Tag: summer2015

Plagued by charges of corruption and waste, Milano Expo 2015 opened with some 30,000 austerity-struck Italians marching in protest against their government for spending a reported 12.5 billion euros to host the event. Besides the money spent on highways, metro and infrastructure improvements, the expo, which I visited several ago, isn’t worth a dime. And...

Bankism, or government and central-bank subsidization of the world’s flawed and fraudulent mega banks at the expense of entire populations, came to a head this year in Greece. On July 5, the Greek population voted ‘no’ to Troika policies that placed big-bank creditor demands for repayment of bailouts with heinous austerity terms above citizens’ needs...

What goes around comes around. What ancient Greeks practiced some 2,523 years ago, demokratia — “the rule by the people” — is back in vogue despite recent setbacks. And, as we forecast in our summer 2011 Trends Journal, Direct Democracy — “the rule of the people” — has become a megatrend in motion that will...

The “Dominant Energy” landscape has been, as forecast, active, multi-dimensional and moving fast across a spectrum of energy sources and delivery systems that will redefine how energy is marketed, priced, delivered and used. New drilling still favors gas, with US production up seven percent during the first six months of 2015. Exports of liquefied natural...

The structure of education is driven by, and mirrors, the needs of the economy that it supports. At the turn of the 20th century, mass migration from rural America was underway. Individuals migrated to industrialized cities in unprecedented numbers. The daily rhythm of the rural community was out of sync with the rigid structure of...

Solar panels and wind turbines are a big part of our energy future but, to a growing number of researchers, these devices are only transition technologies.  These scientists hope to make energy directly from sunlight, water and air, the way plants do — what they call “solar fuels” — and they’re steadily coming closer to...

New industries are emerging as businesses take advantage of the millennial generation’s greatest weakness: fear.  Our largest generation fears reality, avoiding truth at any cost. It has seen school shootings and police shootings on 24-hour cable news. It has seen terrorist attacks. It has lived through hard economic times. It’s tired of being berated by...

Engineers dream of replacing electricity inside computers with light. Silicon bends infrared light the way a prism bends visible light, so specific shapes of silicon could move infrared light along computer circuits the way optical fibers carry regular light.  The problem: There’s been no easy way to design the circuitry; the thousands of point-to-point connections...