Saturday, October 07, 2017

Movie Making Trends



Movies are about to enter a whole different realm, mostly for the good. Some of the trends are:

(1) A Screen In Nearly Every Hand

The smartphone will get there before the broadband will, but the connectivity will get there fast enough. It is a legitimate expectation that people should be able to watch new releases on their own screens. You could charge 10 million people $10 each in a theater, or you could charge a billion people one cent each. Or that cent could be an ad they opt to watch. The numbers work. Micro-payments will become much more of an option.

(2) Reduced Production Costs

A small crew dabbling in the art form could do all the camera work on a smartphone and all the editing on a computer today. That opens up the floodgates of production. Every language, every culture can have its own movie industry. Every such industry has a ready global audience among the scattered peoples, all connected. Let a thousand flowers bloom. That also creates a spectrum of success. A movie making 100 K can meet someone's definition of robust business. A movie making 10 K can. What if you could earn a living making 10 minute long movies? Does that beat serving tables?

(3) Really Big

The small can do brisk business. But the big can get really big. A global super hit movie could make outsize money.

(4) Computer Graphics And Animation

For what you can show on the screen, the imagination is now the limit. You don't have to actually build a physical set. Which means it is possible to have small high tech studios. Right now the costs are high. But they will go down. Spices used to be gold. Now they are commodity. The liberation of the background should give added focus to the human element. Movies have to be thought of as therapy sessions for society at large.

(5) The Script

Some things never change. It boils down to the story, not the technology. Ultimately it is about telling a good story. That ancient art has currency.



Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Technological Advances And The Social, Political Sphere

Often when we talk about technological advances we assume the political and social frameworks will remain stagnant for decades on end. That is flawed thinking. The era of Big Data will be one, the era of Internet Of Things will be one where data gathering also for the social sciences will be as abundant as has been for the physical sciences. That changes things. The Age Of Abundance that will be heralded by astronomical increases in productivity that would fundamentally challenge basic ideas of ownership and distribution will be a new paradigm beyond capitalism and socialism. It is the steepness of the curve of imminent technological advances and its inevitability that gives humanity much hope. The millennial reign is imminent.











Recent centuries of progress in human knowledge have endowed humanity with much gains of insight on the first four dimensions from magnitudes extremely small to extremely large. That puts humanity in a tremendous position to appreciate the huge leap that the fourth dimension is from the third. If subsequent leaps are even larger and larger and God is the tenth, the final dimension, does your physics now take you face to face with God?

Some very smart minds have sounded alarms on Artificial Intelligence. Lucifer, aka Satan, is magnitudes smarter than the smartest AI you could ever create. Because your AI will be limited to the first four dimensions whereas Lucifer is a being from a beyond dimension. Those who fear AI should be aware of Lucifer even more easily. Evidence of Lucifer "getting" you in all around. You call it global warming. Lucifer promised global warming in the Koran more than a millennium ago. The human hubris that kicked in post "enlightenment" and post industrial revolution and post space exploration took big chunks of humanity away from God and right into Satan's lap. Those who say there is no God, there is no hell, there is no devil make it sound like this is original, independent thinking on their part. Not so. You are in Satan's grip. It is bondage. You made the choice to walk away from God. That is not a good record. Love God with all your heart, mind and soul and keep loving God if you stand any chances to positively harvest the imminent advances in technology. God is infinitely smarter and more powerful than Lucifer.

God is everywhere. Pray anywhere.




Saturday, September 16, 2017

The Basic Template Of Entrepreneurship

Steven Spielberg, rightly thought of as one of the most creative movie directors, once said, it makes sense to keep the same team and churn out movie after movie, like they produce cars at factories.

What has happened with technology and innovation in just the past 20 years has been amazing, but all that is nothing compared to what is about to happen. And it makes sense to firm up the basic template of entrepreneurship. So we can focus on the more important stuff, like the technology and the innovation.

Curiously that template is waist deep in politics and public policy. The very idea of who owns the company is about to fundamentally alter. The inevitable Universal Basic Income (UBI) will be a huge boost to the innovators. Without that true large scale wealth creation is simply out of reach. The UBI is the oxygen mask that takes you to the top of Everest.

The idea of the corporate culture should be on the cutting edges of social science fiction and egalitarian thinking. Treating people right does not take away from competition or innovation. The second coming of Steve Jobs was primarily that he had learned to treat people better, like he himself admitted. But it goes beyond smiles and handshakes. It is about making fundamental leaps on race and gender.



Tuesday, November 08, 2016

Grassroots Organizing: The Stealth Hero

Clinton has made a strategic choice to invest significantly in organizing. Finding, onboarding, training, deploying and managing this talent puts any organization under extreme stress, and the Clinton campaign has mastered it flawlessly. The Clinton campaign has deliberately and painstakingly built a grassroots juggernaut that is executing exactly the way it should in these closing days.
Finally, the “Obama Coalition” is quickly evolving into the Clinton coalition. Clinton’s pathway is built on the same foundation of women, young people, African Americans and Latinos but with even stronger support and turnout by those critical groups of voters. I know this coalition well—I ran these programs for President Obama in 2012, and what the Clinton campaign has done to engage these groups is nothing short of breathtaking.
Clinton may very well win women of every age group, ethnicity and educational level—unprecedented in modern campaigns.
When I ran Clinton’s primary in California against Bernie Sanders, I vividly remember the public polling shrinking by the minute as we neared Election Day. However, I knew that if we kept our eye on the prize and deployed the grassroots machine that we developed to turn out our supporters, we would win and we would win big. That’s what we did. Much like then, this campaign is doing everything it needs to in its final days. In the postscript of this election cycle, I hope the analysts and pundits recognize this campaign for what it truly is—a historic achievement of grassroots mobilization in a time of unparalleled political polarization.


Monday, November 07, 2016

Hillary Is Winning, Do Not Fear

In our final battleground map of the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton holds a substantial lead over Donald Trump with one day before Election Day. Clinton has 274 electoral votes in her column -- which is unchanged from last week, and which also is more than the 270 needed to win the presidency. Trump, meanwhile, is at 170 electoral votes, down from 180 last week. And we have 94 electoral votes in the Tossup column.


Too Dangerous For Twitter, Too Dangerous For Nuclear

"Apparently his campaign has taken away his Twitter," Obama scoffed, issuing an attack line on Donald Trump that would barely have made sense during his first stop there eight years earlier. "They had so little confidence in his self-control they said we're just going to take away your Twitter. If somebody can't handle a Twitter account, they can't handle the nuclear codes."
On most days last week Obama woke up at the White House with his schedule virtually cleared. Leaving around midday and returning late in the evening, he spent his downtime tossing a baseball around the Rose Garden with aides and tweaking his stump speech in the Oval Office.
In seemingly every spare moment, he's dialed African-American radio hosts across the swing states, chatting loosely backstage at his rallies and aboard Air Force One about his favorite hip-hop artists (Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper) 
A loss, however, has become a nightmare scenario. Obama's vision of the US is so at odds with Donald Trump's he told a crowd of 16,000 college students in Chapel Hill the "fate of the world is teetering."
"Anybody who is upset about a 'Saturday Night Live' skit, you don't want in charge of nuclear weapons," Obama taunted in Miami on Thursday, only to pierce the anger with yet another exasperated "C'mon man!"


Post Poll


Deep divisions within the Republican Party that Trump has helped stoke are revealed in a question on what the GOP should do if Trump fails to win the presidency.
Among Republicans and independents who lean that way, the largest share, 37 percent, say the party should start from scratch, rename itself, and reinvent what it stands for


Sunday, November 06, 2016

Health 2.0


The technology industry has entered the field of medicine and aims to eliminate disease itself. It may well succeed because of a convergence of exponentially advancing technologies, such as computing, artificial intelligence, sensors, and genomic sequencing. We’re going to see more medical advances in the next decade than happened in the past century.


Abundance, Round The Corner


In the 1800s, aluminum was more valuable than silver and gold because it was rarer. So when Napoleon III entertained the King of Siam, the king and his guests were honored by being given aluminum utensils, while the rest of the dinner party ate with gold
But aluminum is not really rare.
In fact, aluminum is the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, making up 8.3% of the weight of our planet. But it wasn’t until chemists Charles Martin Hall and Paul Héroult discovered how to use electrolysis to cheaply separate aluminum from surrounding materials that the element became suddenly abundant.
The problems keeping us from achieving a world where everyone’s basic needs are met may seem like resource problems — when in reality, many are accessibility problems. 
Think about all the things that computers and the internet made abundant that were previously far less accessible because of cost or availability … 
Less than two decades ago, when someone reached a certain level of economic stability, they could spend somewhere around $10K on stereos, cameras, entertainment systems, etc — today, we have all that equipment in the palm of our hand.
When put to the right use, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence,roboticsdigital manufacturing, nano-materials and digital biology make it possible for us to drastically raise the standard of living for every person on the planet.


Friday, October 28, 2016

Elon Musk: To Mars Or Not To Mars

I say no Mars. It is basic. I don't mean to spoil the fun and sound like I were saying the emperor is naked. But the human skeleton is not designed for Mars gravity. Or for the months of space travel. It would simply give up.

But reusable rockets are a great concept. The financials are in the robotic mining of the asteroid belt and, more immediately, in the network of 4,000 satellites that would carry a big chunk of the load of internet traffic. The need for bandwidth is going to grow exponentially. Both would be tremendous money makers. And robots don't have skeleton issues. Good thing.

The earth is the only home. And Elon Musk should really double down on solar. Create a Musk Law whereby costs are halved every two, or three or four years. Dirty needs to be driven out of business.
Electric vehicles go hand in hand with that.

And what's up with the hyperloop? Again, I have human body questions. All that acceleration and deceleration, how would the human body react to that? But if the hyperloop be possible then you will see an Amazon size forest in America before 2050. Good thing. People would congregate in the big cities of the world.

Mars is for the Curiosity rover. Robotic exploration is the best way.