half of the world's population has never made a phone call

11 results back to index


pages: 323 words: 89,795

Food and Fuel: Solutions for the Future by Andrew Heintzman, Evan Solomon, Eric Schlosser

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, big-box store, California energy crisis, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, deindustrialization, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, full employment, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, hydrogen economy, Kickstarter, land reform, megaproject, microcredit, Negawatt, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social contagion, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

A Canada-wide hydrogen game plan that emphasizes the installation of renewable technologies and a hydrogen fuel-cell infrastructure in poor urban and rural communities can help to create energy independence among Canada’s most vulnerable populations. Empowering the Developing World Incredibly, 65 percent of the human population has never made a telephone call, and a third of the human race has no access to electricity. Today, the per-capita use of energy throughout the developing world is a mere one-fifteenth of the consumption enjoyed in the United States. Narrowing the gap between the haves and have-nots means first narrowing the gap between the connected and the unconnected.


pages: 342 words: 95,013

The Zenith Angle by Bruce Sterling

airport security, Burning Man, cuban missile crisis, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, information security, Iridium satellite, Larry Ellison, market bubble, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, packet switching, pirate software, profit motive, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, space junk, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, thinkpad, Y2K

Then we could short their stock and buy Iridium competitors, such as Globalstar. That would be so profitable that it would easily pay for this telescope.” “Globalstar loses money already,” said Mr. Gupta gloomily. “If satellite phones made money, our Indian ISRO would be launching telephone satellites! Millions of Indians have never made a phone call.” “Maybe you would do that,” said Tony. “More likely, you would become a customer of Mr. Liang. China already has a financially sound commercial space-launch service.” “Why is it getting so hot in here?” said the actress suddenly. “So cold, and then so hot in here! Where is my coconut milk?


pages: 239 words: 45,926

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, borderless world, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, creative destruction, digital divide, double helix, Ford Model T, global village, Gregor Mendel, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Helicobacter pylori, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, new economy, personalized medicine, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, spice trade, stem cell, the new new thing, yottabyte

Toward the end of the twentieth century, only three out of the top fifty were primarily high tech. 18 (Many governments have yet to understand the logic of a knowledge-driven economy … They still do not realize that in the age of information, hard work, by itself, is not sufficient.)19 Never mind Africa … (According to Wired, there are fewer phone lines on the African continent than there are in Manhattan … and half of the world’s population has never made a phone call. Out of sight, out of mind?) It is getting harder to maintain the value of the currency in these regions, because what they produce is less valuable … And this has consequences. Through the mid-twentieth century … The great powers of the world … Still worried about … And fought over … Africa … Its people … Its territory … Its resources.


pages: 391 words: 117,984

pages: 233 words: 75,712

In Defense of Global Capitalism by Johan Norberg

anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, capital controls, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Glaeser, export processing zone, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, open economy, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, rising living standards, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, zero-sum game

People may complain about the slowness of progress, with only about 5 percent of the world’s population, mostly in the affluent Western countries, having access to the Internet, but such complaints ignore the historical perspective. The Internet as we know it is about 5,000 days old and has already reached nearly 1 of every 10 people on earth. This is the fastest spread of technology in world history. The telephone has existed for 125 years, but until only a few years ago, half the world’s inhabitants had never made a phone call. This time things are moving with infinitely greater rapidity, and globalization is the reason. One out of every 10 families in Beijing and Shanghai has a computer, and within a few years, Chinese will be the Web’s biggest language. The ability of the developing countries to take shortcuts in development leads some to imagine a common destination at the end of the road, one that all societies will be converging on.


pages: 290 words: 94,859

Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition by Nicholas Pileggi

air freight, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, index card, load shedding

“The guys who reported to the people who reported to Paulie ranged from regular hustlers to legitimate businessmen. They were the street guys. They kept everything going. They thought up the schemes. They kept everything nice and oiled. And Paulie ran the whole thing in his head. He didn’t have a secretary. He didn’t take any notes. He never wrote anything down, and he never made a phone call unless it was from a booth, and then he’d only make an appointment for later. There were hundreds of guys who depended upon Paulie for their living, but he never paid out a dime. The guys who worked for Paulie had to make their own dollar. All they got from Paulie was protection from other guys looking to rip them off.


pages: 476 words: 124,973

The Desert and the Sea: 977 Days Captive on the Somali Pirate Coast by Michael Scott Moore

Albert Einstein, British Empire, clean water, Columbine, drone strike, European colonialism, Filipino sailors, fixed income, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, South China Sea, UNCLOS

“We gonna do a phone call tonight, to your mother,” Abdul said at last. “The bosses on shore, they gave me permission to handle your case.” He found a scrap of cardboard. “Do me a favor and write down your phone number and your mother’s name.” I did so. “I think we gonna get somewhere,” he said. I’d never made a phone call with Abdul before. My mind began to churn. Would he recognize German? His English was better than Garfanji’s. The pirate master spoke an orotund, almost Kenyan-colonial English, but Abdul’s had an edge of American slang. Which was odd. “Where’d you learn to speak English?” I asked him. “Right here, in Somalia.”


pages: 460 words: 130,053

Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice by Bill Browder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, British Empire, corporate governance, El Camino Real, Gordon Gekko, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, index card, off-the-grid, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, transfer pricing, union organizing

Vladimir was safe, and I couldn’t have been more relieved. 28 Khabarovsk But while Vladimir was safe, Eduard was still somewhere in Russia, and we had no idea where. Not even his wife knew. After he left her on Universitetsky Prospekt, Eduard was taken to a friend’s apartment on the eastern side of the city, just outside the Garden Ring. He stayed there that night and the next. He never went out, never made a phone call. He just paced the apartment and, when his friend was home, discussed his situation and considered his options. He still wasn’t prepared to leave the country. Not yet. Just before dawn on the third day, Eduard got into a different friend’s car and was taken to another apartment. They took a circuitous route.


pages: 306 words: 78,893

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Modern mythmaking held that new technologies overturn old hierarchies, leading to a virtual social revolution—not in the very old-fashioned world of organized politics, of course, but in 24 After the New Economy the new one of wireless web connections.^^ When I interviewed Wired's Kevin Kelly, I interrupted his effusions to ask him what relevance they had in a world where the statistics showed that the gap between rich and poor—nationally and globally—has never been so wide, a world where half the population has never even made a phone call, Kelly responded by saying that there's never been so good a time to be poor, though he didn't offer any evidence. Farther up the social ladder from absolute indigence, we hear some grand claims. For example, we heard constantly that mutual funds and web brokers have enabled Main Street to prosper at the game that used to be Wall Street's monopoly.


pages: 622 words: 194,059

An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, company town, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, haute couture, Louis Pasteur, Norman Mailer, power law, security theater, Upton Sinclair, working poor

Gradually Lasky emerged from his depression and got a contract producing films independently at Fox Pictures, but his life and lifestyle never fully recovered. “It changed everything,” recalled Betty Lasky. “He had never licked a stamp and put one on an envelope in his life. He probably had never made a phone call; he always had a secretary. He had never been to the market. And all of these things were great discoveries. They thrilled him. He would go mad in the cheese section.… And also he was able to drive again. The chauffeur was gone. In the early days he had raced his Stutz Bearcat across the country and driven his Rolls roadster at breakneck speed with the top down.


pages: 142 words: 5,823

The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice Miller

half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Honoré de Balzac


pages: 796 words: 242,660

This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, failed state, financial independence, flying shuttle, glass ceiling, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Northern Rock, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, urban decay

We both tacitly understood that I would be watched over by Howard Watson – an exceptional copy editor with the confidence an author too often needs (well at least this one does). My biggest Thank You letter is to my sometime publisher, now my agent and always my friend, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson who has never sent nor received an email or made a mobile telephone call, and does not care that Google is a verb. Introduction The original edition of This Sceptred Isle was generously received at seemingly every level. It set out to explain the story of these, the British islands. Later volumes covered the twentieth century and, most importantly, the origins, growth and end of British colonial and imperial history.


pages: 389 words: 111,372

pages: 926 words: 312,419