If You Are Not Talking True Revolution You Are Trying To Fool Yourself

Fool yourself into thinking that further, insane, commoditizing can be made humanistic in an ever more competitive race to control the main channel, whatever channel that evolves to be, to the brain of each individual working class consumer (salaried or hourly). What the Marxists used to call the "lumpenproletariat." And whether that competition is to further just more economic power, or political, or ideological power in general, hardly matters. Controlled consumption of something is what is at stake here; consumption not done by any form of real, "informed" consent. Because money has been electrified, along with information, and it moves now as electrons do, at the command of algorithms written with ever less human intervention, because human intervention is too slow; and because electrons are always seeking the path of least resistance.

It seems to me that it is much like the absurd notion that Liberals still have that Capitalism itself can be saved if only we had the right legislation to do it with; which of course you can never have be created inside the very system that will never allow itself to be changed too much. Not if we stay with an absurdly outdated operating system in any case.

This is also another example of how no real change can occur if you don't first stop "Business As Usual" at its very source. Because you have to start over in order to fundamentally change all of the assumptions available to start figuring out a new, and better alternative. An alternative that can be designed from scratch to address the realities of much more powerful new means to instrumentality; new ways to ways to see, envision, and effect. So powerful, in fact, that allowing their use, willy nilly, according the whims and wishes of a very few, can no longer be tolerated by life in general, the planet as that life evolved to know it, and the rest of us.

The individual has rights. There can be no doubt about this. But the rest of everything else has rights too. And now we must figure out a way to balance these things on an ongoing basis. Through perhaps what will be at least a century of great difficulty for the entire world. And that's assuming we get the world organized to start doing something about the coming catastrophes. Because if we do not act soon irreversible changes may happen to too many critical circulation systems. And that will be the end of us.

I have outline a starting point for this debate. But let's first accept that we absolutely must have this debate as a Nation, and as a world population. We can go from there after that if you like.

WISING UP

We Have Reached Peak Screen. Now Revolution Is In The Air

2 diggs The New York Times Technology

Smartphones were once the best thing to happen to the tech industry — and for a while, it seemed, to all of us, too.

It's All Related To Everything Being A Commodity, And The Power That Brings To Too Few Of Us

That and a productive, consumptive model that is both no longer sustainable from a purely systematic standpoint, but also no longer sustainable because it does not give ordinary working people the deep involvement, that a redefined idea of work requires, so that people have a meaningful connection to where they live, so that they can know, on a visceral level even, that they matter, and are needed. All in a way that feels just as much right as it is also respecting of practicality.

And it remains in your power to change it.

How Can We Make Technology Healthier For Humans?

Inside The Investor Revolt That's Trying To Take Down Mark Zuckerberg

The Gospel Of Elon Musk, According To His Flock

We Need A New Plan Alright

I have had some thoughts on that in fact. For some time now.

In the meantime, though, we might want to consider the possibility that urinating the rest of the world off against us might not be the best way to go about getting people to talk to you any further about... Well... About pretty much anything if you urinate them off enough.

This serves to remind me of another thing I think that any fool knows, and that is simply: what goes around, comes around. Because now we're really beginning to see what comes back around on the "Demented Clown Car" form of high placed management. Getting others to cooperate with us on what are also "irrefutable" priorities, assuming, of course, that still being able to live here is important to you at all; along with the rest of life that is; getting others to cooperate, under those kinds of  conditions, becomes more and more an exercise in true, "Demented Clown Car" futility.

Fortunately there are still good choices you can make, but they will not remain indefinitely.

With China saying no to plastic waste, the world needs a new plan


See Also

PEOPLE MAKING A DIFFERENCE

The Beaches Of Mumbai Illustrate The Insane Scale Of India's Plastic Waste Problem

4 diggs Oceans

Volunteers have removed an astonishing 12,000 tons of plastic from one short stretch of beach.

In Today's Highly Interconnected World

Even in just an economic sense, of everything affects everything else, any fool can see that throwing a rock into a pond creates, perhaps many, expanding waves of outgoing effect, throughout everything else. Especially if the rock is as big as our purchasing goes; and what we decide to do in regards to those we do the purchasing from.

So whether you believe all boats are rising right now, or not, and equitably so, or not, those waves of effect are probably still going to be non equal opportunity operators as far as who gets swamped is concerned. At least at first. Swamp enough of the small boats, though, and maybe you lose too many purchasers altogether. And then things can start to get way too destructively equal (remember, all those small boat purchasers are carrying a lot of debt they are just barely able to service now as it is).

This being the case, how hard is it to see that, at this point, it really doesn't matter if he was sincere in his promises or not. It really doesn't matter if you believed in him or not. What does matter is that he is simply out of his depth here. Painfully, deeply, and oh so destructively. And the really odd thing is that the Right could have kept boat loads of legitimacy here simply by understanding, and acting, on that irrefutable conclusion.

Trump's trade war is meant to protect American jobs — so why are businesses planning layoffs


See Also:

Trump doesn't listen to Mattis anymore, say officials

We Have To Stop Doing Business As Usual

And the only way to do that may well be organizing as one group of working Americans.

If a majority of working folks simply picked a week this summer to stop working, across all of America, I can pretty much assure you that the powers that be will be forced to take us seriously. Forced to realize that the system itself is irreparably broken. That it is broken because it is both no longer relevant, as well as being so well down the road of mutation, and corruption, as to be as toxic in its entirety as any one of the poisons it has put into the air, or water, or ground, or any of our social institutions that you might want to pick.

And in this you don't have to become a union organizer. You don't have to become some political party aparachick. You only need to be talking to your neighbors, as well as your coworkers, as to the absolute need for truly fundamental change. Because only fundamental change is going to save us now. Now that we know, and with reasonable assurance, that terrible changes are coming to this planet unless we launch massive actions all across the globe to reverse the damage that "Business As Usual" as wrought.

You know this in your heart and your mind. You just remain so uncertain as to what to do about it because all of the normal options of politics have been so manipulated by so many different players. I know I am just a crazy old dreamer, but the one thing you can count on is this: at least you know everything I am about has nothing to do with my personal gain. I am a barely getting by retiree now, and no matter what happens with this advocacy, I will retain that same economic status. I will do that because I hate not only what money has done to us as a nation, and as a species, but also because what it did to my family. And nothing is ever going to change that I can assure you.

Tear It All Down

Poor Americans Really Are In Despair

Housing Is About To Become Even More Unaffordable

See Also:

WE'RE NOT SAYING IT WAS GRIMES, BUT...

Elon Musk Emails Employees About 'Extensive And Damaging Sabotage' By Employee

4 diggs CNBC News

Musk said this person had conducted "quite extensive and damaging sabotage" to the company's operations, including by changing code to an internal product and exporting data to outsiders.

FUCK THEM

How The Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around The Country

13 diggs The New York Times Transportation

In cities and counties across the country the Koch brothers are fueling a fight against public transit, an offshoot of their longstanding national crusade for lower taxes and smaller government.

[Post Note: And talk about unaffordable. Cities themselves may face the same problem as housing in general is. Something that might ruin even great cities like Seattle. J.V.]

The Death of a Once Great City

The Real Problem Here Is That It Is Not Just One Addiction, To One Particular Drug

That's because electrified Capitalism has commodified all aspects of addiction; everything from making it to fighting it so that there can be increasing profit going full circle around a bad kind of self sustaining loop. So that anything, and everything, is subject to over amplification, down content paths that fuel the fantasies of the basest of our base aspects. Because that has always worked. And now we have vast new kinds of instrumentality with which to work both physical reality, and fantasy reality.

This. This is what you really get now when you ask what is "Business As Usual?"

IN THE BLUE

How The Opioid Crisis Is Depressing America's Labor Force

7 diggs NPR Economics

As employers add jobs at a furious pace a decade after the 2008 financial crisis, the workforce participation rate still hasn't recovered. And now researchers think they know one reason why: the opioid crisis.

See Also:
[Post Note: And then you have the problem of some of our new instrumentality actually threatening to do all of our thinking for us. And boy, didn't that just turn out great for the humans in the Matrix, because they had to suffer through having "The One" six times before Neo 6.0 came out. And even then, it may well have been the "Oracle" who kept them in the game. J.V.]

New IBM robot holds its own in a debate with a human

[Post Note: This is also what you get when the Commoditization of Everything is also part of "Business As Usual." J.V.]

POOR TASTE

The Dark Side Of The Orgasmic Meditation Company

7 diggs Bloomberg Long Reads

OneTaste is pushing its sexuality wellness education toward the mainstream. Some former members say it pushed them into sexual servitude and five-figure debts.

Not Only Is This Probably A Bad Idea Because Of The Questionable Price Tag

But also because it isn't a very good idea in the first place. Not if your goal is affordable, flexible, and much cheaper to create, regional mass transit. As I have already stated, why go to all that expense for a fixed underground system when you can create flying, hybrid dirigible blimp, air trains. that could move a lot more of everything, wherever we needed it to go. And we could implement that system as a public, means tested, transportation solution that would actually benefit everybody, and not just a few rich tech workers in a very limited, high tech corridor.

Just sayin.

SOME VERY EXPENSIVE DIGGING THERE

The Craziest Thing About Elon Musk's 'Express Loop' Is The Price

3 diggs citylab.com Transportation

Forget all the unproven technology: That $1 billion construction estimate is a fraction of what subterranean transit projects cost.

This Is Another Wake Up Call On Just One Of The Dangerous Competitions The World Is Involved In

Wake up and put a stop to it or wake up one day soon to a new war. Because, like I said, this is but one of the dangerous new competitions for dwindling resources. And one thing that would really help here is to remove the money dynamic from the overall equation. That and understanding that only through global cooperation will humanity be able to survive.

FISHING FOR CONFLICT

Climate Change May Spark Global 'Fish Wars'

7 diggs National Geographic Climate Change

Warming seas are driving commercial seafood poleward into waters controlled by other countries, setting up international conflicts.

See Also:

WATER OVER THE BRIDGE

What Happened Last Time It Was As Warm As It's Going To Get Later This Century?

6 diggs Ars Technica Climate Change

Kids today will be grandparents when most climate projections end — does the past have more hints?

Could It Be A Lack Of Meaningful Connections?

Connections that allow all working Americans to feel like they really matter. That the majority of them want to be integrally involved in being a part of what makes their community go. So that they can hold their heads up and say I am part of the solution, and not part of the problem. Because I believe that is basic human nature; a nature that can be leveraged to great affect given the right circumstances, but can also cause a lot of problems if it isn't tended to with the proper balance of structure, stability, and a shared vision on what we're all heading for. A shared vision not easily come by because we have to listen to a lot of different opinions, coming from a lot of different frames of reference. And so compromise by both the majority, and the minority, in however those arbitrary groupings shift about, putting you in one, or the other, at different times, on different issues, come to be.

Take away the commercial, commodity, dynamic, however, and the whole "sell more and more of everything, and do whatever it takes to make the sale, because we have to keep consuming more to provide livelihoods," type of thinking; take that away and you have a whole new ballgame on how you can set things up. Especially if you do it as a complete, employee buyout of the entire productive, private, and public (save for personal dwellings and property), galaxy of process that is the American economy. We buy it out, give fair compensation to those who do not wish to participate in the new Federation of City States, as participating citizens, and then give everybody else the single payer, management system, that will supervise the changeover, as well as referee the negotiations, and ultimate transacting, that the new Federation will engage in to also leverage city to city cooperation; within regions, as well as across the new Federation as a whole.

We can do this. It just takes understanding that it must be done or we are done, to set us on the path of actually doing it.

As always, though, its your call. Your choice. Because it will matter if you think you can choose to sit this one out.

THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES

Why Are Americans So Down In This Economy?

7 diggs Bloomberg Economics

People say they're less satisfied with their lives amid steady growth and falling unemployment.

See Also:

Rural communities see big returns with broadband access, but roadblocks persist

[Poste Note: The thing is, meaningful connections cannot stop at an arbitrary border. Nature teaches us this every day. If we want truly meaningful connections here, that also mesh with things that need connecting to elsewhere, we have to realize our larger connection to all life. To understand that you cannot marginalize one group or another and think that no more turbulence will come from it. Not if you also understand things from the longer point of view; and in the longer point of view, certainly, we will need everyone we can get, doing everything they can, to not only provide for themselves, to help us provide for all the mistakes that have been made in the name of commercial, commoditized, progress.

In absolutely no way can we turn from this, hoping it will go away of its own accord; to do that and still expect to have real meaning in our lives. And in that, of course, I mean human centric meaning, where real humans are given a real, informed chance, to make good choices in regards to what should be valuable, in human terms. Valuable as opposed to what chaotic markets, and individual greed, decide it should be.

Again. Your choice. Your Call. J.V.]

DON'T STOP UNTIL ICE IS ABOLISHED

It's All Too Much, And We Still Have To Care

15 diggs Slate Magazine Politics

What's going on at the border is horrifying, but we can't go numb and turn away.

What Can We Be Sure Of Here?

That a great deal of new turbulence will be pumped into the overall process that is Seattle.

And you have to understand turbulence here as a metaphorical extension of flow over any set of contact points.

For aerospace guys it's only natural to see things in some sense of whether they provide nice, laminar flow over the surface of airframes, along all sorts of challenging surface, and shape, demands to balance one of the many needs, to keep this thing flying, but to do that and also do it as smoothly as possible. Because if you don't do it as smoothly as you can, you create the much feared devil vortices; swirling, not helpful air flows at all, kinds of robbers of efficiency, and creators of possible vibrations, or further surface control instabilities, that then can create a whole new set of issues, long term, for this supposed to be, really high flying system.

The problem with cities, as you might have guessed, is that they are vast complexes of process flow channels. All of the task flows, interacting dynamically (one would hope), all the time, so that all of what powers, and feeds, and provides interactive space for, can happen. Something you can appreciate a great deal more, of course, if you play simulation games like SimCity, Cities: Skyline, the Anno XXXX series, the Civilization series, and so on for quite some time if you browse just Steam for this sort of thing.

My point here is this: Electrofied Capitalism is not set up to allow for the kinds of systems integration that putting new interactive processes into play must have. What else would you expect from the let's keep "disrupting" things crowd. As well as the crowd who sees little profit in "sharing" in the first place, and therefore little incentive to even think about wanting to coordinate with City leaders, much less ask them how, in the real sense of stake hold players, who ought to have a say, what you might want to do, might affect them. Because of course you know it will affect them but that's just not your problem. And even if you did ask them you wouldn't be able to do what they would want, given what they'd probably want to ask for, in the silly notion of wanting it to happen in a more sane way. Because you've already worked the numbers and the only way it works, at least for you, is to get in quick; make a big splash that will go viral popularity wise; and it only needs to do that for a few quarters; and then you sell it out to whatever buyer who comes along, so that you can do the same thing again, only with some other form of disruption. Some place else. And the collateral damage becomes a tax that only working people have to pay, for the most part.

This can no longer work for what cities, or any viable living community, have become, and that is, as already stated, very complexly inter related human systems. Systems that demand careful systems integration. Just ask the Navy Captain who might be commanding an aircraft carrier. Because that, boys and girls is what both an aircraft carrier, and a city are now: big, sometimes floating, complex, amalgams of very different people, who made the choice to come live, and work, in a coordinating system for mutual, overall, benefit. That is what cities are now in the electro-photonic age of new instrumentality. And of course that is what aircraft carriers had to become, floating cities of very highly trained individuals, working together in a bewilderingly fast changing, techno-ized, world.

A world that is also way too overcharged now with so many dangerous competitions. Because the old system still thinks we're playing the old game of "the economics of scarcity." When we do not have to play that game at all anymore if we do not wish to. Recognizing, however, that to do that we must cooperate with each other like never before. Find a way to do that so that we can balance both the rights and the responsibilities, of both the individual, and the group as a whole.

It can be done but you must make the demand for it to happen. And you must be directly involved, within your community, to see it be defined, and carried out. You must do this because you will be the one who ends up sharing the ownership of it all. You and your neighbors.

Otherwise the turbulence will grow and soon, it will be more than semi-useless bikes laying in ruin in the ruined streets.

HELL ON WHEELS

A War Over Bike Shares Is Shaking Up Seattle

9 diggs Wired Long Reads

Residents are divided over whether the city's dockless bike share program is revolutionizing transit — or creating an unwieldy, dangerous mess.

See Also:
[Poste Note: Water, of course, has its own turbulence issues. As it can't be compressed, though, even at the tiniest of scales of water molecule groupings, if there are sudden changes in flow, pressure fluctuations, and phase changes to a gas, and back, can cause explosions that do actual damage, tiny or not. 

One has to wonder here if there are metaphorical commonalities between individual units of water, and whatever kinds of groupings of people you might want to consider. We are, after all, mostly water to begin with, but the key factor here being how you consider what phase change in people might suggest. 

I would like to think that one might consider that in terms of "panicked," or "at ease" or "overstimulated" or "totally Involved." or "enraged," or "suggestively anesthetized, via parameterized algorithm" (as a more sophisticated hypnosis), as such types of phases. You could probably think of a lot more. We are complex after all, so it shouldn't surprise us that we might have quite a number of phases, however you might want to characterize them. It is, in any case, a good exercise for your mind, to try and consider things from another frame of reference. Just sayin. J.V.]

A Fascinating Illustration Of Fluid Cavitation, The Liquid Formation That Can Cause Shock Waves

Sixth New York City cab driver dies of suicide after struggling financially

THE GIG IS UP

The Gig Economy: Lower Wages, More Injuries, Horrible Benefits

14 diggs lithub.com Economics

As the gig economy aged, it became clear that independence, flexibility and freedom were not its only characteristics — that the experience wasn't wonderful for everyone.