Watch. This. (But fast-fwd through the prologue if you need to)

Nils Gilman: Deviant Globalization from The Long Now Foundation on FORA.tv

Update: damn Fora.tv and their shitty embed code, just click this instead then.

Your (other) weekend longwatch, how Greece’s economy collapsed:

Inside Job is an award winning documentary about the origins and actors in the ongoing Global Financial Crisis. If I had paid attention to the Oscars this year I might have heard of it sooner, it won the award for Best Documentary Feature. Instead, it was by lurking on #spanishrevolution that I found out about this, and you’ll note this video has Spanish subtitles. But the film is in English; narrated by Matt Damon, even.

This is the story of financial deregulation and the eventual resultant crisis. Begun by Reagan, but it’s important to note, allowed to become ‘too big to fail’ under the Clinton administration. And in no way reformed by the Obama administration.

How the new Global Elite‘s ranks have become swollen with the wealthy executives of Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros and so on. This film, unsurprisingly, reveals these people to be morally bankrupt, completely divorced from reality. Having no care for society, while the western governments, purely for ideological reasons, abandoned their duty to watch over the interests of their citizens.

Preserving the status quo has come at the expense of employment.. especially for the world’s youth. This is why ‘First World’ infrastructure is in such poor repair. The same ideology adopted by politicians instructing them to pay for only bare minimum maintenance; a culture of short-term gain, ignorant of long-term consequence.

This is how one of the systems of the world was broken and a better future stolen. Observe these people and the faults in, and the corruption of, governance that allowed this to occur, that we might never have (another) a repeat of it. Dare to dream that one day soon they might all be called to account for it too.

City planners in south China have laid out an ambitious plan to merge together the nine cities that lie around the Pearl River Delta. The “Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One” scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.

The new mega-city will cover a large part of China’s manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.

Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan (£190 billion). An express rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong.

“The idea is that when the cities are integrated, the residents can travel around freely and use the health care and other facilities in the different areas,” said Ma Xiangming, the chief planner at the Guangdong Rural and Urban Planning Institute and a senior consultant on the project.

Via disinfo.

Via core77:

Whether you use QR codes or not, its undeniable that mobile tagging has become an integrated part of the marketing landscape. Popping up in print advertising and corporate-sponsored event/experiences, there still seems to be a lot of confusion about the application and usage of mobile tagging in delivering a more comprehensive marketing and retail message. PSFK just released a great “Future Of” report exploring some key trends in the field and interviews with experts an innovators in the field.

(Click through for high resolution)

From Emergence Collective.