This 1% of humanity uses its awesome power to manipulate societal aspirations and the narratives around climate change. These extend from well-funded advertising to pseudo-technical solutions, from the financialisation of carbon emissions (and increasingly, nature) to labelling extreme any meaningful narrative that questions inequality and power.

We dream of a day when IP reputation does not matter and we can rely on domain reputation, but unfortunately we are not there yet.

Google allowed third parties to build their own Wave services (be it private or commercial) because it wanted the Wave protocol to replace the e-mail protocol.[2][16][17] Initially, Google was the only Wave service provider, but it was hoped that other service providers would launch their own Wave services, possibly designing their own unique web-based clients as is common with many email service providers.

At Olay, the winning aspirations were defined as market share leadershipin North America, $1 billion in sales, and a global share that put the brandamong the market leaders. A revitalized and transformed Olay wasexpected to establish skin care as a strong pillar for beauty along with haircare. Establishing and maintaining leadership of a new masstige segment,positioned between mass and prestige, was a third aspiration.

The first question—what is our winning aspiration?—sets the frame for allthe other choices. A company must seek to win in a particular place and in aparticular way. If it doesn’t seek to win, it is wasting the time of its peopleand the investments of its capital providers. But to be most helpful, theabstract concept of winning should be translated into defined aspirations.Aspirations are statements about the ideal future. At a later stage in theprocess, a company ties to those aspirations some specific benchmarks thatmeasure progress toward them

In his videos, Mr. de Hek treats all of these and other twists in the Hyper plot with a light touch, one befitting a farce. That’s especially true when the topic is Mr. H, a figure who now appears on HyperNation videos as some kind of spokesman, wearing a gold mask and a black hoodie and uttering slogans — “HyperNation will be an equal, fair and transparent platform that can solve the pain points of today’s society” — in a variety of slick studio settings. It’s like getting lectured about utopia from a character in “Squid Game.”

without a schema, you do not have a spec, you have an aspiration.

there has been a spectacular rise in luxury consumption, with the consumption patterns of the global elite acting as a marker for those further down the income scale. Robert Frank (2000) describes the process as 'luxury fever', as consumption expectations are ratcheted up all the way down the income scale. The global elite are pushing up people's expectations and assumptions. In the US, for example, the average size of house has doubled, in square feet terms, in the past thirty years. In part it is a function of the positional nature of consumption. We consume in order to position ourselves relative to other people. Not only do the global elite raise the upper limit, everyone is thus forced to spend more just to keep up, but they also become the perceived benchmark, Juliet Schor's work, for example, shows that people are no longer keeping up with the people next door, but the people they see on television and magazines (Schor, 1998). In order to keep up with these raised consumption standards people are working harder and longer as well as taking out more debt. The increase in luxury consumption has raised consumption expectations further down the income scale, which in order to be funded has involved increased workloads and increased indebtedness. It is not so much keeping up with the Jones but 'keeping up with the Gates'.

Science’s culture of critique discourages groupthink, countermands the effects of human biases, and protects knowledge, not only by rewarding a dispassionate stance toward the subject and institutionalizing organized skepticism but also by fostering competition among scientists able to replicate and hence challenge each other’s work.

aspirations and actions