I wanted and electric train for Christmas – but I got the saxophone instead – Clarence Clemons
2012 – Whatever happened to the Lana Del Ray ‘controversy’?
5. Five top Death Bed Regrets…
A nurse in palliative care in India has had long career in nursing patients who on average have only three weeks to live. So here are the number five most common regrets she hears:
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me
- I wish I didn’t work so hard (This came from every male patient she nursed!)
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends
- I with I’d let myself be happier (Many of us don’t realise happiness is a choice and we stay stuck in same patterns and habits)
4. AirBnB…whoa!
1. Rip-off hotels in hip cities have been put on notice…
The Idea: Airbnb connects people looking for places to stay to those with floor space, rooms and entire apartments or houses to rent.
Success Point: Obama Democratic Convention in Denver when ‘everyone young’ wanted to be be there. People listed their accommodation on AirBnB and this really sent them global.
They’ve just this month rolled out in Russia… and 5 million guests nights have been brought throughout the world thus far.
AirBnB currently has 100,000 listings in 19,000 cities in 192 countries
(n.b. HH5 has just used AirBnB to book New York and Berlin!)
UPDATE:AirBnb has just announced that by the end of the this year they will be filling more rooms than Hilton Hotels International. (Hilton has 525,000 rooms in 77 countries). The big diff? AirBnbers spend less on accomo and heaps more on the surrounding businesses. AirBnb has hit 10 million guest nights
Apart from HH5 being inundated with ‘wow…I’ve now used that AirBnb you talked about… we see Auckland’s poor property millionaires vacuuming spare rooms in Ponsonby and Grey Lynn…AND in the US hello Shiny Republic – a company that now exists because of AirBnb and rates AirBnb neighbourhoods – based on transportation, services, quality of local restaurants and more.
Source: San Fransisco Chronicle
3. FOMO!
We’ve mentioned Zen Habits before. So this week the big announcement was made ‘the future of television’ – IMAX TV in your living room. Another future of TV and another gadget. (We thought HD was it!). So suddenly we stop polishing the dials of our Iphone 4′s and look at the sky, something else I want… it never stops!
So we stopped and read The 39th Lesson by Leo Babauta – the guy who started Zen Habits… all about FOMO – ‘the fear of missing out’ .
The new full-on-age of texting while driving, incessant checking of facebook, taking a call when with a friend in a cafe, checking twitter updates while with others and presenting a success profile on Facebook – basically fear of missing any potential connection rather than the one you are experiencing. Some teens have to be available 24/7 for fear of being dumped. Psychologists are now talking about it in terms of a FOMO addiction.
- We check email, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks often, in case we’re missing something important.
- We try and do the most exciting things, and are constantly in search of exciting things, because we’re worried we might miss out on the fun that others are having.
- We constantly read about what other people are doing, and try to emulate them, because it sounds like they’re doing something great that we’re not.
- We feel like our own lives are poor in comparison with the great lives others are leading, and so feel bad about ourselves.This guy’s advice: Be grateful, and each moment think not about what you’re missing, but what you’ve been given.
Source: Zen Habits
2. CHUGGING… charitable mugging….
Charity Mugging…the backlash just may start here. (in what started off as perfect meeting of charities hiring commercial outfits to raise donations for them)
And this is a sensitive subject as Chuggers spruik for good causes.
The Scene: EVERYDAY outside your local post office there is a table with four bods bounding across the pavement to become your new best friends and talk para-Olympics, WWF, Greenpeace ….they want your money not just once but for an ongoing payment programme.
Fact 1: A good chugger can be on a very good wage – with hourly rate and individual signup fees awarded – and with 45 million pounds handed over each year in the UK.
Fact 2: People are starting to avoid certain shop strips know for chuggers in the UK.
Fact 3: There are 24 fund-raising providers – with one outfits 2 bosses paying themselves almost UK$1 million last year
In the UK people are so chugger fatigued some boroughs are saying – you’re allowed to chug only Tuesdays and Thursdays. And the police have gotten involved to stop chuggers chasing people down the street.
Sources: The Guardian
The Telegraph
1. Death By Robot – The Drone and the Obama…
Update: The people who operate the drones, Rolling Stone magazine reports, describe their casualties as “bug splats”, “since viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed”. (An aside – Stanford and NY Law Schools suggest that during Obama’s first three year’s in office 259 Drone strikes killed between 297 and 569 civilians, of whom at least 64 were children.
President Barack Obama’s administration is in the process of drawing up a formal rulebook that will set out the circumstances in which targeted assassination by unmanned drones is justified, according to reports.
The New York Times, citing two unnamed sources, said explicit guidelines were being drawn up amid disagreement between the CIA and the departments of defense, justice and state over when lethal action is acceptable.
Sources: The Guardian
Wired Magazine
Civilian drones are about to cause major privacy issue…
Watch superb Video here
Privacy concerns because the Australian police are talking about using drones for crime fighting… as well ‘un-registered’ drone operators have been raising their dubious heads.
Un-registered = paparazzi (photos of celebs) and bike gangs (keeping meth lab’s guarded) using them for illicit purposes – and under current law anything goes.
N.B. They take superb imagery…
And also be afraid if this becomes an avalanche: Queensland Police said it was “in a research and testing stage to determine viability” of such aircraft.
Several law enforcement agencies around Australia are believed to be investigating the use of drones in their operations — following adoption by police in the United States — but none except Queensland Police would confirm this officially. Victoria Police hosted a conference in Melbourne this year with police from other states to discuss drone use.
“The very first 20th-century anti-utopian novel — 25 years before Orwell’s 1984 — used drones (“aeros” ) as the means by which the government observed and repressed the population.
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