World's first 'Stock Market' in 40 years opens

October 13 2050

By Calcutta ZI finance reporter: Carl Zietpunda

Largely unnoticed by the broader financial world, the CFX or Calcutta Financial Exchange, opened for trading today - the first legal 'stock market' allowed to trade since the global financial collapse of 2015.

Younger readers may not remember, but 'stock markets' ruled the financial world in the pre-Binary era, and the rise and fall of the company 'shares' traded on the market could make or break the wealth of individuals, corporations, or even countries.

Stock markets and share trading, in all its various flavours, were outlawed in the major economies in 2010 and since then simpler forms of 'share trading' have only been seen in developing countries and these rogue exchanges are shut down just as quickly as they spring up.

Calcutta Finance Minister Shuri Evewattra says the new CFX will lead to more transparent financial dealings between major government institutions.

"Since governments took control of the finance sector globally in 2008, much of the trading and deals between governments has been hidden behind freedom of information and state security laws which prohibit ordinary citizens from gaining true insight into what their governments are doing with their tax dollars," Evewattra says.

"I was nominated to this position because I believe in transparency and a public exchange, properly regulated and managed by the Ministry, is the best way to achieve that."

Only Government listed commercial entities will be allowed to trade 'shares' on the CFX. In order to list they will be required to disclose all details of the financial status at least once every five years.

Managing Gen-XX
‘Get bots’ or get out

By Anthony Germaine
ZI Moscow business writer
24 Sept 2050

You can pay a self-important consultant 20,000 Yen to tell you what I am about to tell you in this article for free.

Or you can read it, and trust me.

I’ve just spent two weeks of my holidays helping a friend who runs a small media consulting firm. He, like any business, deals on a daily basis with the challenge of finding staff to keep his business working.

He, like any business, is finding the biggest of those challenges is attracting and retaining Gen XXers, the generation born in the 2020s.

“By our generation’s standards they are lazy, lack personal responsibility, have outrageous demands around social networking and have an inflated sense of their own importance,” he says in frustration.

“But whenever I advertise a job, they form the bulk of the applicants, so I have to live with it.”

Gen XX: Touchy-feely reborn

If this sounds familiar to you, let me share with you what he has learned:

It’s all about the bots.

Gen XXers have grown up completely reliant on bots to perform the most mundane of tasks. If you just emerged from the cave of a doomsday sect, you may not ‘get bots’ as the saying goes, but you need to understand that GenXXers not only ‘get bots’, they can’t live without them.

I’m not talking about robots – those handy little domestic devices that clean your home or trim your lawn – I’m talking about software bots.

GenXXers use bots for EVERYTHING, from ordering pizza, to getting a bank loan, arranging pickup and delivery of their dry cleaning, researching their university homework, or inviting friends to parties.

Why do anything yourself when there is a bot on MyValet that will do it for you?

“Gen XXers honestly think that sending a bunch of bots out into the Omninet and having to manage them, is real work,” my friend groans.

“If I ask my staff to do a media feed for a client about his new product, they plug the details of the assignment into a bot, and send it out into the world for quotes from a vendor. Then someone in Arkansas or Chechnya does the job for them and sends it back to them.

“Most of the time they do accept the cost of doing this should come from their own salary, but I recently had an employee who demanded a ‘bot allowance’ because his bot costs were starting to increase because of my ‘unreasonable’ demands!”

Personal ownership of work results is totally missing, and has to be managed as well, he said.

“When the bots come back with the result and I tell them it isn’t good enough, they shrug and say, “Blame the Bot dude.” They don’t see that it is their responsibility to deliver a quality result, not the bot’s.”

The answer, he says, is not to try to re-educate them, but to accept or even, god-forbid, embrace the way Gen-XXers use bots.

“I hired an in-house coder to take the open-source bots my staff were using, and reconfigure them to use higher quality sources or more reliable vendors,” he said.

“Results improved immediately.”

We want face-time and we want it now

 The second struggle many Gen XX employers have, is with the Gen XXer’s need for personal face to face contact.

Most corporations transitioned to virtual offices and streaming conferencing twenty years ago, and the turn-of-the-century model of housing workers in office blocks like so many honey bees died an unlamented death.

But so did collective schooling, Eyeware(R) and home schooling with tactile simulation interfaces has meant that families now spend most of their working and leisure time together, in the home, interacting face to face.

“Gen XXers just entering the workforce, are demanding an environment which is just like home,” my friend tells me.

“They expect me to be like mum or dad – they want us to be located physically together, so that they can just wander in and out of my personal space whenever they have a question or want to chat.

“There was one persistent employee who kept complaining that my Party Line™ status was always ‘busy’ or ‘out’ and he was sick of waiting in line to talk with me.

“One day he just turned up at my house and was sitting there in at my dining table like one of my kids!”

After fighting it for a year, he gave in, and has rented a disused community centre downtown which he visits three days a week for two hours a day, so that any employees who want to interact with him personally can do so.

“I know I sound like my grandfather, but I actually have to commute to work!” he laughs. “And they love it. They get more energised by that two hours of face-time than they do with five hours of conferencing.”

The moral of this story is you may not understand them, you may blame their parents, society or the media for who they are, but if you can learn to see the world through their eyes, you may just be able to make them productive and happy employees.

Anthony Germaine signing out! (Note: this stream was not created by a bot. Or, was it?)

Could new RTG technology lead to a revival of the ‘car’?

By Sirhan Gupta,
ZI Sacramento Transport Writer
5 May 2050

You have seen it in movies from the turn of the century – the motor vehicle built for a family, but usually only driven by one person.

It’s a heresy today but back in the days of cheap energy and climate vandalism it wasn’t unusual to see two or more of these parked in the front gardens of the average suburban home, one for each member of the family.

And in these days of on-demand mass transit, is there any reason to think of the motor car as anything but a dinosaur?

Certainly the new concepts division at Yahoogle-GMH in Sacramento California thinks there is. And the secret is Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generation, or RTGs.

“People don’t realise it but 50 year old RTG technologies are still powering the Gallileo and Cassini space probes today, and operating at 80% of their original capacity,” said team leader Yin Hu.

“We have revisited the RTG technology which has basically sat undeveloped since the oil wars, because of the general taboo on all things nuclear.”

Hu is quick to point out the RTG does not use nuclear fission.

“RTGs use nuclear decay to generate heat, not fission. There is absolutely no chance of a meltdown or explosion from one of these things.”

RTGs take a nuclear fuel, usually plutonium, and using an array of thermocouples translate the heat from radioactive decay into electricity which can drive engines or computer systems.

“The RTGs in the Cassini probe were the size of a standing person, and weighed 150kg,” Hu said.

“Our prototype powerplant (ED: at this stage just a computer model) is the size of a home barbecue kettle, weighs 50Kg and can put out enough power to drive a half tonne vehicle at 50 miles an hour, for a hundred years.”

“It would mean a revolution in transport engineering,” Hu said. “Instead of replacing vehicles when they are obsolescent, power plant and all, you would have a removeable power plant that would go from vehicle to vehicle over time, whenever you upgraded – meaning people could upgrade more often, more cheaply.”

EnviroSceptics spokesperson Sanjiv Taylor Neilsen said he believed the announcement of the new concept project by Yahoogle-GMH was “unserious”.

“Most metropolises today have on-demand mass transit systems that mean a person can travel door to door from their home to their destination and only ever face a ten to fifteen minute waiting time between connections,” he said.

“They don’t have to think about how to get where they are going, they face almost no risk of personal accidents, they don’t have to worry about where to park and how much it will cost and they are sharing the energy cost with other travellers instead of having to carry the entire burden themselves.”

He said RTGs might have application for powering urban-rural transport networks but enzymatic engines were likely to remain the power plant of choice for these systems because of the continuing fear of abuse of nuclear power and technology.

“It is one thing to say that the RTG cannot explode or melt down, but it has a core of pure plutonium which could be used in so-called “dirty weapons” and it is highly irresponsible to even suggest a return to exploring nuclear technologies,” Taylor Neilsen said.

Veteran Sacramento Congressman, Mr Rodney King Jnr, warned ZI that he believes the Yahoogle-GMH proposal is just spin, intended to push legislators into approving their other major development proposal, the P-Mover 2055, by presenting a less attractive alternative.

“Y-GMH want to scare legislators into a corner by saying you can fund investment on this radioactive vote losing monster, or our obsolete but safe P-Mover 2055, the choice is yours,” Mr King said.

“I’ve spoken to the Mayors of New York, LA, Chicago and Baltimore and they are not interested in extending the P-Mover contract - they want new ideas, and they say Y-GMH is not offering them.”

New Battle of Britain looms
by Sanjeev Gupta, Zurich Intermedia.

London, August 20, 2050: As preparations begin for commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the iconic Battle of Britain, in which a few hundred RAF pilots held the might of the German Luftwaffe at bay, tensions within Europe over access to fresh water are threatening to ignite a new aerial war.

Lough Neagh, the largest freshwater lake in the UK, and one of the last remaining in Europe, was the scene of a dramatic conflict last month when the Euro water freighter Pelikan sailed up the Bann Estuary in Northern Island to fulfil an existing contract to load water.

The move was a deliberate provocation by the Euro Government after it failed in the World Maritime Court to force the UK Government to reverse a recent decision to ban all water exports given the current drought in the UK.

The Pelikan refused to leave the dock in Toomebridge and subsequently all traffic on the critical Bann Estuary Freshwater Route has ground to a halt.

British naval efforts to forcibly tow the Pelikan were rebuffed when the Euro Republic responded by stationing Unmanned Attack Helicopters on the deck of the Pelikan and warned they would be used to defend the vessel if attacked.

The Luftwaffe Mosquito UAH

The tension is rising against a background of unease in Europe about the complicated system of water rights negotiated in the early 2020s, and increasing pressure on natural fesh water supplies to feed demand for hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles.

Both the ER and the UK have placed their air forces on alert to respond to any military action at Lough Neagh.

SIDEBAR: Who would win a new Battle of Britain? By Damon Sin Teng, Zurich Intermedia Defence Analyst.

Ironically the British military lethargy which nearly cost them the Battle of Britain 100 years ago, may once again cost them dearly if the UK and ER come to blows over water.

The British public has elected an unbroken chain of non-interventionist governments since its unfortunate alliance with the then United States of America during the Oil Wars. Defence spending is capped under British law at 1% or less of GDP and may only be used for defense purposes.

Britain therefore lacks any ability to project air power, relying almost entirely on ground and satellite based laser interception systems which were commissioned in the early 2040s and are due for decommissioning by 2055. No successor for this air defence system has yet been announced, or field tested, though a Request for Tender was issued two years ago.

The ER on the other hand, as the lead country Pan Continental Pre-Emptive Response Initiative, engaged in a steady build up of its offensive capabilities following the damaging ER-Turkish conflict. The smaller but more modern Turkish forces exacted a heavy toll on the obsolescent ER force dispatched to Turkey (made up primarily of German land and air units).

Recent acquisitions and a home grown aeronautics and space defence sector have given the ER the most potent air force in the region, though still not comparable to China or India.

Most worrying for the UK will be the ER USV (Unmanned Space Vehicle) Dropship Luftflotte, which can be deployed from its orbiting satellite platform to any location in the UK within 30 minutes of activation.

Roughly 200 aircraft strong, and armed with thermobaric missiles, it is unlikely the UK laser defence system will be effective against it.

The next energy crisis?
Column by Sirhan Irfan, Mumbai, July 15 2050:

30 years after the Oil Wars the world teeters on the brink of a new crisis over energy. I call it Peak Enzymes.


The development of almost limitless energy through the harnessing of the Calvin-Benson photosynthesis cycle relieved the energy crisis and turned back the clock on carbon emissions - it was also supposed to end the need for energy wars, forever.


Now, a shortage in the crucial enzymes needed to power Calvin-Benson generators is leading to sabre weilding by India, disgruntled by the unreliable supply of enzymes by the world's largest producer, the Euro Republic.

This week, India placed its Kinetic Weapons Satellite System (Code named Kartikeya) in geostationary orbit over the ER capital, Berlin. The ERthreatened an immediate pre-emptive strike against the Kartikeya satellite unless it was re-deployed over the North Pole and India complied, claiming that the movement of the satellite was coincidental and not related to current tensions with the ER. But the gesture has not gone unnoticed inside the walls of the Bundestag.

The ER National Enzyme Consortium claims to have abundant enzyme production capacity and promises new efficiencies will boost production. However, the ER's enzyme production peaked at 6 million megaunits per day in 2044. Since the last new production facility was opened in 2047 and is already operating at peak capacity, where will they find the new efficiencies they promise to deliver without the necessary supply of water to feed the breeders?


Furthermore to keep up with the ever-increasing demand, they would need to open several massive new production facilities every year.

The fact is they aren't.

Both public opposition and the prohibitive cost of building new facilities which comply with stringent ER safeguards virtually guarantee no new facility can be built in the EU, and to date, generic factories outside the ER and China have failed to match the production output of the superior ER enzyme technologies.


The world does not want to contemplate a future of new energy scarcities but I believe that the EU authorities are "whistling past the graveyard" to keep the world from getting scared.