Happy bisextile day! (whatever …)

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I’d like to congratulate our american neighbours: “For the first time in U.S. history, more than one in every 100 adults are in jail or prison“. I think we just reached an important milestone.

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Suburbs are the next slums (in the U.S. at least)! “For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.”
via kottke.org

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Freakonomics blog asked its readers last week to find a new 6 words motto for the U.S. (I liked the Copyranter one: Red, white and blue. Fuck you.).     Freakonomics winner is: Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay

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To continue on the business of free, Trendwatching’s trend to watch this month is: Free love. “FREE LOVE: the ongoing rise of free, valuable stuff that’s available to consumers online and offline. From AirAsia tickets to Wikipedia, and from diapers to music. FREE LOVE thrives on an all-out war for consumers’ ever-scarcer attention and the resulting new business models and marketing techniques, but also benefits from the ever-decreasing costs of producing physical goods, the post-scarcity dynamics of the online world (and the related avalanche of free content created by attention-hungry members of GENERATION C), the many C2C marketplaces enabling consumers to swap instead of spend, and an emerging recycling culture. “

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