BlockChain Technology Doesn't Have To Be Used For Money

I have posted on this before, but I think it's worth putting at least one more stab into seeing if my alternative use for blockchain technology is worth further consideration by those in the business who a are lot smarter network people than I ever pretended to be. No biggie if it isn't mind you.

About the only thing more stupid than using bitcoins for money is thinking you need money in the first place to make a society go. And of course nothing could be further from the truth.

What you do need to make a society go is the free flow of information so that you can have an informed electorate; assuming, naturally, that Democracy is still a goal. Turn information into money, however, and you get a very bad situation indeed. And because the electrification of experience retrieval does exactly that you can readily see a big reason why we are in trouble now. Compounded, unfortunately, by the fact that information is also a way you can utilize to control folks (redefining things to your benefit, and preformming questions so that there are only the answers you want to be available as possible responses, so you also tend to get a very significant, possible, corrupting factor put into the very exercise of trying to have social intercourse at all, so that the process of compromise can begin. And that, as we have seen in the manipulation of posts by foreign actors is, in and of itself, a lot of extra bad.

If one were to look at conversations about various topics, whether the conversations occur on commercially provided social interaction sites, or via more formal public, government sponsored discussions sites, one way to consider the process is that it is, in fact, just topic transactions to a topic thread. Why couldn't some application of this form of transaction linkages to a secure store of overall topic state, with the various public and private keys, and a dedicated network of independent checking servers to do the group verification thing; why couldn't that be applied to important public conversations?

Not to say it would be necessarily easy mind you. Or that it wouldn't take a lot of extra network effort and support, but if it could be done mighten it provide a means to validate an individual making a topic content change, as opposed to some bot algorithm running on multiple compromised processors?

Just a thought.

Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous

This Is What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town

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TAKING BACK THE GRID

The City That Banned Bitcoin Mining

9 diggs Motherboard Long Reads

Cryptocurrency investors from around the world have been using Plattsburgh's cheap electricity to get rich, and are being subsidized by the city's residents to do so.

BLOCKCHAIN DIDN'T SOLVE THIS ONE

Want To Make Millions? Copy Someone's Cryptocurrency Project

11 diggs BuzzFeed Cryptocurrency

Copying other company's work and intellectual property can generate big paydays for hucksters in the cryptocurrency world. One company has maintained a $2.3 billion valuation despite widespread allegations of plagiarism.

Of Course It Was

What else would you expect from power wanting to get more power. Or, looked at from another direction, why wouldn't a junkie lie to you to get his next fix. Assuming we're talking about a real junkie here, of course; and on that I will let you make up your own mind on the point.

The real issue now, though, is what you will choose to do about taking this excess away from them. Think you can really do that by doing it through "business as usual?" And before the planet shucks us off?

FUDGING THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT

'Corporations Are People' Is Built On An Incredible 19th-Century Lie

17 diggs The Atlantic Law

How a farcical series of events in the 1880s produced an enduring and controversial legal precedent.

If You Don't Make People Build It Themselves

As well as maintain it themselves, how can they truly buy into owning what is created?

THE ROOF CAVED IN

The Rise And Fall Of American Public Housing

7 diggs citylab.com Cities

Of all that came out of the mid-20th-century liberal consensus, perhaps nothing ended up so reviled as public housing.

The Real Problem Here Is The Collateral Damage Already Done To Commercialized Message

Which means you'd be a fool to not doubt anything that comes out of any corporate entity. Which is a real problem. Not only because there are people actually trying to do Capitalism responsibly (and always have been), however few that may, or may not be, but that this then spills over into every other form of public message, for or against, pretty much any contentious issue. And so now we can hardly talk to each other at all any more.

Unless we change the dynamic of how we interact, in the main, socially, we will not be just shooting ourselves in the foot with a lot of misdirected, and miscommunicated, intentions to try and solve problems. We will, in fact, be pulling the pins, and pushing the buttons, to just blow it all up.

And the really sad, bottom line here, is that a lot of people have become either too burned out, too fed up, or just not really human, anymore, that they are, in a sense, gleefully, sadly, resignedly, or numbly, or whatever else, ready to help pull those pins, and press those buttons to make it happen. Which then means it's going to be all the harder for the rest of us to overcome the deficit.

The only question that really matters, though, is what your choice is going to be in this matter.

BRANDS ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS

The Rise Of Corporate Social Responsibility

4 diggs New Republic Policy

While Congress dithers, companies are taking action on issues like gun control. But is it all just an exercise in branding?

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[Post Note: And be sure to bring a gun to shoot yourself with before you return from your vacation celebrating the turning of our demise into a tourist attraction. J.V.]

LAST-CHANCE TOURISM

Tourists Are Swarming Antarctica To See It Before It's Gone

3 diggs theoutline.com Nature

Go quick; it's melting.

And People Wonder Why I keep Harping On the Importance Of Critical Public Logistics

And that a much more flexible, fault tolerant system, ought to be a very big public infrastructure priority.

Hybrid Dirigible Blimp trains might just actually be a solution here you know. Just saying.

TUNNEL TO NOWHERE

How Trump's Hudson Tunnel Snit Threatens The National Economy

17 diggs Bloomberg Cities

A tunnel predating World War I is key to 20 percent of the nation's gross domestic product — and it's crumbling.

YouTube Is A Quite Different Way To Do Piecework

Normally, with piece work, the idea was to compensate you in direct proportion to your output. However stingy that proportion might be, you at least knew, up front, what putting the pedal to the metal of "working your ass off," would get you. You only then needed to determine if you could sustain such, "pulling yourself up by your own boot strapping," within the required time periods.

I came to understand how this works quite intimately. For a while there, in the late seventies, or early eighties, just before I met and, latter married, my second wife, Helen, I worked cleaning restaurants for a living. And let me tell you, if want a definition of hard work, that's one place to find a pretty good one.

It was two, young entrepreneurs, who started this company that wanted to put a real emphasis on "polish" to their, "we'll put your restaurants right for business the next morning, guaranteed." And to do this they came up with the formula that, if you promised people $6 an hour for a night's work, you could make money with it; assuming, though, that two work pieces, so to speak, were completed; and I mean completed in demanding detail because that was the "premium service" they wanted to try to sell. And don't get me wrong. These two guys were absolutely willing to work that hard. You could tell just by being around them because they were both quite fit. And that was the thing. If you weren't nearly a kid, something of the order of a quite proficient, high school athletics person, then it would be quite unlikely you could do two restaurants.

I, of course, wasn't really nearly that fit, but I was burning up inside, ready to explode, with so much whirling about me in ideas, uncertainties, waking dreams, and that need to further push out something I could only feel. Bouncing back and forth between thinking I could, maybe understand some of it, or that I would never be able to understand any of it. I had to have something to burn into, and also have burn into me. And as I look back now, I can see this pattern repeated.

Anyways, the point here is that now, YouTube has changed this around. What you do on YouTube, first, and foremost, only presents you with the possibility of being able to do piece work. And for that they simply let the, now insane machine of, popular consumer, popular culture, commoditized infosphere, total involvinizer, maker and receiver, ready to burn out the circuits of their own, impossible, feeding, back, and feeding from, ultimate feedback loop system (who's lack of balanced meaning, and involvement, make it impossible to be truly self sustaining); we will simply let that, "you are out of your mind" feedback system, determine what deserves to be, and only then, the next thing that can now be paid a piecework price.

So, just to be clear, not only is this just insanely bad as an idea, just going in, but it is also bad for another.

And that's because you are put further behind the proverbial eight ball by the fact of where control of the piece work price itself will be; and you just have to see that it will likely be something you will have very little control over. Unless, of  course, you are really willing to risk it all by going totally mental, in whatever way it takes, to do whatever outlandishly new thing it takes, to titillate something that, ultimately revolves around some aspect of our base instincts, because that's what always sells, along with addiction itself, of course; and your risk in that is not only your sanity, but the sanity of the rest of us as well.

This is a choice we all participate in now, in a larger sense, because we think we can continue doing business as usual; business as usual when we've lost balanced perception of what "business as usual" has actually become. Because the multiplicity of fantasies, and always increasing, being engineered for synthetic experience, imagina-realization, at ever increasing levels of "high fidelity;" because all of these things distracting us more and more, even as they serve to change us from the inside out. That is what "business as usual" has become in the bigger picture. And whether it is a piece work scam, or a "I can hide information from you," to sell you shit as shinola, scam, matters only in the details of the particular people it impacts in the most immediate sense.

The fact of the matter is that we can no longer apply band aids to this hurt, or that hurt, in ever greater lack of coordination, and decrease in reliability; which the economics of scarcity (always allowing the needs of the many to go, as they say, begging) has only too clearly indicated, throughout its history, is its main prompt to do, whether intentionally or not. Now we must apply a comprehensively new solution to how we will go about being still socially capable of working together humans. And unfortunately we must start doing this very quickly.

Always remember, though, that it involves a choice that all of you must make. I am not going to dictate you into this. And you would be well advised to not let anybody else dictate you  into anything you don't understand. Because it's time for each and everyone of you to grow up. You have to take responsibility for yourselves. Each in every community. You will have to figure out how to do all of things that will make compromise possible, because if we can no longer manage compromise then we can no longer be a working social organization. How much more simple can it get.

Why almost no one is making a living on YouTube


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[Post Note: And lest you forget, here is one example of how withholding information allows folks to sell you shit as shinola. J.V.]

'IT WAS A COOL TRICK — ON ALL OF US'

How America's Clean Coal Dream Unravelled

7 diggs theguardian.com Energy

Kemper power plant promised to be a world leader in "clean coal" technology but there is evidence top executives knew of construction problems and design flaws years before the scheme collapsed.

Already So Many Dangerous Competitions With Other Nations

And this idiot thinks it would be a good idea to start a trade war; exactly where one of our dangerous competitions resides in.

This is the equivalent of him brandishing the steering wheel, of the clown car he has made of a Presidential Administration, pulled off its steering column of course, with him now waving it around proudly, out his clown car window, resounding with exaltation in the glorious abandon of using total anarchy as a means to do important process. He must do this, I guess, because there are not many other clowns left to appear magically out of it any more; his own inner audience, and comic diversion, to do their own hijinks of buffoonish imitation of persons who know what they are doing; and fall over each other, or under the clowncar, wonderfully as they gleefully make everything we face worse.

And yet we still wonder why.

In one sense he could just be up to his old tricks of fast facade change here. It will have resonation with the far Right, Fortress America, white nationalists. And it will resonate some with people who have been made to see that their job loss is only to do with gains made by others, on their backs; with the loss of their jobs, which is a significant part of what has been allowed to fuel populism these days (rather than try to question the faulty economic system that to seeks to pit working people against each other as a divide and conquer tactic).

Then again, it could be that Putin has decreed this to be the desired course of action, sending orders out via intermediaries. There is, after all, a big probability that "Vlad, the thinks he Glad," has Trump by the financial balls, as well as by being able to out him anytime he wants to as an actual, money laundering, or email complicit, criminal (at the very least). And why, you might ask, would Putin want that? Good question. If for no other reason than Putin's an idiot himself if he things bringing economic armageddon about will do him, or his nation any good in the long haul.

In the near term, certainly, he might see benefit to sort of leveling the playing field; as in my economy stinks, so why should I let any of the others continue doing well? The problem there, though, being that, just because you are good at trade craft in the corrupting business (which a good spy must be), doesn't also necessarily mean you are good at understanding complex, interconnected systems. Which means he could have no idea of just how dangerous such brinkmanship gaming might really be now (because we are only a few cascade events away from total collapse everywhere).

Or we could simply come back to my current favorite scenario: He craves the shiny of adulation and it is getting harder and harder to achieve as his antics do more and more to have the actual realities, of actual physical meaning space, thwart him, and his clown car. Making the space he has to maneuver in less and less. In which case you have to ask yourself, what does a wounded, facade changing clown do when he's cornered? Are you sure you really want to know?

Time will tell. Even as time runs out on what we might have as options to deal with in what is left of our own room to maneuver in, with so many other critical systems also ready to fail.

Trump defends tariff plan, says ‘trade wars are good’ as markets drop

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QUITE THE WEEK

Trump's Top Economic Adviser, Gary Cohn, Resigns Amid Tariff Dispute

8 diggs NBC News Politics

Cohn was reportedly furious at Trump's recent announcement of new tariffs on steel and aluminum.

[Post Note: I doubt that even super, super glue, or even epoxy impregnated carbon tape, for that matter, could fix this kind of "unglued." And yet those in and about the White House trot (or leak if you prefer) this sort of explanation out to do what exactly. Explain the unexplainable? Put some sort of patina of "you have to understand" around that which is never going to be fully understandable?

The only thing that would be understandable, at this point, would be the rest of institutional Washington DC regaining some sense of "what is needed now" and eliminate this situation that cannot be fully understood, or explained anymore, because you simply do not have a working, or workable, Presidential Administration at the present moment, and that is absolutely not going to change.

What can change, however, is that the not understandable, and the not explainable can, and will, get worse.

Any questions? J.V.]

Trump was angry and ‘unglued’ when he started a trade war, officials say