alanwatts

What about a BI based on resources rather than the dollar? There already exists a renewable surplus of food, water, and shelter.

There are around 4-6 empty houses in the US for every homeless person and around 40% of food goes to waste.

So providing for the most basic physiological needs of the ~45 million impoverished people in the US is not a problem of production, it's a problem of distribution and waste management.

Is there a specific tool you would recommend for doing this?

Couldn't it be more advantageous for them to pardon him rather than taking him to trial and risking exposure of the details?

>Are those options really more likely that some journalists simple have different opinions than you?

Obviously not. But if those journalists have different opinions than executive management on important issues, like Phil Donahue opposing invading Iraq on MSNBC, then they'll be fired.

Relying simply on voting and politicians to solve the problem of mass surveillance is just passing the buck.

The problem is more technical than political. It is a problem of internet architecture and design which must be addressed from within by technologists.

Currently, only a handful of ISPs and Internet Gatekeepers (i.e. Google, Facebook) have ultimate control over the majority of information flow.

If all you have to do is tap a few wires at key choke points (i.e. Room 641a) or hack into a server at FB or Google to own billions of users then that is like marching rank and file into machine gun fire on a global scale.

>People need to know that strong crypto, when implemented correctly does work.

*Assuming the end points have 0 vulnerabilities, which is the elephant in the room.

>We've arranged a global civilization in which the most crucial elements — transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting, profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

-Carl Sagan

Sock puppet armies aren't science fiction:

[1]https://m.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/38wl43/we_used_sock_p...

And chat bots are now being powered by NLP.

[2]http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-cha...

[3]https://www.motion.ai/

Subverting an online community would not be difficult for anyone with some programming knowledge and a desire to learn.

The study in the link[1] notes that detection is exceedingly difficult, and even then, in the case of Reddit, the Mods and Admins have negligible power to mitigate such attacks even if they do detect them.

The 3 P's mentioned by the author are some of the most classic human pit falls into mental paralysis.

>1. Personalization – the believe that we are at fault. This is the lesson that not everything that happens to us happens because of us.

"Small-minded people blame others. Average people blame themselves. The wise see all blame as foolishness."

-Epictetus

>2. Pervasiveness – the belief that an event will affect all areas of your life

"Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream."

-Lao Tzu

>3. Permanence – the belief that the sorrow will last forever

"A student went to his meditation teacher and said, “My meditation is horrible! I feel so distracted, or my legs ache, or I’m constantly falling asleep. It’s just horrible!”

“It will pass,” the teacher said matter-of-factly.

A week later, the student came back to his teacher. “My meditation is wonderful! I feel so aware, so peaceful, so alive! It’s just wonderful!”

“It will pass,” the teacher replied matter-of-factly."

-old Zen tale

"You must be genuine" is a double bind. Being genuine is something that cannot be forced by coercion

Don't miss the forest for the trees.

The desire to survive against a perceived threat may have been the impetus for all of these but immediately beyond that, all of these could not have been possible without the collaboration between scientists.

If we could but discover a new motivation for technological innovation besides murder, such innovations could occur at a fraction of the time and cost and not run the risk of being used to suicide the entire species (i.e. nuclear weapons).

Additionally, when taking into consideration the existential threat of climate change, the survival of the species may now depend on a status quo of mutual aid rather than mutual sabotage.

In the former, a small closed source centralized authority has all the information and power.

In the latter, everyone has the information, so the balance of power is evened.

>However, there is also a wide variety of media

By "wide variety" you mean those 6 corporations/oligarchies, many of which have been owned by the same families for decades, even centuries (i.e. Hearst)? The "variety" is just targeted marketing. For example, the communications chief at Time Warner (CNN's parent) and the CEO at News Corp (Fox News' parent) are "close confidants" who worked together for 11+ years, even though CNN is often considered "left" while Fox is "right".

http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-...

Apologies to all for posting this 5 times. Each time I hit reply it was giving me an error.

The 2nd US Secretary of Homeland Security and co-author of the Patriot Act is the founder of a lobbying front for the the manufacturers of the body scanners.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Chertoff

Having power is a requirement of being corrupt, by the definition. If you didn't have power, you wouldn't have the leverage to corrupt the system in the first place.

>Corruption: dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery

Height and weight are dynamic and can be spoofed.

Personal identity is not an exact science, no matter how much we would like it to be, there are always ways to fake it given the right tools.

Consider the roots of the concept: the word "person" originates from the ancient Greek persona, meaning a theatrical mask worn by actors.

Per+sona

Per: that through which

Sona: sound goes

Passions and dreams are dynamic, not static. If one "dies" you can find a new one

Memento mori. Be mindful of death.

Let's look at it another way, the enormity of death shows us the precious value of being alive. GO out and live your life! Go do what makes you happy and feel alive. If you couldn't die, you wouldn't know you were alive, like a rock.

Many of those who have come close to death claim to feel more alive than they ever have, unless they are drugged out by pain killers and such.

>It seems to me there is plenty of money to keep the internet going without advertising.

Curious how many seem to think money is literally the lifeblood that the internet runs on.

"Money" as we know it (i.e. the dollar) is a legacy centralized paper-based information system.

The internet is a decentralized/distributed electric information system.

The internet runs on electricity, not paper. Electricity is a renewable resource.

For anyone interested in this shift in power, check out futurist Alvin Toffler's Powershift.

His thesis is that the pinnacle of power throughout time as technology has evolved has shifted from brute strength, to money in the industrial age, and now finally to information in the post-industrial age which we live in now.

http://www.amazon.com/Powershift-Knowledge-Wealth-Violence-C...

>The nation has provided that person with certain values which she/he deeply appreciates and feels strongly about: is that stupidity? Isn't it a good idea to determine what those values are and how they relate to other people before you generalize so crudely?

Indeed it is important to understand how they relate to other people, but not just people within the artificial boundaries of a nation state.

Those values weren't spontaneously and independently invented by the artificial lines drawn on a piece of paper, they were developed throughout all human history across the whole planet.

>Spaceship Earth now has 150 admirals. The five admirals in the staterooms immediately above the ship's fuel tanks claim that they own the oil. The admirals with staterooms surrounding the ship's kitchen, dining rooms, and food refrigerators claim they own all the food. Those with a stateroom next to a lifeboat claim that they own the lifeboat, and so forth. They then have an onboard game called balance of trade. Very shortly the majority of admirals have a deficit balance. All the while the starboard-side admirals are secretly planning to list the boat to port far enough to drown the portside admirals, while the portside admirals are secretly trying to list the boat to starboard far enough to drown the starboard-side admirals. Nobody is paying any attention to operating the ship or steering it to some port. They run out of food and fuel. They discover that they can no longer reach a port of supply. Finis.

-Buckminster Fuller

>Nationalism cuts both ways -- it's useful for tearing down the walls between ethnic groups within a country, but take it too far and you get Nazis.

Nationalism erects walls between ethnic groups by definition. Framing it as "within a country" is missing the forest for the trees.

I don't know what "banned" means in this case, it's just from the title. His point stands however:

Money Supply + Interest > Money Supply => perpetual debt servitude

>Banks do not intermediate funds when lending they create new money. This has interest due on it. Create more to cover the interest or die.

Professor Franz Hormann of the Vienna University of Economics further elaborates on this catch-22 in his banned TED talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYWVbdSX7B4

>Name-drop as many of the latest software frameworks and technologies as possible throughout your rant. Use words like big data, cloud, and scalability. Mention test-driven development at least three to four times.

If we don't immediately adopt agile scrum kanban test-driven development processes there is no way we can scale to harness the power of big data analytics using our cloud-based deep machine learning artificial intelligence neural networks for quantum computing the internet of things. Furthermore, I'm rewriting the whole architecture in Vanilla JS on the front end, ReactJS on the back end, and using Docker containers to achieve a more scalable continuous integration work flow optimization process for our test-driven development integrations in the cloud using the legacy waterfall methodology.

Any questions? No? Good, now get back to work.

Those are all symptoms of a concussion. In my understanding, anxiety attacks are one of the primary symptoms of PTSD.

The word "college" is much more ambiguous than "car wash".

Latin root: collegium: 'partnership, association'

Certain religious colleges for example tend to shelter and reinforce their respective beliefs more than challenge them.

Indeed, pharma sales are maybe only a small part of the reason.

The biggest reason may be the irrational terror certain societies have regarding death, which is something easily exploited by terrorists.

Even many of those who claim to know they are going to Heaven when they die are terrified to do so, indicating they don't really believe.

But where does the root of this terror come from? Perhaps it is the false belief of an artificial separation between mankind and nature