Sunday, April 30, 2017

Packaging Is Everything...

...And sometimes the packaging can be quite attractive. It's still packaging, though, and in the end you are made to buy a "pig in a poke" as they used to say in the south.

What we do when we use "attractive" to manipulate ourselves into consumption, let alone consumptive patterns that are demonstrably bad for you, is quite destructive. Destructive on the level of relationships, and how we're able to trust, or not; as well as for whether we see relationships as needed intimacy, or just transactions to be one up on. And then, of course, we do this with every other aspect of our emotional makeup. And all of it ever more pervasive, seamlessly interfaced, and expertly engineered.

The surprise now should not be about how crazy things have become, but that they aren't a great deal crazier even than this. The result of a cold start perhaps. Don't get complacent, though. It is absolutely warming up.

Wellness, Womanhood, and the West: How Goop Profits From Endless Illness





Saturday, April 29, 2017

The Problem Is We're Desperate For Fun...

...Because fun, like work itself, has become an empty product; full of calories, so to speak, but not really containing the kind of full, organic involvement that would be truly satisfying to very real human needs. All we're given, though, is just more commoditized, brightly packaged, bits of various forms of a "sugar" rush. Sometimes exciting. Sometimes a direct connect to a singular, overly pumped, climax, but not very substantial overall. Hence the need to always have more.

What else would you expect from an absolutely mad form of productive-consumptive organization that requires nothing else from us but productive consumption so that others can reap greater flows of what is their primary addiction; ever more counters with which to work their will for getting even more power and influence. And all because entertainment works so well to move not only ever more product, but to keep us from minding, or even having the language to understand, that we are selling, and purchasing, ourselves to death.

Because entertainment is distraction and, most importantly, diversion of action; where diversion becomes a very subtle form of catharsis without action for actual change. Understandable because the action for actual change, as opposed to entertaining displays of dissatisfaction, require serious, long term, commitments to doing things quite differently. Courses of behavior that, in the whole, demand that we step out of our comfort zones and engage in the hard work of negotiating, cooperating and, again most importantly, owning the sacrifices that real change requires.

This is why we tend to go into most acts of demonstration as a kind of temporary volunteering; engaging in the comradery of our shared concern, enjoying the creative play of message, as much as it can be obtained, with the ultimate expectation that important "others" will actually do the hard work involved to bring change about.

What can you expect, though, when we've been brought up through generations of "specialist" mentality. The "that's not my job" kind of thinking that leads people to be quite content in demanding that the "experts" get busy and do what it is that we have so cleverly expressed our desired to have be done.

So we watch the satirists. We watch the comedians. We laugh. Sometimes we even give up a half day or two together and laugh communally, and shout, as one. And in this we take comfort in sort of identifying what is wrong with the current leadership, and what they are doing, whatever leadership it might be, but we end up not engaging in the one thing that would actually change things: All of us stopping what we have been doing, taking responsibility for what needs to be done, and then working full time to achieve those goals; knowing full well that in the interim, fun as we've known it, will have to be put on hold for a while. That's what you do when you agree to make a real sacrifice.

The real problem we're facing is not one of a particular injustice, or a singular despot, that needs removal. It is that we have a way of doing things overall that simply does not work right any more at all. It was rendered obsolete by the very technology that it served to create so abundantly. And unfortunately for us this obsolescence has been ongoing for so long, leaving the running of things to go off the tracks in spectacular fashion. So that we find ourselves in an ever more mutating form of organized insanity; making not only us, but everything around us crazier and crazier.

This is why everybody needs to stop doing business as usual. Because we literally have to do that very thing. Bring the old way to a full stop. Demand that our leadership accept that stoppage and then demand that they help us in going through the very hard work of creating a new way of doing things. That is just the way it is. And we all ignore it at our peril. And of course we'd know that a lot better if we'd just stop with the sugary distractions for a while.

Are We Having Too Much Fun?







Friday, April 28, 2017

Oh What Tangled Webs We'll Weave...

...When first we practice to receive, our fictions.


DEUS SEX MACHINA


The $30 billion sex tech industry is about to unveil its biggest blockbuster: a $15,000 robot companion that talks, learns and never says no.



And You Think This Is Crazy..?

...Just wait.

Our crazy, traveling wave tube, of an economic resonator is just getting started. You're in for some hard rock, and bad roll, like you've never seen before. Because act is fact and react in this self pumped crazy maser. And when the fact is crazy to begin with... Well, you know, crazy in, crazy out, only amplified. Really, really, amplified. Again. And again. And so on.

Wells Fargo Account Scam Targeted Undocumented Immigrants, Lawsuit Claims



Thursday, April 27, 2017

Economic Insanity Inside An Insane Economic System

Ok. Enough talk about supply side economics. Or any more of the fact that the silly notion ever had a rats ass chance in cat heaven at actually achieving what was advertised of it (saving itself, which is what they mean when they say paying for itself, let alone even having any thought of saving any of the rest of us).

Let's talk about what Capitalist formed tax plans are really all about. Simply stated, they are about putting more juice into the fix that a certain group of capital holders are now getting. Which group of capital holders you might be talking about is now what might well be the only new game in town in what constitutes reliable competition (as already posted, the nominal kind of competition now has become a chaotic miasma of none, too little, or too much).

The big two shaping up so far seem to be the "Fortress America" group (favoring protectionism, and America first in all things), and the Internationalists, who favor pan national corporations, and the absolute free flow of capital, and goods, across all, supposed, borders.

Whatever their differences, though, both groups mainline money like no junkie could ever dream of doing the street junk of choice. And make no mistake. These kinds of flow produce a rush from just getting more of it that would rival even the newest opioid; and that doesn't even begin to talk about the rush that also comes from being able to express ever more of "your" will over that many more of everybody else.

It goes without saying that none of these people has any desire, let alone the ability, to step back and see the bigger issue at play. These are addicts after all. They see what their addiction lets them see, and that's mostly about keeping the pipeline open, and growing. Because the last rush always demands that the next be based on the presumptive "more."

We, on the other hand, are meant to be addicts of a more traditional sense; as to say product junkies so that we can be kept on the wage treadmill to nowhere. And that might have worked for quite a while were it not for all of the, collecting, collateral damage that's created as an ongoing process reality. Unpaid costs to the environment. Unpaid social necessities costs. And of course, the simple fact of a shrinking planet resource wise. But that's not the immediate show stopper, surprising as that may be (we're being cooked in our own economic cooking pot, and we know it, but still do so little about it), because what's puT a real burr in everyone's saddle is the fact that us working addicts can't stay competitive in the skills markets of the world now. And what's to do with all of those ordinary addicts with no "marketable" skill? Will it be a return to Debtors Prison? Indentured Slavery? Maybe even rethinking the actual economics of "Soylent Green (it could be cheap animal feed for important export crops you know)?"

Crazy, right? Just crazy speculation. But with anything any more now, crazy as compared to what exactly?

The bottom line as far as actual economics goes is that, yes, of course this tax plan makes no sense. How has creating a huge amounts of more national debt, just to give a big drug fix to a few, ever made sense. It hasn't. Unless you've become the very cynical version of a fiscal Conservative that is. Perhaps then, knowing full well that it doesn't make sense, you push for it precisely because it will bring Big Government to its knees simply by weighing it down with a debt servicing payment not even God could afford to pay. In that end it, so the hope goes, it will have to give up its big spending ways and do only the "good" things you've always intended for it to do.

What is called for here is not going on with business as usual. What is called for is The Mother of All Interventions (or #MOAI). We must stop being occupied as we have before and intervene (occupying ourselves, with ourselves, in the process). We must demand a stop to the real problem: That the economic operating system we've had for so long now is making us all crazier than monkeys flinging feces in a surgery. It must stop. It must be replaced. And we must all stop working as usual to make it happen.

The bottom line here is cold turkey all the way around, but there's simply nothing else for it. It is either that difficult confrontation, with a lot of cold realities to deal with, or we just go on with crazy inside of crazy, resonating and galloping away from any further resort to reality at all. Perhaps your addiction will make it bearable enough; perhaps it will not, especially if it is suddenly taken away from you. Time will tell certainly but I am just glad that I am as old as I am. Given the current probabilities I take some comfort in the knowledge that I likely won't live to see how bad it can really get.
Seven Takeaways From the White House’s ‘Massive’ Tax Plan




The Only Way To Fight A Bad Idea...

...Or a set of bad ideas, is with a better set of ideas, or a better core idea. Keeping what you feel is crazy from speaking serves only to give the proponents more publicity than they deserve.

The simple fact of the matter is that we must confront crazy, point for point, and refute their spurious claims; difficult though that may be as these people seem to spew it forth like copy machines on turbochargers; which is, of course, a quite probable tactic they employ simply to wear the rest of us down.

Be that as it may, however, we must engage them because it is also possible, however unlikely, that they may be addressing an issue we've missed; even if they addressed it in a completely ham handed, and self serving fashion. And of course we must also engage them because we need to find ways to cooperate no matter how offensive, or disgusting we may see their point of view. Because, without cooperation, this nation cannot survive as any kind of a union at all, whether it be a Federation, or a tightly bound national entity of some other sort. It is just the way it is, and we have to find a way to live with it; everyone of us on all sides of every issue.

Ann Coulter Says She Won’t Be Speaking at Berkeley on Thursday





Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Reaffirmation Of Our Current Economic Operating System...

...As the new economics of addiction.

Just remember. It doesn't matter what the addiction is. Only that it will be found and commoditized to the maximum degree possible. The profits will be too great to resist, which is, of course, its own addiction.

All part and parcel of how our current economic operating system has been mutated by the advent of electrified experience retrieval.





MANUFACTURING THE OPOID CRISIS


Insys Therapeutics executives suffered multiple arrests for bribing doctors to prescribe its fentanyl-based pain medication while funding anti-weed campaigns and developing its own lab-made THC drug.

See Also:

Painkillers to Heroin, New Film Shows It Can ‘Happen to Anybody”




THE NATURE OF THE BEAST


The jungles in Guatemala's northern reaches are some of the most biodiverse forests north of the Amazon. They're one of the last remaining homes for jaguars, tapirs, and scarlet macaws. And they're being systematically destroyed.

The Result Of Turning Information Into A Commodity

You get competition to create that information getting fiercer (as well as more entertaining, which brings in the whole "shock and awe" syndrome into the fray with it's own, unique, Mad Avenue twist) and so a new migration of jobs; where once there was a nearly uniform distribution of newspapers across the land, and thus, employers hiring from local communities to fill the role of "reporter," now there are web companies doing what brick and mortar institutions used to do, and a lot more cheaply of course.

Now, though, that competition means that the web companies are likely to start up where IT has already been going strong, and that means either coast of the nation for the most part. Which then means the "reporters" are going to be a lot less representative of the nation's demographics as a whole. So we end up with a Media Bubble maker that had little to do with an automatic bias reflex, and a lot to do with crass economics.

The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think





Desperate People Doing Desperate Things...

...And if there's one thing that Capitalism is good at it is in making people desperate. Whether because an overload of commodities like grain would better serve Capitalist interests by being left to rot in huge piles in many places, or by keeping other critically needed commodities scarce so that the price will stay in profiter heaven, doesn't really matter. What does matter is the heavy price in collateral damage that must be paid by the rest of us, most of which is not expressed at all by the number with a dollar sign in front of it. No, most of that is expressed by the extreme measures so many families are forced to take to keep going in the face of this atrocity of human interaction.

If everything we do has to first have a number with a dollar sign in front of it, where that number must be dealt with before any other action can be taken, then we have reached a point of inhuman impasse for which we all must take great shame in. An impasse that happens time and again for a kind of immorality that ought to shake us to our core. That it does not is at least some testimony to the fact that "desperation" has become so pervasive that we just don't register it any more. Thus greasing the slides for the ultimate of "skid rows" for an entire species; a species that used to at least pretend to be intelligent, and thoughtful.

Desperate Families Driven to Black Market Insulin




A Very Good Idea...

...That I hope more of you get on board with.

For Grab Your Wallet’s Shannon Coulter, There’s No Quitting




Monday, April 24, 2017

No Commentary Needed Here

A New World Atlas For A Planet In Crisis



Nobody Can Save The Democratic Party

The better question is why you would even want to try.

In this context it wouldn't matter who you had out front trying to rally the troops; even if it were a dream team composed of front people with stellar positives as far as the public is concerned. And the reason is as it has always been: A party, just as steeped in the morass of money making the wheels go round as the Republicans, trying to pretend that paying lip service to a few hot button cultural, or moral issues, is enough to keep a splintering base happy, even as they have no real clue about how to make corporate Capitalism behave in any way that would give them the ability to solve the pressing problems that made middle class white folks abandon them in the first place.

The problem here starts with Liberals being too impractical on the social issues, and way too practical on the corporate side of things, and very few people on any side yet ready to step back and see the bigger picture: that trying to do things as simply a rehash of strategies, to keep an unworkable operating system going long enough to get past the current crises of the week, isn't working any more; not stopping long enough to realize that it is the operating system itself that makes everything worse; not only in frustrating solutions to whatever the current problem is, but in structurally mandating that more crises situations keep coming at us.

Just as there must be a new economic operating system, there must also be a new political party. A party that recognizes that we have a nation now that sees a lot of issues quite differently. A party that will have the intestinal fortitude to give people a lot more slack to run their communities they way that they see fit, as long as we change the nature of work so that it is not the skill that is the sole determinate of value (within wildly arbitrary markets that seem to create the very instability that makes the uncertainty they deplore so much), but that it is work itself that has value; especially as it relates to participating in the running of a community.

If we valued work, in and of itself, everybody would have a living wage regardless of what the work actually constituted. But then that makes market economies have even more problems than they already deal with, now that Capitalism has been mutated beyond all recognition from what it started out as back in the haydays of typographic man (remember, Capitalism was the product of the typographic mindset, brought on by the advent of repeatable type, and the printing press). All of which is to merely reiterate the need to start over with a new system.

A new party, as I have already outlined, would give us the means to apply the unbelievably abundant creativity this country has in coming up with a combination that would have a more loosely configured federation of communities, able to live as they deemed right, but with the added ability of the individual to go and live where they wanted, without it being an economic catastrophe for them; because participating in the upkeep of any community would give you the means to have a healthy, prosperous life. All you should have to do is find the one that's right for you.

The one thing that is sure to happen, however, if we do nothing but continue with business as usual, is that we are going to keep getting ever more of the crazy that has become the one, clear, winner of our now disastrous political process. More crazy as even less actually gets done, or is resolved in any lasting, and meaningful way. So, if that's what you truly want then just sit back and enjoy the ride to that hard landing we're heading for. After that it won't matter, right?

Can Bernie Sanders Save the Democratic Party?


See Also:
Bernie Sanders Stands By Anti-Abortion Mayoral Candidate




Saturday, April 22, 2017

We Can Do An Amazing Amount Of Whatever We Can Imagine Doing Now...

...And that is both our blessing, and our curse.

Amazing kinds of new flying machines. Amazing kinds of everything that can just be printed. Inching closer to genetic solutions to a host of very serious physical maladies. Experience retrieval systems that would seamlessly allow anyone, in virtually any situation, to understand what to do next, if called upon to do so (married with the right kind of combined vision glasses, or contact lenses, bone conduction sound processing, and perhaps some kind of haptic latex layer over the skin). Maybe even true faster than light travel.

Interestingly enough, that really isn't the issue any more. What is at issue is what feeds into the making of our imaginations, and consequently, what is then more likely to come out?

I ask this question now, having just recently posted on the proposed march for science, because not only scientists, but the rest of us as well, ought to be thinking about this sort of thing precisely because so much depends on it.

If my imagination has been stoked a great deal more for the receipt of fantasies along all of the lines of our base instincts, you can imagine as well just the kinds of excess that web porn today, and sci fi, have only started to rev the engines on. The extra incentive here, unfortunately, is that there is also the nitro that this hothouse environment we call Capitalism feeds on, and sweats out in grand profusion: Money.

In a sense, you could see this as an economy driven in ever greater degree by an underlying, and unbelievably profitable, addiction as a path to power. Is that really the ever more structurally self perpetuating direction you want society to head in?

We can't get rid of our base instincts, any more than we can simply forget the mind sugar diet we've already been fed on. We can, however, work to emplace a quite different structural imperative. One that can at least remove the hothouse environment that feeds into addiction so easily. One that would take away the commercial aspect of message so that the incentive to continue to manipulate base instincts would be greatly reduced. And one that would make working with more of our neighbors a natural part of community life. A life direction therefore more mutually involved, and organically supportive.

Call me crazy but it just seems like common sense to see that, if you want citizens able to make good decisions you first need to get back to the basics of what makes a person confident, well adjusted, and self motivated. All things that require a sense of meaning, worth, and a host of ever more demanding cognitive skills. If you think that's going to work continuing down this path of commercialized fantasies as commodities then it's already too late for you.

All of you need to think long and hard about these things. You need to be demanding the very same thing of everyone you know, and that they pass that along to all of their acquaintances. We are at an unprecedented moment of decision here. A very big moment of choice. Which direction will humanity go in? Who will lead the change if we make the right choice? If you've been thinking at all, in your heart, and in your head, you know that business as usual has to stop. The sooner the better.


Images For Amazing New Inventions

See also:
Netflix’s ‘13 Reasons Why’ Carries Danger of Glorifying Suicide, Experts Say





Be There Or Be Flat Earth Square

Everything is politics now because everything involving money is political, and everything involving politics is money. You have to become involved if you want to change that fundamental dynamic.

March for Science: Scientists Hit the Streets to Demand Respect, Funding

See Also:

This Is How Climate Change Might Kill Us


Why the Menace of Mosquitoes Will Only Get Worse




Friday, April 21, 2017

Just In Case There's Lingering Doubt About The Planet Getting Hotter

And if you think a money oriented economy is going to be able to handle all of the collateral effects this is going to have you have been drinking too much of our de facto ex presidents Kool Aid.

A Terrifying Chart Showing How Much The Earth Has Warmed Since 1880



Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Academic Validation That We Absolutely Need To Reinvent Our Relationship...

 ...Between providing for ourselves, and providing for the communities to keep it all working together.

As the books referred to in the New Republic article, linked below, indicates, it is simply time to realize that Capitalism, with the technological change it has wrought, has taken us as far as it can in performing as a social/economic operating system.

Sure, it had it's day. It created an almost unbelieveable avalanche of both material, and technological gain. That it also did a behemoth's bulldozering of the planet as collateral damage, though, must be acknowledged as well; which is undeniably why the problem is so much more complicated now, but that is damage we just need to try and move on from.

In any case, though, the bottom line is that work, as a commercialized, and specialized, mass production for mass consumption, process can't apply anymore; especially when the principal consumer can no longer compete viably as the holder of a skill commodity. The once virtuous circle of capital to productive structure, to wage induced skill application, to market varied quality and variety, to wage earner consumption, to capital return with profit, no longer works, and doesn't make sense any more.

The thing is, there is another aspect to why Capitalism no longer makes any sense any more. And it is related to the change in sense modalities that societies go through when they move from a typographic mind set, back to a more multi sensual, oral type mindset; much as Marshall McLuhan described it (primarily) in "The Gutenberg Galaxy." Of course the arc described there was culture going from oral (the tribal default) to typographic. Electrification of information flow reversed this process so that we have been moving back to a more tribal oriented, multi sensual mind set. And just so we're clear here, this makes a big difference in how we experience, and conceptualize things (as a lot of Mr. McLuhan's work indicated).

The major point of the differences is that we require greater involvement in depth in what we do as a natural course of living. It simply cannot be oddly sequenced, disconnected chunks of busy time any more. It has to be integrated, broadly connected and, most importantly, meaningful interaction that defines daily life. Which then demands that the way we organize things must also be structured so as to facilitate this new kind of "thoughtful, loving structure." A way to make keeping things going, and keeping ourselves prospering, just part and parcel of community life. Something. I hasten to add, that is quite possible if we would just put, even a small part, of the same creativity that has kept Capitalism going far longer than it would otherwise, to work on making it happen.

This is a big choice moment folks. Your choice. Don't blow it.


The United States of Work




Monday, April 17, 2017

Which Is Why We Can't Do This With A Money Based Economy!



THE GREEN PLANET


They'll probably want to go with the cheapest option which is, oh, only $450 billion.

First Our Solar System, And Then Others...

...But we have to do this without the baggage that the economics of scarcity have burdened us with through most of our history. Which is why it is mandatory that we ditch Capitalism right now!


BECAUSE 'COLONIZING' ALWAYS GOES WELL...


It is small-time to make just the world a better place. The real opportunity lies in making the universe a better place.



More Greed In Medicine


GREED SPREADS THROUGHOUT THE BODY


Cancer drugs cost more in the US than anywhere in the world.
There's an old saying among four wheelers: "The better the four wheel drive, the farther from civilization you are when it finally breaks down." The corollary to that in Capitalism is "The more successful a manufacturing company, the more community wide disaster there is when the company finally stops competing there."

Whole communities. Decades of structure, and generations of working families building their ties together; all around the livelihood of making something. And then it just gets pulled out from under the entire community (either in major portion, or all together).

But that's just the way it is with Capitalism. Disruption, though quite a motivator for competition, is by definition a significant shaking up of things. And especially with hyper technology thrown into the mix now. And the really sad part is that all of that generational knowledge gathered into people, and structure, is still there. Still able to make things. Just not with the currently valued efficiency the world demands. And in letting that structural whole wither, and crumble away is a true crime social equity, and common sense. Of the highest degree.

That kind of whole, in case you have forgotten, is what swung from making cars, to making bombers, in very short order, I might add, for usual human institutions. And I say that not in the sense that we're likely to need mass produced bombers again, but in the sense that something else might crop up critical, and needed in significant quantities.

The problem is none of our political leadership, or our political structure for that matter, is ready to accept the fact that humanity as a whole is facing a World War 2 crisis. The enemy here isn't a Fascist despot, or an Imperial power, but survival itself. Between an ever increasing global population, decreasing resources, and ever more extreme weather, we are between the proverbial rock, and a hard place, but with the water rising rapidly. And though things aren't truly desperate yet overall, the time for that approaches. This when our focus should be nation wide mobilization to begin the many, long lead time developments, that will give us the flexibility, to lead the rest of the world in getting our species through this. As opposed to the "government as reality TV show" we have now.

If you do not understand this yet you are either: 1. Willfully ignorant. 2. Profitably anesthetized. 3. An idiot. or 4. You just don't care anymore.

It is my hope; my faith, that the majority of us are still none of these.


JANESVILLE: AN AMERICAN STORY



Sunday, April 16, 2017

Organizing Stream Content Providers For YouTube, And Twitch, Is Great...

...Not only because there is a valid "employee, employer" equity issue going on here, but also because of the parallel going on between the language used to describe this situation, and how it can also be used to talk about a wage earner's relationship to our current economic operating system.

We can see this at play in the recommended article on the subject linked below. Of particular interest to me especially is the very first paragraph:
"Unique to the digital age is the video content creation industry, one where employees are “users” and employers are “platforms.” In it, workers aren’t owed squat. When there are tech issues, they can visit the support page. When there are platform updates, a lot of the time, the press knows first. Full-time YouTubers and Twitch streamers, workers whose livelihoods depend on these platforms, are weed-whacking their way through the nascent industry’s first labor issues. And while it’s a new industry, there’s one old, time-tried solution to users’ grievances: organization."
One can, in a sense, look, at Capitalism as a "platform." The interesting part here, though, is that, on the one hand we have the fiction that no one actually owns it, and on the other we have the fact of corporations, which are quasi citizens now, and who make up most of its fabric, which are owned, one way or another, by those who have accumulated the most counters. We use the productive structures thus created to create enough counters for ourselves so that we can provide the consumption that keeps everything going, and that's pretty much all that we are here for now.

Because of the quasi citizenship of corporations their true owners can have the best of both worlds. This is because corporations can have the best rights of citizenship (especially where free speech is concerned), but also be quite limited in the amount of responsibility one might also demand of them. And so us content providers (workers) are left carrying most of the responsibility burden, but are then not only getting less and less say on how things are run. Sure, we can shout our lungs out, and if we really gather together, that can be a pretty potent thing, but for how long? When you have to get back to making sure there's food on the table, a roof over your head, a keeping a sense, getting harder all the time, that you still have some kind of intrinsic value?

The fact of the matter now is that free speech in the age of electro amplification is a joke; at least in its current manifestation when people, with a lot more counters than we will ever hope to have, can do the kind of amplification that spreads a message out way beyond just making it louder; as in having distribution across both a full spectrum of channels, as well as over far larger time spans, where consistency, as well as high tech, message engineering, can have the best, overall effect.

This is why we have to begin the process of changing to an alternative by doing an employee buyout. Purchase the whole damn thing outright, give fair compensation to the former owners, and then take full possession of the platform we make work every day. Take possession. Rationalize and humanize it. Make it truly equitable for all of those who work to keep it going while we figure out how to do away with needing money at all.

It's Time For YouTubers And Twitch Streamers To Organize





Saturday, April 15, 2017

Going Single Payer For Everything Might Save Us A Considerable Amount Of Money

As complicated as our economy is I'm not even going to attempt to guess at even a ballpark figure, but it does stand to reason in general.

Between streamlining the military (think about how much simplier things would be there if profit wasn't involved), and working an integrated unification of both the information aspects, and the means of physical delivery, of health care. Especially in health care.

Just in rationalizing, and finally standardizing, the information flow of patient data, procedures data, procedure charges, and the cross checking of plan coverage against procedure appropriateness, in relation to diagnosis, would involve what I have to believe would be unbelievable savings; and I say that after having had about six years experience in developing, and supporting, the data collection, and distribution system for a fair sized, regional remote billing organization (Health Services Northwest, an on again, off again, partnership between the Providence, and Swedish, hospital groups).

All of you out there ought to be giving an employee buyout of America some very serious though.


WE'LL PAY MORE FOR MORE PARKS


Looking at the list of expenditures, it is clear why some say the U.S. is a giant insurance company with an army. Half of all spending goes for Social Security benefits and health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, while another 20% is for defense and military benefits.



Friday, April 14, 2017

Like I Said...

...Who would want to even think of wanting to keep an economic operating system as fragile as capitalism?

If We owned everything we probably wouldn't have to worry about having a stock market at all, let alone the nervous nellies that make up a significant portion of its traders. And since we'd be working for ourselves, the automatic incentive of keeping the profits going would be there because that's the only way we could continue operating generally without resorting back to income taxes again. And that's something I don't think anybody needs to be very "uncertain" about.

As More and More Red Flags Go Up, Is Wall Street About to Start a Slide



And Yet People Are Still Starving In Many Areas Of The World

This has always been one of Capitalism's biggest contradictions: That it would rather let surplus production sit useless than get it to those who are in desperate need of whatever might be involved. The cost of getting it to those in desperate need, of course, as well as the write off of original production costs, always makes for an argument that keeps things all bound up until the commodity in question either goes to rot, or becomes useless in some other fashion.

It's unfortunate that there's never been a mechanism that allows producers to clear surpluses from the distribution system, get the supply back in balance with self supportive prices, and yet still make use of the items; especially when it is food.

It seems to me that, if we owned everything, there might be a way to channel the costs, and get the product used, that wouldn't pile unserviceable debt on the producers. It would simply have the government buy the product at cost, using that purchase price as a further employee buyout debt servicing, and then charging the government expenditure on the Foreign Policy budget. If we also then had a world public transportation utility, supported by the UN as a whole, the product could be delivered, en mass, to wherever it was needed, with the world sharing that cost.

A lot of "ifs" to be sure. A lot of good things start with "ifs" though. If you are really of a mind to make things better. We just have to forge a common way of looking at the problem, and then negotiate our way to making the solution happen.

Grains piled on runways, parking lots, fields amid global glut






Thursday, April 13, 2017

You Can't Do What Bernie Really Wants To Do...

...With the Democratic Party involved. At least not as that party is constituted presently.

And what Bernie really wants to do is Socialism, of one form or another; something that's quite understandable with the way Capitalism usually treats basic human needs. The problem is, trying to mold Capitalism in some way so as to accommodate true socialism just doesn't work very well; especially when the rest of the world is likely to stick with very competitive Capitalism. You are very quickly put into the position where balancing costs, equitably distributing payment burdens, and still remain competitive, without also controlling profits (without capital then running away from under you), is not something meant for high probabilities of success.

Then you add the further problem of what doing more attempts at reform always do now, put more turbulence into very complex systems; turbulence that spreads out in waves through the multi dimensional matrix we call an economy, causing ever more unanticipated events of collateral damage. Which then create even greater problems needing to be fixed, with further inputs of instability just feeding on itself on growing waves of cascade effect.

My wish would be for such well intentioned, and smart, people like Mr. Sanders would be to step back and consider the larger implications of what is really going on with our problem with Capitalism. The very fact that, as a product of 18th and 19th century typographic thinking (linear, one thing at a time, segmentation; residing in Newtonian, as opposed to Einstein, physical, and meaning, space), it no longer has any of its original validity remaining. Not now that we've infused ourselves into an electro, turbocharged, multi dimensional matrix of interaction, effect, and more interaction.

It would be a system that wouldn't make any sense any more even if it hadn't been mutated by the technology it helped to create. We find that simple fact hard to see precisely because the mutation is resplendent with not only narcotics for every imagination, but with intrigues for every desire, as well as excess beyond any means of resistance.

In point of fact then we need to be rid of it. And the sooner the better. My sincere hope is that people are going to be more and more receptive to this notion. It's up to people in intelligentsia, business, and politics, to help that notion develope.


Bernie Sanders -- Democrats Win If We Mobilize And Educate




More Capitalist Contradictions


LOBBYISTS ARE THE WORST, PART 1000


"Tennessee will literally be paying AT&T to provide a service 1000 times slower than what Chattanooga could provide without subsidies."