As people around the United States begin to fill up their McMansions, they are starting to learn that there is not a great deal of value in accumulating “stuff”. You can only have so much stuff crammed into your mansion.

More and more people are finding that there is much more value in experiences. After all it is about the people you’re with and the things you do that creates memories worth having. Accumulating stuff can create a memory, but once you’ve accumulated it there’s no action anymore.

This is driving people to change their perspective and their actions fundamentally from where people were 20 or 30 years ago during the ‘greed is good’ 1980’s. Fewer people eat dinner at home opting instead to eat dinner out at restaurants. In part it is for the experience as well as the convenience. More people are doing other things as well from taking trips all over the world to doing volunteer work and much more.

When they do acquire “stuff”, they are buying things that allow them to do more things like exercising or mountain biking or skiing or watching a DVD on their home movie theater system. An entire industry is starting to creep up that serves up the experience that people are looking for.

Off-Broadway and other types of entertainment, live entertainment and online entertainment are flourishing right now. There is an extremely high demand for content both online and off whether you’re going to see a Sting concert or you are searching for the best prices on jersey boys tickets to see a re-creation of Frankie Valley’s own life experiences.

In some regards this seems a little bit selfish but it’s also very much in keeping with the concept of carpe diem, people are seizing the day and doing things as opposed to seizing the gold and sitting on it.

A little over 10 years ago, I applied for life insurance for the first time. I’m not talking about that life insurance that you automatically get from an employer just for working for them, some simple term package. I’m talking about going to an insurance agent and applying for insurance.

To get the best rates for life insurance a person usually has to undergo a physical medical evaluation. Sometimes it’s as simple as an interview and sometimes you have to go into the doctor and get a full physical. The basic idea is that if you are in poor health, odds are that you will not live as long and therefore the insurance will pay out a claim faster and your rates should be high enough to cover that claim within the time frame of your life expectancy. It sounds a little cold, but it is business and basically when you take out life insurance you are betting on your own life expectancy yourself so its not appropriate to get to bent out of shape with the insurance companies allowing you to place that bet.

Like many things in life insurance companies are working to try and make things a little bit simpler. They are starting to offer no exam life insurance options where people can just apply and receive an approval instantly, typically through an online form entry and have their application process relatively quickly and efficiently and automatically. Now from the insurance companies perspective they are sacrificing a little bit of precise information which means the risk increases. To cover their risk they must offer or charge that is higher prices.

As consumers our demand for instant gratification and instant solutions when we purchase things online from insurance to apply for a home equity loan or a mortgage even or a dozen other things are often times traded off with the cost or value of the item that were looking to get if we take a little bit more time with my kids a better deal of what we wanted instantly we pay a premium.

The Following is a response that developed into a better question relating to the article, MindMapping with our Time Travelling Brain and moved to a discussion forum in the MindManager yahoo group.

I find this(MindMapping with greater sensory Perception tuning,training and development) very interesting from the perspective that through many years of growing a user base (900,000 MindManager users now) there is a new potential study group out there that is using mindmaps in a way that was not possible with paper based versions.

In the past we could look at how fast a person could pick up information from looking/reading at a mindmap.

But after many years of MM users learning the skills and practicing them on  aregular basis, we now have a new area of potential study.  Something like:

• What is the impact of MindMapping on Composition and the feedback loop of composition?
• On the individual composing?
• On the group composing together?

In creating a mindmap by myself, I can rapidly pull ideas floating in my mind and put them into position on my mindmap and repeat this idea after idea, rapidly moving throughout my thoughts organizing them as I go.

I find that I can pull in a much more comprehensive perspective than I could if I were writing in word (I’m sure many mindmappers would agree).

Similarly this also works in a group.

The question is how big of a difference is this really?  How much better is the quality of the composition?  How much more complete?  Is there more quantity?

Is this spurred on by the real time, almost real time, faster than time aspect of the immediate visual impact of pulling the idea from my mind and turning it into a visual object. 

maybe to put it a different way, as a student of languages in the past, its one thing to be able to think in your language and translate to another.  Once you can think in another language that is an entirely different order of magnitude of capability(not to mention dreaming in a foreign language).

Is there an order of magnitude difference in composition with MM users that have ceased to only think in words but now also think in images?  Artists have been doing this for years, but their application and profession take them down a different path.

MM usres are often words smiths, project managers, managers, programmers and more.  We often come from a word / language driven background and we have learned through MM to think visually.

so after doing this for so many years, where have we ended up?  have we learned something new about ourselves along the way?  About our capabilities?  About our needs and goals to take this journey to a new level?
My thoughts are that there are three areas that will drive the future of this work and we cover them here in this group with a little regularity.

1.  Three dimensional mindmapping combined with a collaborative wiki approach to mindmapping

2.  Adding Audio sensory capabilities to MM

3.  Adding video capabilities (images in vector form if you will) – an image may provide a thousand  words, but a 20 second video at 30 frames per second can provide 600,000 words – if we have the big picture context to absorb it.

To understand where we will go next, we need a slightly more complete understanding of where we are today, physically, mentally and in action.
Then we can review the order of magnitude changes from
1.  Language thinker to
2.  2d MM visual image thinker to
3.  3d MM Audio/Video Collaborative Thinkers

Do you grok?   

For more informatin on this topic see the conversation unfold in the Mindmanager Yahoo Group under the thread MindMapping with our Time Travelling Brain.

I have found another great translation service.  This one is from Language123 and they specialize in pooling together translators from around the world to create a freelance Translation Services Marketplace.

Translators

Translators can create a profile including their CV or resume and offer up their various translations services, promoting themselves and their companies.

Customers

Customers needing translation services for anything from small to large projects can post the project and await for translators to bid on a job. 

Its a tried and true internet model of bringing together the supply and demand from the marketplace and creating a positive atmosphere to make connections.

Today, I received a chain email talking about a new ‘Jury Duty Scam.’ Many of us never know whether or not to believe these chain mails these days as they could be real, could be urban legend, or could be something that has morphed through the grapevine with a little truth and a little fiction. Today’s email even had a ‘trusted’ source with a web address. A web address costs next to nothing, so even a scammer could post a web address with details about scams and then scam the people that are looking for instructions in avoiding scams. EEH Gads! Circles within Circles.

So I googled the topic ‘Jury Duty Scam’ and took the 4th hit down with an fbi.gov url. Case Closed, it is a real scam!

Scam Scenario
A person calls you and informs you that a warrant has been issued for your arrest, because you failed to appear for jury duty. They tell you that they can reschedule you and have the warrant dismissed. They then proceed to request your social security number and in some cases your credit card information. This is a scam.

There is no need to reference a scam site, please feel free to go direct to the source at the FBI through the link below.
Federal Bureau of Investigation – Press Release September 28, 2005

Since 2001, the US has fallen from 4th place to 12th place this year as rated against 30 industrialized member states of the OECD organization. For a country with such a high per capita of computer users, it would seem to be counter intuitive that the US would lag in broadband usage comparatively speaking.

However, the country still faces many obstacles that are not limited by the cost of physically wiring a very large land mass. Even though 3G and promises of free wifi offer the potential of rapidly catching up, to many infights between industries and local governments seem to be slowing things down. Couple this with a cost of service to the end user that ranges from $40-$90 per month, and it is no wonder that the US lags.

The US Government shows no signs of providing funds to subsidize a project that would bring access to more people and communities, and so the market must drive the implementation, even while participants battle each other in court and with lobbyists to gain political and legal advantages. Meanwhile, the rest of the industrialized world moves on and moves on rapidly.

For those of us that have broadband access its difficult to conceive of living without it. So we have to consider what the ramifications will be for a country the size of the US, to lag behind in access to knowledge. For a country that beleives in the axiom that knowledge is power, its surprising that the US is not taking action to compete in accessing knowledge at speed and quantity available to its peers.

OECD: U.S. Lags in Broadband Rollout – Yahoo! News