Organisation is a technology choice. Whether it is political, social or economic organisation. Normally the most efficient form of organisation is chosen to serve a particular purpose. Capital intensive industries tend to adopt heavily centralised structures to support their operations. Commoditised industries can support decentralised structures.
The Navy is a good example of a capital intensive industry. A ship takes a lot of money to design, build, man and maintain. Consequently the Navy needs a massive operation to raise the revenues, to fund the process, and over look the process. Navies largely remain the monopoly of nation-states as they have the infrastructure to raise the money through tax to build and support the bureaucracy a Navy needs.
Publishing has become a commoditised industry. There are numerous competitors supplying both paper and digital publishing services and products. An example of this is SSR which is hosted in a basement but has the same web-presence as the New York Times (but not the same audience).
An organisation that wants to compete in the publishing industry has to have a decentralised structure in order to avoid the high overhead of a centralised bureaucratic structure. Centralisation in a commoditised industry makes the organisational form inefficient.
Government is an organisational form which has to respond to pressures in order to maximise its efficiency. The early 20thC was a capital intensive environment. Warfare was capital intensive and between states. Then there was the rise of the welfare state where governments adopted many of the services that private industry had (or had not) provided. This type of system makes sense to have a supporting centralised organisation.
In the last twenty years out-sourcing has become more common. Many of the technologies that led to nation-state monopolies for capital reasons have commoditised to the point that non-state actors can afford them.
A good example of this is UAVs. Once the domain of nation-states, they have become affordable for private owners in the short space of twenty years. An Australian test recently had a garage built UAV fly from Canada to England, through storms and rain, to land a 5kg payload within five metres of its target in England. That type of precision had been a capital intensive pursuit in the past - not anymore.
In a commoditised environment the government needs to adopt flatter or decentralised structures otherwise they are adding inefficiencies into the system.
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Phoenix Eats Out is the restaurant review site for
Phoenix,
Scottsdale and
Old Town Scottsdale which lists the modernist and contemporary restaurants, taverns and bars in the greater Phoenix area.
This is the list of the most popular restaurants pages from phoenixeatsout.com that have been viewed the most;
My personal favourite restaurants in Phoenix are
AZ88,
Postinos,
Bomberos with
Grazie,
Humble Pie,
Orange Table,
The Vig,
Fez and others coming close behind. View the complete list with the photo-journalistic style images on
phoenixeatsout.com
Arizona is an outdoor state and has lots of hiking in the city and around the state. Phoenix is unusual for most cities in having several large mountains in the center of the city with great hiking. Anyone who comes to Phoenix has to do the
Echo Canyon trail on Camelback and the
Summit Hike on Squaw Peak or Piesta Peak. The views of the city, suburbs and surrounding mountains are wonderful from Camelback and Piesta Peak.
For more experienced hikers there is the McDowell Mountains in North Scottsdale that has several difficult and strenuous hikes in
Tom's Thumb and
Bell Pass. Alternatively, you can hike the highest mountain in Arizona. At 12,600 feet
Humphrey's Peak is a long and difficult hike.
Between 2004 and 2009 this site,
southsearepublic.org, was a constitutional blog based on scoop which focused on Australian and global constitutional issues.
One of the strongest aspects of it was the development of constitutions by those involved in the blog. These constitutions are the outcome:
The constitutions were built using principles from Montesquieu's separation of powers, the enlightnment's universal political rights and the ancient Athenian technology of sortition and choice by lot.
South Sea Republic started in 2004 as an Australian constitutional blog in 2004 based on scoop software. It was an immigrative outgrowth of Kuro5hin. The archives for each year since then;
The articles are ordered by views.
I am an Australian living in the United States as a permanent resident.
I am a software developer by trade and mostly work in Java and jump between middleware and front end.
I originally worked in the New York area of the United States in telecommunications before moving to Washington DC and
working in a mix of telecommunications, energy and ITS. I started my own software company before heading out to
Arizona and working with Shutterfly. Since then I have joined a startup in the Phoenix area and am thoroughly enjoying myself.
I do a lot of photography which I post on this website, but also on flickr. I have a photo-journalistic website which lists
the modernist and contemporary restaurants in phoenix. I have a site on the
Australian Flying Corps [AFC] which has been around since the 1990s and which I unfortunately
lost the .org URL to during a life event; however, it is under the
www.australianflyingcorps.com URL now.
The AFC website has gone through several iterations since the 90s and the two most recent are
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2004-2002) and
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2002-1999) which are good places to start.
