On September 16, 2008, Carl Pike, the deputy head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Operations Division, watched live video feeds from a command center outside Washington, D.C., as federal agents fanned out across dozens of U.S. cities. In Dallas, a team in SWAT gear tossed a flash-bang grenade into a suburban home and, once inside, discovered six pounds of cocaine behind a stove, and a stockpile of guns. At a used-car dealer’s house in Carmel, Indiana, agents pulled bricks of cocaine from a secret compartment in his Audi sedan, while state troopers dragged a stove-size safe onto the lawn and went at it with a sledgehammer.
In the coming weeks, the net widened to include caches of assault rifles, a Mexico-bound 18-wheeler with drug money hidden in fresh produce, and a crooked Texas sheriff who helped traffic narcotics through his county. In Mexico City, a financier was arrested for laundering drug money through a minor-league soccer team named the Raccoons (and an avocado farm). After one especially large bust, when it came time for a “dope on the table” photo, there was in fact no table big enough to support the thousands of tightly bundled kilos of confiscated cocaine. They had to be stacked in the back parking lot of a police station.
The raids and arrests were the final stage of a DEA-led investigation called Project Reckoning—18 months, 64 cities, 200 agencies—intended to cripple Mexico’s Gulf Cartel. Over the past two decades, the organization had built a drug empire that spanned across Mexico and into the U.S. It had become pervasive, hyper-violent, brazen. Cartel operatives had smuggled billions of dollars’ worth of narcotics into the U.S. They had assassinated Mexican politicians and corrupted entire police departments. One of the organization’s leaders had famously brandished a gold-plated .45 at two agents from the DEA and FBI traveling through northeastern Mexico. The cartel had even formed its own paramilitary unit, a band of former Mexican police and special-forces soldiers called the Zetas, to seize territory and dispatch rivals. The notorious syndicate became known as La Compañia, or The Company.
QUOTATION(S): “…The forces shaping your future are digital [and mathematical], and you need to understand them…” AND “…You can’t understand the knot without understanding the strands, but in the future, the strands need not remain tied up in the same way as they are today…” AND “…ALL CHILDREN ARE BORN GENIUSES; 9,999 OUT OF EVERY 10,000 ARE SWIFTLY, INADVERTENTLY DEGENIUNIZED BY GROWNUPS…” AND “…Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020 .… We appear to be programmed with the idea that there are ‘things’ outside of our self, and some are conscious, and some are not .… We are beginning to see intimations of this in the implantation of computer devices into the human body…” AND “…People are always [and wrongfully] assuming that everything that is going to be invented must have been invented already. But it hasn’t…”
CITATION(S): “…We have the Internet that we have today because the Internet of yesterday did not focus on the today of yesterday…” AND “…Legal scholars can debate whether copyright law mandates a future of ‘authorized use only’ for digital information. The answer may not matter much, because that future is coming to pass through the technologies of digital rights management and trusted systems…” AND “…Can we envision the future transcontinental flights, where books, music, images, and videos are automatically extracted, sampled, mixed, and remixed; fed into massive automated reasoning engines; assimilated into the core software of every personal computer and every cell phone ─ and thousands of other things for which the words don’t even exist yet?…” AND “…Governments of the Industrial World, your weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You have no so sovereignty where we gather .… We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity … In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits .… [Y]ou are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace…”
NEWEST, PRACTICAL PRINCIPALS (TENETS) TO SEIZE SUSTAINABLE PROFESSIONAL, MANAGERIAL AND BUSINESS SUCCESS TENTES: (18) Foster momentum by creating virtuous cycles that build credibility and by avoiding getting caught in vicious cycles that harm credibility. (19) Institute coalitions that translate into swifter organizational adjustments to the inevitable streams of change in personnel and environment. BOOK(S): A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink (ISBN-13: 978–1594481710).
N.B.: Quotations, Citations and Success Tenets are by the Futuretronium Book.
QUOTATION(S): “…We won’t just experience 100 years of progress in the twenty-first century ─ it will be more like 20,000 years of progress…”
CITATION(S): “…If it seems like your world has been topsy-turvy over the past few years … Consider what’s coming. Your genetic code will be imprinted on and ID card … For better and worse. Medicines will be tailored to your genes and will help prevent specific diseases for which you may be at risk. (But … your insurance company and your prospective employer may also find out that you are genetically disposed to, say, heart disease, or breast cancer, or Alzheimer’s.)…” AND “…The lesson of the last three decades is that nobody can drive to the future on cruise control…”
BOOK(S): Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff. ISBN-13: 978–1591844761
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
uArm, A Mini Robotic Arm You Can Assemble and Control http://singularityhub.com/2014/01/28/uarm-a-mini-robotic-arm…d-control/ QUOTATION(S): “…It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring…” AND “…Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion…”
CITATION(S): “…HUMAN KNOWLEDGE IS DOUBLING EVERY TEN YEARS [AS PER THE 1998 STANDARDS].…COMPUTER POWER IS DOUBLING EVERY EIGHTEEN MONTHS. THE INTERNET IS DOUBLING EVERY YEAR. THE NUMBER OF DNA SEQUENCES WE CAN ANALYZE IS DOUBLING EVERY TWO YEARS…”
BOOK(S): Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku. ISBN-13: 978–0307473332
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
PayPal Is Cracking Down on Bitcoin Sellers http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/05/idUS371088795720140205 QUOTATION(S): “…Change is hard. Change is hardest on those caught by surprise. Change is hardest on those who have difficulty changing too. But change is natural; change is not new; change is important…” AND “…Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition…”
CITATION: “…BEGINNING WITH THE AMOUNT OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE KNOWN WORLD AT THE TIME OF CHRIST, STUDIES HAVE ESTIMATED THAT THE FIRST DOUBLING OF THAT KNOWLEDGE TOOK PLACE ABOUT 1700 A.D. THE SECOND DOUBLING OCCURRED AROUND THE YEAR 1900. IT IS ESTIMATED TODAY THAT THE WORLD’S KNOWLEDGE BASE WILL DOUBLE AGAIN BY 2010 AND AGAIN AFTER THAT BY 2013…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK(S): Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier. ISBN-13: 978–1451654967
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
QUOTATION: “…Thirty-five years ago, psychologist and visionary Dr. Abraham Maslow warned, ‘life is moving far more rapidly now than ever before in the rate of growth of facts, knowledge, techniques, and inventions. We need a different kind of human being able to life in a world that changes perpetually, who has been educated to be comfortable with change and situations in which he has absolutely no forewarning. The society that can turn out those people will survive. Societies which do not will die.’…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK: Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime by Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae. ISBN-13: 978–0312367077
QUOTATION: “…The flattening of the world is going to be hugely disruptive to both traditional and developed societies. The weak will fall further behind faster. The traditional will feel the force of modernization much more profoundly. The new will get turned into old quicker. The developed will be challenged by the underdeveloped much more profoundly. I worry, because so much political stability is built on economic stability, and economic stability is not going to be a feature of the flat world. Add it all up and you can see that the disruptions and going to come faster and harder. No one is immune ─ not me, not you, not Microsoft. WE ARE ENTERING AN ERA OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION ON STEROIDS. Dealing with flatism is going to be a challenge of a whole new dimension even if your country has a strategy. But if you don’t have a strategy at all, well, again, you’ve warned…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK: The Living Company: Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business by Arie De Geus ISBN-13: 978–1857881851
QUOTATION: “…Digital code is what drives rapid speed growth today. It allows mergers like AOL Time Warner … It drives the Internet, TV, music, finance, IT, news coverage, research, manufacturing. A few countries and companies understood the change. That is how poor countries like Finland, Singapore, and Taiwan got so wealthy … So quickly … But a lot of folks just did not learn to read and write a new language … And even though they produced more and more goods, particularly commodities … And even though they restructured companies and governments … Cut budgets, raised taxes, built large factories and buildings … They got a lot poorer. (In 1938 the richest country per person in Asia was … the Philippines. In 1954, according to the World Bank, the most promising Asian economy was … Burma. Both remain commodity economies … Both are sidelined from the digital revolution … And you probably would not like to live in either country). Your world changed when you went ‘On Line.’ One day you used a fax or e-mail … And it soon became hard to conceive of living with only snail mail. If you understood this change early … And invested or worked in some of the companies driving the digital revolution … You are probably quite well off … (as a country and/or as an individual). If you came late, as a speculator, without understanding what a digital language does, or does not do … You probably lost a lot of money during the year 2000. Your world … and your language … are about to change again. The two nucleotide base pairs that code all life …A-T, C-G … Have already led some of the world’s largest companies … Monsanto … DuPont … Novartis … IBM … Hoechst … Compaq … GlaxoSmithKline … To declare that their future lies in life science. They have abandoned, sold, spun off core business divisions … And launched themselves into selling completely new products … Which is why so many chemical, seed, cosmetic, food, pharmaceutical companies … Are partnering, Merging, Growing. Some life-science companies will crash spectacularly … Others will get larger than Microsoft and Cisco … (Companies that are already larger than the economies of most of the world’s countries.). The world’s mega-mergers are going to be driven by digital and genetic code. Consider what is about to happen to medicine. You currently spend about nine times as much for doctors and medical interventions … As you do on medicines and prevention. In the measure that we understand how viruses, bacteria, and our bodies are programmed … And how they can be reprogrammed … Treatment will shift from emergency interventions … Toward deliberate and personalized prevention … (Just as dentistry did.). And we may end up spending just as much on pharmaceuticals as we do on doctors. These medicines do not have to be pills or injections … They could be a part of the food you eat every day, your soap or cosmetics … Perhaps you will inhale them or simply put various patches on your skin. (This is why Procter & Gamble is thinking of merging with a pharmaceutical company, why L’Oreal is hiring molecular biologists, and why Campbell’s is selling soups designed for hospital patients with specific diseases.)…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK: Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler ISBN-13: 978–0385522076
