TED Community » Jose Fernandez Calvo

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Finding a way to fight government corruption with technology.

An idea worth spreading

Legalize all recreational drugs. Treat them just like smoking, fight them through awareness and control them within the law. The damage the illegal drug trade is doing now around the world is larger than the damage from potential increase in drug use due to legalization.

Talk to me about

Law is Amoral: Religious morality cannot be the foundation for a legal system.
How can we fight corruption using technology?

People don't know that I'm good at

Driving cattle cross country on horseback. Singing at weddings.

My TED Story

I found TED while seaching online for talks by Richard Dawkins. I fell in love with TED at first sight, watched tons of videos online and cheekly applied for membership, Long Beach 2011 will be my third TED conference.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +175 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +6

  A reply on Talk: Joel Burns tells gay teens "it gets better"

  May 4 2011: Philip Stephens:
  
  Your analogies to murder/pedophilia are all about imposing the will of one person (the murderer/pedophile) upon another unwilling participant (the victim).
  
  And aren't those crimes more analogous to your own behaviour, as you try to impose your will on other, unwilling, members of society?
• +2

  A comment on Conversation: Has a TED Talk ever influenced you? How?

  Feb 23 2011: A TED talk changed my life. About five years ago I was doing an online search about Richard Dawkins when I found his TED talk. I then started watching other talks as they went online and a few years later became a TEDster myself for the first time in 2009.
  
  It may be a cliche, but it is still true: TED2009 blew my mind and when the pieces came together again they were aligned differently ... better! The experience was repeated in 2010 and I have high expectations for what will happen in a few days in 2011. I can honestly say that I lead a better life by thinking bigger and acting on ideas.
  
  TED does that to you, it gives you ideas and energizes you into taking action to make this world a better place.

• A comment on Conversation: Changing American leadership from one President to four Presidents.

  Feb 18 2011: Agree with Charlie, also professional independent bodies (like the Federal Reserve) take important decisions out of the hand of politicians that might be tempted to tweak the rules (like the interest rate) to benefit them at re-election time, instead of considering the long-time benefit of the country.

• A comment on Conversation: Triple-blind politics

  Feb 17 2011: I cant see how it could be implemented in practice, but it would be great if it could be done!! Any thing that helps reduce corruption is a good thing!!

• A comment on Conversation: Use surplus merchant ships as "Rain Boats". Modified vessels will follow tropical low pressure systems and harvest rain for needy countries.

  Feb 17 2011: The problem is that the cost of the water would be way too expensive! Just to give you an idea ...a panamax ship might cost something like USD 10 million per year to operate (crews, port costs, fuel, insurance, etc.). If you managed 8 loads of 70.000 tons per year (highly improbable you would get so much) the cost per ton would be close to USD 20 per ton (or cubic meter) of water.
  
  Also, every day millions of cubic meters of fresh water are "destroyed" (turned into salt water) at the mouths of rivers around the world, in many cases this water is clean enough to drink. This would probably be a cheaper fixed location to "harvest" water. But still the total cost would make the whole thing uneconomical, there are better alternatives.
  
  In comparison water from a desalination plant costs about USD 1 to USD 3 per ton, these are becoming more popular but still have the problem of their environmental impact (energy consumption and waste salt).
  
  It would be much more efficient to set up purification plants (small or large) at a water source close the location where the water will be consumed, with less transport costs you would also reduce the environmental impact of the whole operation.
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: Using IT To Tackle Down Corruption

  Feb 17 2011: I like your question. Something similar has been on my TED profile for a couple of years and I recently proposed an idea related to this ... get you friends and family to stop helping the money laundering that comes from corruption!! That includes the employees of companies like Goldman Sacks!!
  
  One idea I have had for some time related to IT but not sure how to implement would be to create a program that searches the databases of real estate property ownership in the US (which is public record and is mostly online) and matches it with politicians of different countries. I think a list of the properties in the US of Indonesian and Argentine politicians (and their families) would make a very interesting read ... maybe we could hand it to judges in Jakarta and Buenos Aires ... maybe something gets done about it .... right?

• A comment on Conversation: Who is the most interesting TED Fellow you have seen on TED.com or met in person?

  Feb 17 2011: Juliana Machado Ferreira !! Met her at TED in Long Beach and I'm in awe of the great work she is doing.
• +2

  A comment on Conversation: Can biodynamic farms scale?

  Feb 17 2011: Yes, it is possible! I've seen and lived it!!
  
  I grew up spending a lot of time on a large ranch on the Pampas, where the main activities were cattle rearing and agriculture, but integrated were a large number of other activities including pigs, hens/turkeys/ducks, milk-cows, vegetables, fruit trees, and even the protection (and culling) of wildlife that included pheasants, ducks, geese hares, foxes, ostriches and deer (and the occasional puma).
  
  A lot of human-cultural activities were related to this including things like hunting, gathering, jam-making from the fruit, horsemanship, products made with leather and feathers, food processing (salami, ham, dried fruit, etc.), etc.
  
  It took a lot of work and know-how to maintain the balance of such a complex system in such a way that was sustainable in the long term.
  
  The problem is that this model stopped being economically viable, by the 1990's most estancias (ranches) in our region had switched over to being dedicated almost exclusively to soybeans which requires a lot less workers and makes a lot more money. Much of the free range cattle moved (and is still moving) into feedlots. Many cultural traditions are being abandoned.
  
  It is possible to switch large areas of Argentina back to a balanced sustainable model as much of the know-how is still there, but it is being lost at an increasingly rapid rate, and more importantly : the economic incentive is not there.
  
  Can we find the right incentives to bring back this balanced approach to farming in a large scale?
  
  I don´t know, but if somebody finds the incentives, I do know that it can be done.
• +2

  A comment on Conversation: Translating TED.com website into other languages...

  Feb 17 2011: I believe the current system of translation (translator-reviewer) for talks is good enough that it could be applied to the website. By simply distributing the text files to the existing translators you could get them translated to a large number of languages.
  
  The problem I see would be dealing with the updates and the different speeds of translations, meaning that you would end up with a fragmentation of hundreds of TED websites all slightly different depending on the language you are reading.
  
  So the translation of a "core website" that is only sporadically changed might be a solution for this. Anybody has a better idea?
  
  Or maybe living with a slightly different TED.com depending on your language is acceptable as long as the main items remain unchanged...
  
  Kudos to Anwar for a great proposal ... you can count on me for the translation into Spanish!
  
  Go TED!

• A comment on Conversation: Visiting Physician agreement for Argentine doctors to visit the United States.

  Feb 16 2011: Sounds like a great idea. It would also be a great experience for the Argentine doctors. For example, my cousin is an excellent surgeon that has specialized in burns for many years, yet she earns a pittance in Argentina, spending a few years in the US would be a great learning experience for her, both by being exposed to a different medical establishment/system and improving her English!
  
  A program like this would be great for both the US and Argentina, as long as the doctors returned to Argentina. Because if the Argentine doctors stayed on it would increase the brain-drain that is already wrecking havoc in our country ... to the great benefit of the USA!
  
  I hope somebody picks up this idea and makes it work.
  
  Kudos!