whodathunkit
The world is turning on it’s head
An Indian and a Mexican now claim the top two spots on the riches people in the world list.
Number 5 is an Indian as well…
When 3 of the top 5 richest people in the world are from developing countries (partly because the number 3 and 4 are giving a lot of their money away) it really says something about the powerhouses of the future.
It also says a lot about economic polarization in developing countries. That 60 some billion dollars comes from somewhere - $50 from each man woman and child in India roughly. And when a significant proportion of the population is living on $1-$2 a day, well, lets just say that’s a very strong polarization.
It will be interesting to see if these richest people leave their country, give back to their country, give to other countries or reverse the flow of investment from developing to developed countries. With so much money concentrated at the top of a very steep pyramid, it will be interesting to see what happens.
The world is a mess.
Political Pwnage, real world style
A paragraph in a recent post on Terra Nova caught my attention
All of this is to get us thinking about to what extent hardcore raiding guilds should be seen in a similar light. The essence of disciplined bodies is that they are malleable; they can be shaped to perform in lock-step (literally) under a command hierarchy.
Terra Nova: Discipline & Pwnage
Now, I’m not so much interested in the “Pwnage” part so much as the Discipline in Guilds part (I was always the one getting Pwnd anyway). What Thomas Malaby is essentially talking about is the power of a guild to grind a certain type of action and reaction to certain situations into its members. In this context it’s about attacking mobs in the synthetic world, but what happens when this becomes about politics in the physical world.
In my mind, it is only a matter of time before Single-Server technologies bring about the advent of mega-guilds who become politically salient real world movements based around what the Guild Leader, High Council or (frighteningly) Group-o’-14-Year-Olds-In-Charge decide is the right way to think for their Guild. As Guild creation, organization and membership moves towards increasingly complex modes of understanding, it is almost inevitable that in an effort to distinguish itself from other Guilds, one will emerge along physical world political lines (as we have already begun to see in Second Life) and others will follow suit, perhaps in an ethnic-politics-esque “outbidding war” (”My Guild is more _____ than yours”)
I wont write more now, as synthetic/physical political spillover is an area that I have way too many thoughts on that aren’t complete and which will eventually be put down on paper, perhaps as part of my masters thesis at some point in the distant future.
Why I hate the "Delete” button on a Mod toolbar
As a mod and community manager I’ve had to close down my share of threads. I very very rarely delete anything, but I’ve worked for people who are very trigger happy in this department. The trigger happy ones fall, generally, into two categories: “Kill it and pretend it never happened” and “Move it and try to pretend it never happened” but either way, the post, its discussion and any issues surrounding it disappear.
Those who delete threads will make the very valid claim that often the threads contain content which is inappropriate for the forum to which it is posted. But, there are degrees of inappropriateness and there is a wonderful thing called the edit button. Deletion in my eyes, is the easy way out of an unfortunate and undesirable situation that should be resolved through dialogue, not disappearances.
Now, this may seem trivial, but it’s core to my mentality of forum opperation - the Community Manager is not there to dictate what is and is not discussed. The Community Manager is there to set up a structure and environment in which people choose to discuss what the Forum Owner(s) intended. You could think of this as self-censorship if you want, but the main difference between that, and what I propose is that self-censorship is out of fear (of banning, deletion, insults, or other negative feedback responses) where as what I am talking about is positive norm creation.
I had a bit of a discussion on this point with some members of a forum I used to be the Community Manager for. Rather than reproduce the arguments here here, check out the thread there. (For those who don’t know, or can’t guess, I go by Twill)
Thread being discussed (Not for the easily offended)
Thread with my arguments