Some say that by 2050 the world population would reach a point where world resources would be depleted and this will lead to the end of the civilization as we know it. This is information some top investors base their decisions on, taking every opportunity to maximize profit. Which leads to the collapse of the economy, social instability and hyper-inflation.

Sometimes their actions look immoral and cynic to us, as we fell that our lives are directly or indirectly threatened and naturally want to fight them.

Maybe it’s because morality is seen as something external to the Greedy Investor. If one feels separated from the rest, it acts in it’s own narrow interest.

But when you feel you are a part of a community, and the layer that separates you from society dissipates, morality becomes innate. Morality is basic self-preservation for the collective being.

I think this economy will completely collapse before we run out of resources and this will lead to wars, most probably a global conflagration. In case of war, people will lose the last shred of confidence in immoral governments and alternative organization patterns will emerge.

What’s different now form previous world wars is that communication reached a new stage thanks to technology. Because of that, society will be able to reorganize much faster and in a shape fit to the collective being that we are.

The scary New World Order couldn’t last even if it would be implemented. Its inventors missed thinking about the capacity of people to get out of their individual shells and act together as one.

We should find natural ways to stop population growth. By helping to improve the standard of living in poor countries instead of taking advantage of the lower wages.
Based on these numbers, in Eastern Europe population growth is not a problem. By applying the same linear math Romania would loose 25% of it’s population by 2050.

All the projects I truly care about involve large amounts of people.  It’s what makes me tick.

Until recently, I’ve been putting away all the web apps I wanted to develop as I wasn’t really happy with the path from testing to deploying the app and then managing the scaling.

Cloud computing is interesting but to be fair,  I hate to create databases and tables.
I don’t want root access to my virtual machines, or “total control” on the web server.  I just want to focus on the functionality.

Google App Engine is the right combination for me.
Python is really easy to pick up and it’s a beautiful language.

Give it a go, try to understand it’s simplicity which in turn gives you a lot of developing speed and power.

In my spare time, I’ve started working on an online system that would help people connect with the Local Administration and the Government. Not that anybody asked me to.

It’s an online app called webocrat (webocrat.ro and webocrat.eu) and it’s focused on identifying problems (geo-tagged), finding solutions and then monitoring actions (eg. online : signing petitions, legal : law suits).

To put it in perspective, I’ll also have to write a short story about the evolution of tools, consciousness as a tool, the source of the need for power – the human ego, evolution from individual to collective consciousness and finally online tools that convert our common wishes to focused, real-world actions through non-governmental organizations, law suits, petitions or whatever else will be necessary to make things work.

In the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about the world. And particularly about my country, Romania.
Not about what needs to be changed, but more on how to do it, and what I can do to make that change happen sooner.
I’ve been analyzing the political scene, trying to see how it works and looking at what makes the end result such a mess.

My conclusion is that we don’t have the right tools for the job, but fortunately we can build them.
The smallest building block of a real democratic society is the Acting Group and not the family or the citizen as it’s currently stated.
This is where the power is and unfortunately most of the people don’t know it yet. They are so used to being abused that they’ve lost any kind of hope.

We have to build and deliver free, open-source group communication tools that help people gather around common interests, collaborate on reporting problems and finding solutions, making decisions and then implementing the solutions. With legal help, fund raising, petitions, street protests, whatever it takes.
It’s more than crowd-sourcing, it’s complete crowd-government.  Oh, wait.  That’s what democracy was supposed to be in the first place.

It’s not something we should do, but rather something that we can’t afford not to do.
We can’t afford waiting for some extraterrestrial divine force to come and solve our problems.  Even if it did, this force would teach us to change ourselves in order to gain the upper hand in the fight with the worst parts of the human nature.
We need to learn how to collaborate and for this we need communication tools better than forums or blogs.

These tools are not invented yet.  It’s not a matter of educating the users but educating the tool-makers that work on social programming.

And that’s what I’m going to do.

Romania is in the middle of a political crisis, just had the Presidential Elections and the former President organized a massive fraud to maintain his power.
The exit poll results were basically reversed when the “official” count came in.
People from Romania still had the majority, but the votes from Romanians living outside Romania changed it. The elections were organized by the nobody else but his former Chief of Electoral Campaign from 2004.

Dead people voted, thousands of people voted with fake ID cards, thousands of people voted more than once but not limited to twice.
Local mayors in the rural areas forced people – yes, forced – to vote for this guy.

Using the same strategy as Hitler did – one man against the political system – he gained support of the undereducated and uninformed. Unlike Hitler, he doesn’t have any real solution for the economy. This is a violent man, he was shot on tape when hitting a child in the face four years ago. He is known for being violent with his wife.

His first reaction when he saw the tape was that he doesn’t remember, not that he would never hit a child in the face. At least never when surrounded by people and cameras.
Of course, later he said the tape is a fake. I strongly believe it’s not, as I’m into visual effects since 2000.
Some of the people taking his side are actually thinking that this tape is a forgery, others say that “the kid deserved it”. Yeah. That’s the level of his supporters.

His plan now is to change the Constitution and grab complete power over the country as there is a lot more to steal.
One of his main targets is Rosia Montana, the biggest gold mine in Europe, from which Romanians will theoretically get 4 billion* EURO. (see the *)
Actually, if we get 7 EUR/citizen/year for the next 15 years it would be much more than I’m expecting.
There is a very strong opposition. 80% of the Romanians are against mining as we’ve already had an ecological disaster back in 2000.

We are waiting for the decision of the Constitutional Court on Friday
LATER EDIT : They’ve validated the elections. Traian Basescu is still president. Yes, the guy in the video.