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Today's Official Lunch Break Activity, and the latest event in my love affair with all things Google, is figuring out "How to Use Google Maps to Win Friends and Influence People." So far I've got this spiffy little offering showing the geographic location of my day job at Competitive Futures, Inc.

Tomorrow, (a well-mapped version of) the world!

The Subprime Mortgage Fiasco

The most cogent analysis of the recent subprime mortgage fiasco I've yet heard. You'll laugh before you cry.

The Real "Kingdom of Heaven"

The Kingdom may have been a dud, but its introductory credits hosted one of the most cogent and engaging summations of Saudi-American relations every presented. So, put aside two minutes of your life, and discover what the War on Terror, $3/gallon gasoline, and young women being sentenced to six months jail and 200 lashes for the crime of being raped all mean.

So, just what does the future of Saudi-American relations hold? Recently, veteran petrochemical expert and Georgetown University scholar Dr. Jean-François Seznec maintained to me that Saudi Arabia would supplant Germany as the world's largest chemical exporter by 2015. It's well-known that the Kingdom has the world's largest known reserves of crude oil by far. As the above short points out, the United States will be the world's largest oil consumer for some time. Though Saudi Arabia is not the largest exporter to the United States (contrary to popular belief, that honor falls to Canada), it's 14 percent share is significant. Even so, as Rachel Bronson argued last year in The Washington Post, the relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia more closely resemble that which it maintains with Jordan. Forged and strengthened during the Cold War for the common cause against Communism, the diplomatic ties are more strategic than economic. But, whether for trade or for common cause, the Saudi-American alliance has proven durable.

Clouds loom on the horizon, however. Osama bin Laden, born in Yemen, but reared in Saudi Arabia, is only the most visible manifestation of the discontent with the House of Saud. Long before the September 11th attacks, bin Laden had declared war on the decadent royal family for chummy relations with the West. Fifteen of the nineteen September 11th hijackers were Saudi nationals. Saudis flocked to the jihad being waged against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s, forming the brunt of bin Laden's "Afghan Arabs." They comprise a large percentage of the foreign insurgent fighters in Iraq today.

Ironically, the anti-Communist stance of the royal family and the Cold War United States may have midwifed the current breed of Muslim extremism rife in the Kingdom today. At the time, the best way to deflect atheistic anti-Communism seemed to be to encourage the nascent religious movements then metathesizing in Saudi Arabia and Nasser's Egypt. It was only with the arresting surprise of the 1979 Iranian Revolution that Muslim activists were re-labeled as the enemy. And remember, during the subsequent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA actively armed and financed the Mujahideen "freedom fighters," including Bin Laden's "Afghan Arabs." They (now known as the Taliban) would later use the very same RPGs delivered to them by the U.S. Government against NATO forces a decade later.

Reagan dedicates the Shuttle Columbia to Mujahideen freedom fighters:


Both the Saudis and their American allies must face the bitter harvest of these past choices today. A third of Saudi Arabia's young men (aged 20-24) are unemployed. Saudi Arabia has one of the world's fastest growing population rates, ballooning six-fold since 1960. This is the so-called "oil baby boom" who is now emerging into adulthood. A glut of young, and often-unemployed Saudis is restless about the inordinate level of wealth concentrated among the thousands of members of the royal line, bitter at the ubiquity of foreign expatriate labor which dominates the economy (foreigners make up a third of the Saudi population), inflamed by their leadership's tacit complicity in the American invasion of Iraq, and restless under the weight of a corrupt and moribund regime. As the Saudis with box cutters on September 11th demonstrated, these disaffected young can be dangerously fertile ground for terrorist recruitment.

Will the Saudi regime stand? What kind of economic and geopolitical fallout would result from the regime's collapse? Short of that, can the alliance be maintained in the wake of popular outcry both in the United States and Saudi Arabia?

See the newest World Economic Forum scenario on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council countries like Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates here. Also, read Dr. Seznec's intelligent interview on his love-hate relationship with Saudi Arabia, and his recent article in Foreign Policy concerning Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz's surprising reforms.

New Site Feed

You may have noticed that we've added automatically updating RSS feeds (what is RSS?) above and to the right column of the Greene Futures blog. The box at the top of this column is a widget which projects the articles we pick to share from our own Google Reader RSS subscriptions. With it, we will publish the most important and interesting pieces from our daily reading (encompassing 1000+ articles daily from 304 independent outlets, including news articles, blog posts, journal offerings, new books, and published reports). Greene Future's regular sources are listed to the bottom right-hand side of the blog. We spend hours every day combing through this mountain of information, running the gamut of world news, foreign affairs, trends, energy developments, scientific findings, technological innovations, environmental issues, business events and economic ramifications.

But for you, dear reader, we provide fertile seeds sorted from the chaff. Meaty, actionable intelligence wrestled from a tangle of information overload.

This is just one step in a series to make this site the most useful depot for its readers in all things related to future trends. There exists no satisfactory list of all the news outlets, futurist thinkers and analysis sources to date. It's a full-time job attempting to track down all the little bits of evidence from every corner of the information sphere, and an even more intimidating task groping toward some understanding of what it all means.

Please make sure and subscribe to the Greene Futures blog feed (click here to subscribe). It will allow you to automatically stay abreast of news, analysis and updates from Greene Futures through your favored RSS Reader (Google Reader, My Yahoo RSS, RSS Reader, etc.). And if you frankly have no idea what I've been talking about with all this RSS nonsense, check out the video below:

The Future of Luxury

A house in Belgrave Square will soon go on sale for £90million (which is approximately $900 gazillion, for those of you following the plummeting US Dollar). But this doesn’t even set the record for London real estate. That honor goes to a Qatar sheik, who paid £100 million for a Hyde Park penthouse. Speaking of English real estate, the Beckhams have perhaps set the record for most expensive tree house, wrangling with local zoning authorities to get permission for their children to tromp about in a $187,000 lux-fort.

But don’t worry, you too can have a “luxury” tree fort, too (for $50,000 from Neiman Marcus), which brings us to our theme of the day: mass luxury. What does luxury mean in the 21st Century? When all the rest of us can feasibly afford bejeweled iPhones, snakeskin Razr mobiles, golden Zunes, and blingin’ MacBooks, what’s exclusive anymore? A MacLaren baby stroller? No way, every Volvo-driving mom in the suburbs has one of those. How about a bullet-proof baby stroller?


(Disclaimer: Don't worry, no babies are harmed in the recording of this YouTube video, but it is the most insane thing you've ever seen)

Even luxury objects themselves have taken on characteristics of popular culture, kitch and camp. Witness the $100,000 Pepsi can, glam Mr. Potato Head, diamond Christmas tree (Steven Quick jeweler will make you a gold one), and Big Boi's $50,000 diamond-set Nike Air Force Ones.



Spending even astronomical amounts of cash isn’t even any guarantee. Perhaps luxury is experiences? A $20 million vacation to space, anyone? Want even more cache? How about a $30 million trip to the moon, care of Google? Even the new owner of the record $7.3 million vintage Rolls-Royce can’t drive there.

But then again, any crass lout among the nouveaux (ultra) riche can buy their way into such upper-echelon markers. Last year, the number of world billionaires grew by 35 percent, and the number of world millionaire households grew 16 percent to 9.6 million. What’s an aspiring magnate to do when just everyone is eating Yves Saint Laurent designer caviar?

Perhaps material luxury is so 20th Century, to be left behind with all the other gauche manifestations of conspicuous consumption? The traditional luxury industry may just be terrible for the environment. Perhaps the new luxury is conspicuous giving? Is saving the planet the newest status symbol? Certainly if the organic ubiquity of Whole Foods, celebrities smugly wielding hybrid Priuses, and haut eco-couture are any indication, then new exclusivity is the vanguard of conscience. No one can cast you the evil eye when your millions are preserving delicate rainforest ecosystems.

Maybe the only true luxury anymore is attention. Unlike diamond Mr. Potato Heads and rocket flights to the moon, attention truly is limited by the number of eyes and ears to fall upon every one of us jockeying frantically for their favor. So, help me feel luxurious, dear reader, and read on!

-For another interesting meditation on the future of luxury, check out my colleague Eric Garland's newest cover story in The Futurist magazine, "The Experience Economy: The High Life of Tomorrow."

James Howard Kunstler: F*ck the Suburbs

James Howard Kunstler, author of Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape is angry. Nay, he's foaming at the mouth, slathering rollicking obscenities, spitting fierce vitriolic diatribes lambasting the evil cancer that is the late 20th Century American suburb. Watch him in a TED Conference video, "The Tragedy of Suburbia"



Why move away from the suburbs? Well, they're isolating, with few public spaces, helping to lead to a marked decline of social capital in the United States. Such a social disintegration may be threatening the vigorous associative spirit that De Tocqueville praised in his famous study of American democracy. Once more, the sprawl and lack of public transportation in traditional suburbs makes for constant driving, long commutes, heavy energy use, rampant air pollution and carbon emissions, and the destruction of both open spaces and farm areas. In an age where $3 gas seems like a deal, perhaps the suburbs born from cheap and plentiful oil in the 1950s have reached their obsolescence?

So what will it take to turn this:



Into this?



At least we have some good examples to work from. Here's a list of the most livable cities internationally, according to the (excellent new London-based magazine) Monocle. The only city in the United States given a nod is Honolulu, "a truly global city." And Mercer Human Resource Consulting provides their own list of top 100 cities most desired by "expatriate executives." Zurich again makes an appearance at the top, followed by Geneva, Vancouver and Vienna. Almost all the desirable cities are European, with Honolulu again ranking top for the United States (but only 27th internationally). Generally, German and Swiss cities are top picks.

As for American suburbs, the new urbanism movement has provided some outstanding examples of livable suburbs: The Irvine Ranch planned community in Orange County, Columbia in Maryland, and The Woodlands north of Houston.

William McDonough and Cradle to Cradle

William McDonough, author of Cradle to Cradle, is the most intelligent voice in the clean tech movement right now. In 1999, Time Magazine recognized him as a "hero of the planet." His book itself is published on Durabook "paper," constructed of a paper-like plastic that can be recycled without loosing structural integrity, and is waterproof, to boot (as seen above). McDonough's day-job is as founder of William McDonough + Partners, a leading architectural firm. He's designed the world's largest grass roof (10.4 acres) for a Ford Motor Company plant in Dearborn, Michigan. On the first day, the plant saved Ford $35 million dollars in operating costs. McDonough has been contracted by the Chinese government to build 12 entire cities along the Cradle to Cradle model. If this makes enough business sense to woo billions of dollars from the stereotypically un-environmental Ford Motor Company and People's Republic of China, might it be good enough for you?

His Cradle to Cradle innovation is to imagine a "technological metabolism" modeled upon the "biological metabolism" which we're all well-familiar. There is no waste in nature, dead animals and plants are broken down and turned into nutrients for the soil (even rocks and metal become the iron, zinc, magnesium "minerals" in our dinner). Waste=Food. Materials are then not created and then thrown away, they are constructed, broken down and re-constructed in an sustainable, wasteless circuit. Traditional recycling, on the other hand, is mere "downcycling" because the papers and plastics that are recycled become lower and lower quality with each recycling until they are useless and are thrown into landfills anyway. The recycling process itself is often more polluting that simply making a new plastic bottle. Why not make goods that can be created, destroyed, and then recreated, without any waste? Why not design them that way from the start? It saves materials, and therefore money. The trees are happy, and so are the accountants.

Watch him speak to the TED Conference in 2005:

Welcome to Greene Futures

Welcome to Greene Futures, a forum to explore and harness watershed events, important movements and future trends.

The pace of change, the level of advance and the sheer unimaginable volume of information available to billions of eyes and ears unfolds toward us today in a dizzying torrent. And no one--Cincinnati office worker, Nicaraguan fruit farmer, Wall Street venture capitalist or Darfur refugee--is immune to the immense and often confusing undercurrents pulling inexorably into tomorrow.

How can you plan a life with blind doubt about what tomorrow will bring? How can you build a house without knowing what the housing market brings, structure your investment portfolio with no inkling of the next big thing, create laws without understanding their effects or venture to feed the world's poor without knowing how? Our decisions now not only build upon or hedge against what tomorrow will bring--wise action now creates desired futures.

It is the humble project of Greene Futures to wield the most powerful tool available to human beings--information--to both anticipate and thrive from the future. Information, like any tool, can be winnowed from crude beginnings into a fine precision instrument. We aim to hack through the bramble of words and pictures that assault us daily, in order to emerge with strategic intelligence. Guidance you can use now. Direction to give you a superior edge, to help you thrive. Power to emerge from the fray of the fast and furious, to reign high in a globalized world.

Foresight and relevance. Ability and opportunity. Wisdom and conscience.

Let the conversation begin...