about how our economy functions and whose interests it serves.
On May 2nd Forum for the Future—whose work on system innovation aims to create change across entire sectors of our economy—are hosting an event in New York which will explore better ways of doing business in a post-Great Recession world…
Internet retailer, Amazon is in a powerful position after the government’s decision to pursue major publishers on antitrust charges. may now get to decide how much an e-book will cost, and the book world is quaking over the potential consequences.
Grand Challenges create a new vision of the future.
Tom Kalil of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy gave a presentation today about Grand Challenges, such as the ones proposed by futurist Thomas Frey HERE. Kalil called them “ambitious yet achievable goals that capture the public’s imagination and that require innovation and breakthroughs in science and technology to achieve,” like NASA’s Green Flight Challenge and the Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health. I think Tom’s speech, delivered to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, does a terrific job showing why the grand challenge approach is a powerful way to tackle some pretty daunting problems. He also puts grand challenges in the context of President Obama’s Strategy for American Innovation. (By the way, it must be nice to be authorized to use the Presidential PowerPoint template.) From Tom’s speech
The income tax system is only one of many systems that will collapse in the coming years.
An enormous opportunity is presenting itself as a frightening problem—Complexity. How leaders react will determine the future of their businesses, and indeed the future and prosperity of America for decades to come.
