Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

It appears Swedish parliament has at least temporarily shelved a planned surveillance law, due to a massive campaign among Swedish bloggers.

The law would have formalized pervasive telephone and electronic surveillance of all telephone- and digital traffic moving across Swedish borders. In practice, broadband and phone providers would have had to install government snooping equipment in their infrastructure (at their cost!), which would then have been used to listen in on every phone call, read every text message and e-mail, and keep track of every website surfed to in Sweden. This traffic would then have been sifted through by super computers and government officials.

In other words, legislation that would have made Orwells “1984″ look like a carefree picnic in the park.

This seems to have been halted by a massive blog campaign, for now. It’s not inconceivable the legislation will come back shortly with some minor amendments, sneaked through parliament while no one is watching - Swedish MP’s have been attentively learning those kind of practices from their EU overlords.

..anyone who actually takes the “analysts” in the media seriously should have their brains lobotomized. It should be common knowledge that anyone even remotely worth their salt won’t work in business journalism, as amply shown by the video above, regarding Bear Stearns, that collapsed the other day (the first section of the video itself is only 7 days old).

Fast Company is one of the magazines I’ve enjoyed reading for over 8 years - It was originally a magazine for entrepreneurs and business people who were passionate about what they did, and wanted to keep a finger on the pulse of what other similar people were doing, and what worked.

Not so anymore, Fast Company seems to have become a source of politically correct drivel, simply parroting whatever fad or hysteria is going on at the moment. Not an issue seems to go by without the magazine having a feature on “environmentally friendly companies” or “social entrepreneurship”. There is nothing wrong in either of those concepts, but when it is veiled in a slight sense of shame over the fact that Fast Company actually covers a phenomena that is capitalist at it’s core, and has profit as a goal, it gets a little too much: they simply seem to be ashamed over having to cover capitalist pigs who make a profit from creating new products, services and jobs that improve peoples lives and create prosperity.

If Fast Company is ashamed of covering those who create prosperity and need to shroud their coverage in various politically correct veils, maybe they should either change their name and profile entirely, or cease existing?
Political correctness, fad following and shaming of economic creation is tiresome wherever it rears its ugly face, it is doubly so when it comes from a supposed business magazine.

For those of us who tasted our first “battle” in IT and entrepreneurship during the dizzy heights of the dotcom-bubble, one of the defining publications of the time was The Industry Standard, a magazine that rose to prominense during the bubble and went bust with the demise of that era.

Well, mourn no more, The Industry Standard is now back, with the appropriate Web 2.0 bells and whistles to go. It remains to be seen whether the Standard can yet again climb to prominence, or if it will just be one last horraah for the nostalgics.

Dumbass of the week: National Geographic claims in a (later corrected with a note) video that global warming is threatening polar bears in Finland.

Just one slight problem with the story - Finland is a bloody cold country, but the only place you’ll find a polar bear in Finland is the zoo. There are no indigenous polar bears in Finland!
I guess someone was just too quick to publish a juicy story about a current mass-hysteria..

“Never let facts get in the way of a good story”.

The Daily Telegraph reports that after a cool summer, a ski resort in Austria that was previously said to be “doomed” by global warming is now able to open up six weeks early because of ample snow.

As warm, cold, calm, stormy and every other type of weather imaginable can be blamed on global warming, the cold weather and snow is probably down to global warming..

(Now back to creating a mass hysteria by means of scare-mongering around the “second decade of the millennium bug”, which I hope will fund what I hope to be my very early retirement..)