How Your Social Class Affects Where You'll Move
Friday, April 6, 2018
And When Most Of Us Can't Afford Living In Our Own Country, What Then?
Perhaps demented clown thinking will turn Mexico into one vast Debtors Prison run by retasked Drug Cartels, because they'll love the slave labor for an expanded drug trade, so the whole thing can pay for itself; including a much bigger new wall.
Thursday, April 5, 2018
This Would Obviously Be A Very Satisfying Technical Challenge To Solve
But is this really a priority right now? Do we really need to get the few people who are going to be able to afford to do this a few hours faster to their destinations? When tens of thousands of us can't get to any safety right now at all? When tens of thousands of us have no viable habitat to go to in the first place?
Wouldn't it make a whole lot more sense to be spending precious research dollars on perfecting a much more flexible, and much larger scale, form of air transport? You know... Say like a Hybrid Dirigible Blimp transport that could be linked into air trains? Because what we really need right now is a lot more, affordable, transport capability, even if it only flies at 300 knots or so.
And sure, hypersonic is one of the weapon techs that everybody is worried about now, but doesn't that suggest the possibility that we might be better served in doing a lot more negotiating, than building, every new weapon idea that comes down the pike. Because I can assure you that this is what is going to be needed if we're ever to be able to start stepping back from all of these dangerous competitions we so deeply into now: competing for markets. Competing for ever more scarce resources. And now competing on too many technical fronts for too many scary new weapons capabilities. It has to stop at some point or other after all. And for no other reason than we are living in interrelated systems that can only handle certain levels of carrying capacity in any kind of "bad effect" you might want to talk about. The only real question is when, and how. Of whether we address these thing proactively, or whether we have them get addressed for us; just as surely as gravity can make a big rock fall where you least want, or need it.
Wouldn't it make a whole lot more sense to be spending precious research dollars on perfecting a much more flexible, and much larger scale, form of air transport? You know... Say like a Hybrid Dirigible Blimp transport that could be linked into air trains? Because what we really need right now is a lot more, affordable, transport capability, even if it only flies at 300 knots or so.
And sure, hypersonic is one of the weapon techs that everybody is worried about now, but doesn't that suggest the possibility that we might be better served in doing a lot more negotiating, than building, every new weapon idea that comes down the pike. Because I can assure you that this is what is going to be needed if we're ever to be able to start stepping back from all of these dangerous competitions we so deeply into now: competing for markets. Competing for ever more scarce resources. And now competing on too many technical fronts for too many scary new weapons capabilities. It has to stop at some point or other after all. And for no other reason than we are living in interrelated systems that can only handle certain levels of carrying capacity in any kind of "bad effect" you might want to talk about. The only real question is when, and how. Of whether we address these thing proactively, or whether we have them get addressed for us; just as surely as gravity can make a big rock fall where you least want, or need it.
QUIET RIOT
NASA's New X-Plane Could Revive Supersonic Flight For The Masses
Flying faster than sound is the easy part. The real trick is doing it without creating the eardrum-battering sonic boom, a key hurdle to reviving supersonic flight for civilians.
When Too Much Power Can Hurt You Just By Being Indifferent To A Mistake
A mistake that the "too much" power in question has done, and continues to do, because it has become too institutionally above what it thinks it presides over; above and beyond because it is doing what it does with such new precision, and dominance. How could it possibly need to question itself. And now, of course, it's becoming too big for even it to try to question itself internally.
That it also functions on the wrong economic dynamic now is also a real problem; the commercial dynamic that sees no benefit in truly allowing for the free flow of information, any more than it still sees Democracy as such a good idea any more. It tolerates it for the moment because it was an early beneficiary of it, but that is certainly starting to change.
The bigger question for me, however, is how the people who make up this, once very people oriented organization, can see how staying on an obviously outdated operating system makes any sense at all. Any sense at all for the vast majority of the people who have to live in it anyway.
And of all of the folks who ignore what I post theirs is the most damning in its absence of comment. Of all of the titans of tech, theirs is the most obvious in not being able to either defend Capitalism, or come up with a better alternative for it than I have. If one were available you would certainly think the creative capital available to this company, as a whole, could come up with it. But they do not. They say nothing because they are supposedly above the lowly commentary of mere mortals. And they seem to answer to them only when pointedly made to pay attention.
Europe made them pay attention and the Europeans are getting better service because of it. Now the planet is going to make them pay attention as well. Maybe the people who make up Alphabet now will come to see that they must pay attention to that as well. The planet, I think, is not going to take to being ignored for very much longer. One can only hope.
That it also functions on the wrong economic dynamic now is also a real problem; the commercial dynamic that sees no benefit in truly allowing for the free flow of information, any more than it still sees Democracy as such a good idea any more. It tolerates it for the moment because it was an early beneficiary of it, but that is certainly starting to change.
The bigger question for me, however, is how the people who make up this, once very people oriented organization, can see how staying on an obviously outdated operating system makes any sense at all. Any sense at all for the vast majority of the people who have to live in it anyway.
And of all of the folks who ignore what I post theirs is the most damning in its absence of comment. Of all of the titans of tech, theirs is the most obvious in not being able to either defend Capitalism, or come up with a better alternative for it than I have. If one were available you would certainly think the creative capital available to this company, as a whole, could come up with it. But they do not. They say nothing because they are supposedly above the lowly commentary of mere mortals. And they seem to answer to them only when pointedly made to pay attention.
Europe made them pay attention and the Europeans are getting better service because of it. Now the planet is going to make them pay attention as well. Maybe the people who make up Alphabet now will come to see that they must pay attention to that as well. The planet, I think, is not going to take to being ignored for very much longer. One can only hope.
The Man Who Spent $100K To Remove A Lie From Google
Wednesday, April 4, 2018
If You Can Hit The Pause Button, Maybe The Stop Button Isn't That Much Of A Stretch Either
The bottom line question here really, is quite simple.
Do you really think there is real meaning to be had in continuing with this, at least tarnished, process of how we do society? Does it really make sense to continue to have your livelihoods tied to ever more consumption?
And remember, we are talking about what the new "Megamatronic Monster" our mutated Capitalism is now; the thing that can produce way faster than either we can consume (even if we could afford to) in any practical terms, any more than the planet could continue to support the influx of material resource to continue to make that, mostly waste, happen.
Do you really think that personal meaning lies down that path? Even if rich people decided to pay for a big part of fixing everything broken environmentally? Would you want to head down the path were the marketing to keep us consuming at the rate we will need to consume to keep the rich as happy as they increasingly want to be? Because that path is quite likely to lead to levels of addiction as yet unheard of, with new instrumentality designed specifically for that purpose, because, of course, the rich like to keep the gravy train going. And VR will give them that tool. And eventually a special internet will be free, absolutely involving, and exciting, and intoxicating in every respect; and they will have developed that special link, right to the spinal column somehow, for direct back and forth between the brain, the body, and a digital interlink; bio optical in nature perhaps. And once you try it on you will never be able to take it off. You will never want to take it off. And it won't feel like a slave collar at all, but that is what it will be.
This is the risk you face even if the planet were miraculously saved. And that in itself is a pipe dream unless the human race, as a whole, mobilizes. And I am pretty sure the world won't do diddly squat like that unless we decided to jump into it first.
Understand something very important here, however. You have it in your power to redefine work, and life for society, pretty much any way you can come to agree to do so. As such you can set things up to give yourselves a chance to have real meaning in your lives. To makes things work so that everybody will be needed to make it a win/win for everybody. This will require a lot of work on your part though. A lot of sacrifice. You will, in essence, be required to take real responsibility for yourselves as nearly independent city states; owning and running your own lives; making your own decisions on how everything gets done because you really will own the results (baring natural incidents of course, and understanding that the New Federation will want to help even if you have screwed some things up). And you will have to do this with the understanding that cooperation, and compromise, are the only ways it is going to work.
So that's where you are at now. Now that you, supposedly, sit there in media speak "pausing," trying to figure out what do any of us do next. And even though I am biased about this (a humanitarian Progressive by birth, come to a better understanding of balance, and a need for a "Grand Compromise" between Progressives and Libertarians), I still think you can count on the fact that doing "Business As Usual" isn't going to get you very far anymore. You are on a treadmill and debt is an instrument of control to keep you there. Running faster to stay where you are will be required, assuming you want to just "stay where you are." The planet certainly has had enough of what we having been doing. And then there is the fact that there are too many of us on it. Ignore that at your peril as well.
It is your choice. Think about it carefully. Better do something quick though. Time is a factor here.
Do you really think there is real meaning to be had in continuing with this, at least tarnished, process of how we do society? Does it really make sense to continue to have your livelihoods tied to ever more consumption?
And remember, we are talking about what the new "Megamatronic Monster" our mutated Capitalism is now; the thing that can produce way faster than either we can consume (even if we could afford to) in any practical terms, any more than the planet could continue to support the influx of material resource to continue to make that, mostly waste, happen.
Do you really think that personal meaning lies down that path? Even if rich people decided to pay for a big part of fixing everything broken environmentally? Would you want to head down the path were the marketing to keep us consuming at the rate we will need to consume to keep the rich as happy as they increasingly want to be? Because that path is quite likely to lead to levels of addiction as yet unheard of, with new instrumentality designed specifically for that purpose, because, of course, the rich like to keep the gravy train going. And VR will give them that tool. And eventually a special internet will be free, absolutely involving, and exciting, and intoxicating in every respect; and they will have developed that special link, right to the spinal column somehow, for direct back and forth between the brain, the body, and a digital interlink; bio optical in nature perhaps. And once you try it on you will never be able to take it off. You will never want to take it off. And it won't feel like a slave collar at all, but that is what it will be.
This is the risk you face even if the planet were miraculously saved. And that in itself is a pipe dream unless the human race, as a whole, mobilizes. And I am pretty sure the world won't do diddly squat like that unless we decided to jump into it first.
Understand something very important here, however. You have it in your power to redefine work, and life for society, pretty much any way you can come to agree to do so. As such you can set things up to give yourselves a chance to have real meaning in your lives. To makes things work so that everybody will be needed to make it a win/win for everybody. This will require a lot of work on your part though. A lot of sacrifice. You will, in essence, be required to take real responsibility for yourselves as nearly independent city states; owning and running your own lives; making your own decisions on how everything gets done because you really will own the results (baring natural incidents of course, and understanding that the New Federation will want to help even if you have screwed some things up). And you will have to do this with the understanding that cooperation, and compromise, are the only ways it is going to work.
So that's where you are at now. Now that you, supposedly, sit there in media speak "pausing," trying to figure out what do any of us do next. And even though I am biased about this (a humanitarian Progressive by birth, come to a better understanding of balance, and a need for a "Grand Compromise" between Progressives and Libertarians), I still think you can count on the fact that doing "Business As Usual" isn't going to get you very far anymore. You are on a treadmill and debt is an instrument of control to keep you there. Running faster to stay where you are will be required, assuming you want to just "stay where you are." The planet certainly has had enough of what we having been doing. And then there is the fact that there are too many of us on it. Ignore that at your peril as well.
It is your choice. Think about it carefully. Better do something quick though. Time is a factor here.
Poll: Majority of millennials are in debt, hitting pause on major life events
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Trying To Make A Broken System Do What It Wasn't Designed For Is A Big Mistake
You can certainly understand the usual Liberal tendency towards wanting to make a system that isn't working very well better. And Liberals have been trying for decades now to make our economic system work better; not only in terms of a better deal, across the boards, in terms of an actual improvement in equality of outcomes, but in trying to have jubs be available to all folks ready to work.
The problem is that this complicated system, that has gotten a lot more complicated precisely because of the efforts to control it from the outside with laws, simply does not want there to be this kind of equality, because the truth of the matter is that it is supposed to be a system based on what was the starting assumption of the time of its creation: That we will always be faced with a natural form of scarcity so we must organize around how to best allocate scarce resources, and skilled labor. And that worked fairly well for a while.
But this system was also a great instigator of change, and change did indeed happen; most especially in our abilities to understand, and effect nature. Which is just another way of saying we acquired a great increase in instrumentality with which to do both understanding better, and effecting better. And this would inevitably lead to ever more stunning technical achievements, from repeatable type, to optics, to harnessing electrons, and ultimately the atom itself. And now we don't have to carry forward the old thinking of scarcity as we used to, encrusted so deeply into the very DNA of an old economic operating system. But certain elements in our society have become accustomed to these old arrangements and are loath to part with them now, for it has given them great privilege the rest of us do not have. But a lot of us still think that, just by changing a law here, and there, that we can give this old tiger a new way of thinking. But that notion must be seen as the folly decades of trying, and failing, have shown it to be.
It simply can't be done. Capitalism is broken. It can't be fixed. Accept that. The sooner you do the sooner we can get to doing the things we need to do to fix this planet.
The problem is that this complicated system, that has gotten a lot more complicated precisely because of the efforts to control it from the outside with laws, simply does not want there to be this kind of equality, because the truth of the matter is that it is supposed to be a system based on what was the starting assumption of the time of its creation: That we will always be faced with a natural form of scarcity so we must organize around how to best allocate scarce resources, and skilled labor. And that worked fairly well for a while.
But this system was also a great instigator of change, and change did indeed happen; most especially in our abilities to understand, and effect nature. Which is just another way of saying we acquired a great increase in instrumentality with which to do both understanding better, and effecting better. And this would inevitably lead to ever more stunning technical achievements, from repeatable type, to optics, to harnessing electrons, and ultimately the atom itself. And now we don't have to carry forward the old thinking of scarcity as we used to, encrusted so deeply into the very DNA of an old economic operating system. But certain elements in our society have become accustomed to these old arrangements and are loath to part with them now, for it has given them great privilege the rest of us do not have. But a lot of us still think that, just by changing a law here, and there, that we can give this old tiger a new way of thinking. But that notion must be seen as the folly decades of trying, and failing, have shown it to be.
It simply can't be done. Capitalism is broken. It can't be fixed. Accept that. The sooner you do the sooner we can get to doing the things we need to do to fix this planet.
FULL EMPLOYMENT
A Guaranteed Jobs-For-All Program Is Gaining Traction Among 2020 Democratic Hopefuls
A job guarantee — the idea that everyone should have a job if they want or need one, and it’s the government’s job to make that possible — is back.
Monday, April 2, 2018
Get Ready For More Efforts By Big Money To Bombard You With Propaganda
And by propaganda, of course, I mean scripted dogma written by the corporate head office, and sent down the pipe for simple distribution. Reporting be damned. This is simply the company line being read by the company grist machine.
See this for what it is. A power play by one elite conservative group, or another, to BS you into at least more confusion, if not outright convince you that up is down, and down is up; which would certainly explain why an administration known only for its demented clown car qualities, and penchant for creating more chaos than an asylum run by the inmates, would be lavishing them with such praise.
Don't take this sitting down either, though. Understand that you will need to take peaceful action against the monied few or your rights will be chipped away from under you. And the prospects for saving this planet will be all the more diminished as well.
[Post Note: The bias implied here is obvious. And after our de facto ex president, along with a corrupt Republican majority, gave them the tax break these fat cats wanted (that they didn't really need), why wouldn't they support him, idiot, or demented clown car driver though he may well be. Presidents come and go as far as these people are concerned, and there have certainly been corrupt incompetents before as well, but to no where near this severity. This truly is unprecedented as this demented clown works to tear apart not only our only barely working economy, our standing abroad, and our own sense of unity; a unity of respectful disagreement that would allow us to do negotiating so that there can be compromises. Compromise, though, is most definitely not what these people want at all. They want it their way, all the way because once you get a taste of being in control, it's a hard drug to give up. J.V.]
[Post Note: The propagandists supporting the president are also of the same mindset as these fringe sites have in spreading hate for hate's sake, and of course the confusion it can sow in the rest of us if we listen to this crap. Don't do it. Don't pay any more attention to it than is required to see it for the mean spirited bullying it is. Because the bottom line here is to control you anyway they can. J.V.]
[Post Note: Here you can see exactly the kind of demented clown car this administration really is. The kind of administration this kind of propaganda seems keen to support. J.V.]
See this for what it is. A power play by one elite conservative group, or another, to BS you into at least more confusion, if not outright convince you that up is down, and down is up; which would certainly explain why an administration known only for its demented clown car qualities, and penchant for creating more chaos than an asylum run by the inmates, would be lavishing them with such praise.
Don't take this sitting down either, though. Understand that you will need to take peaceful action against the monied few or your rights will be chipped away from under you. And the prospects for saving this planet will be all the more diminished as well.
TV anchors decrying 'fake' news put spotlight on Sinclair Broadcast Group
See Also:[Post Note: The bias implied here is obvious. And after our de facto ex president, along with a corrupt Republican majority, gave them the tax break these fat cats wanted (that they didn't really need), why wouldn't they support him, idiot, or demented clown car driver though he may well be. Presidents come and go as far as these people are concerned, and there have certainly been corrupt incompetents before as well, but to no where near this severity. This truly is unprecedented as this demented clown works to tear apart not only our only barely working economy, our standing abroad, and our own sense of unity; a unity of respectful disagreement that would allow us to do negotiating so that there can be compromises. Compromise, though, is most definitely not what these people want at all. They want it their way, all the way because once you get a taste of being in control, it's a hard drug to give up. J.V.]
Sinclair Responds To Script Controversy | Morning Joe
[Post Note: The propagandists supporting the president are also of the same mindset as these fringe sites have in spreading hate for hate's sake, and of course the confusion it can sow in the rest of us if we listen to this crap. Don't do it. Don't pay any more attention to it than is required to see it for the mean spirited bullying it is. Because the bottom line here is to control you anyway they can. J.V.]
As mainstream pundits apologize, fringe sites cash in on attacking Parkland teens
[Post Note: Here you can see exactly the kind of demented clown car this administration really is. The kind of administration this kind of propaganda seems keen to support. J.V.]
Trump's telephone diplomacy sends the wrong message to Putin
Another Reason Why All Working People Need To Take Action As a Whole
Salaried, and hourly workers. All of us need to take action. Not just one isolated union, here or there. Because that old way of doing things has simply not been working very well.
At some point it's going to take at least a week long work stoppage across as much of American as we can manage to really get their attention. Do that and then see what kind of bargaining position workers might be better put into. Then you can demand the real negotiations as to what work really needs to become to be what we need for the future; what work needs to be to save the planet so we can have a future at all.
See Also:
Oklahoma, Kentucky public schools close as thousands of teachers strike
At some point it's going to take at least a week long work stoppage across as much of American as we can manage to really get their attention. Do that and then see what kind of bargaining position workers might be better put into. Then you can demand the real negotiations as to what work really needs to become to be what we need for the future; what work needs to be to save the planet so we can have a future at all.
Trouble in candy land
See Also:
Oklahoma, Kentucky public schools close as thousands of teachers strike
"This wasn’t caused by a natural disaster. This is a man-made crisis," National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen García said.
by Kalhan Rosenblatt and The Associated Press / Apr.02.2018 / 7:23 AM ET / Updated 10:07 AM ET
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