I get so optimistic about the potential for full connectedness that I need an occasional reminder of just how fucked up we are semantically. The main objection to a Basic Income Guarantee is that it "pays people not to have a job" even decades after there really is no societal need for a huge percentage of the "jobs" in current practice.
To counteract this I read something like Al Sheahen's "The Rise and Fall of a Basic Income Guarantee Bill in the United States Congress" which can be linked (it's a .doc file) from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
In "Agrarian Justice" Thomas Paine says "...the first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period."
Funny how over 200 years later we still have prejudice against the poor!
Love.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Monday, May 26, 2008
Moore's Law still striking
I wonder if solid state devices like Samsung's pending 256 GB will at last signal the end for mechanical data storage? Why would anyone want a hard drive - ever?
The other "just around the corner" event is a truly universal wireless connectedness such as promised by FON http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/category/fon and other wireless broadband solutions in lieu of forests of cell towers and miles of fiber optic cable.
Love.
The other "just around the corner" event is a truly universal wireless connectedness such as promised by FON http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/category/fon and other wireless broadband solutions in lieu of forests of cell towers and miles of fiber optic cable.
Love.
Games Rule!
Fillmore's oft-espoused "Games Rule!" is quite descriptive of my life. I play hours of solitaire card games ("Pretty Good Solitaire" has more games than I'll ever sample) and lately I've been doing the same with the FXCM Trading Station using play money to learn/trade on the Foreign Currency Exchange, often called "Forex".
It somehow has me interested in "the dollar" which is, at the moment, pretty much tanking - much in line with my shorting it vs. the Pound/Yen/Euro/Swiss-Franc.
The game has a language all its own and is very different from Stock/Equity trading and with quite pronounced affect. During the vocabulary/software learning phase I lost most of my $50,000 stake but have built it back up by taking a more patient approach.
I don't think I'd ever risk real money on this but it sure is fun.
You can try it by doing a download from http://www.fxcm.com/
Love.
It somehow has me interested in "the dollar" which is, at the moment, pretty much tanking - much in line with my shorting it vs. the Pound/Yen/Euro/Swiss-Franc.
The game has a language all its own and is very different from Stock/Equity trading and with quite pronounced affect. During the vocabulary/software learning phase I lost most of my $50,000 stake but have built it back up by taking a more patient approach.
I don't think I'd ever risk real money on this but it sure is fun.
You can try it by doing a download from http://www.fxcm.com/
Love.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Brown + 54
Today is the 54th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that "separate but equal" was a vain fantasy - separate guarantees unequal.
Why do we take so long to adopt progressive ideals when it was eminently clear that certain institutionalized norms of society at the time of their being challenged that they were doomed: e.g. woment's suffrage; the Equal Rights Amendment; human rights for People with disabilities; same-sex marriage.
We know that Paul Robeson was fucked over pointlessly and that there never should have been circumstances requiring Jackie Robinson to endure absurd hazing before black men could play baseball.
There was no sane doubt that slavery was an abomination on humankind and that preventing participation at every level by women and other oppressed pejoratively-labeled groups were blatant examples of bigotry/prejudice. But such things as kowtowing to some badly translated ancient texts or exulting in living in the penthouse persist.
Even the most ardent segregationists knew in their souls that they were in the wrong and would eventually go down in ridicule - remember Governors Faubus and Wallace, etc.
As we get more universally connected perhaps the lag 'twixt realization of a concept and its implementation will dwindle. I can hardly wait.
Love.
Why do we take so long to adopt progressive ideals when it was eminently clear that certain institutionalized norms of society at the time of their being challenged that they were doomed: e.g. woment's suffrage; the Equal Rights Amendment; human rights for People with disabilities; same-sex marriage.
We know that Paul Robeson was fucked over pointlessly and that there never should have been circumstances requiring Jackie Robinson to endure absurd hazing before black men could play baseball.
There was no sane doubt that slavery was an abomination on humankind and that preventing participation at every level by women and other oppressed pejoratively-labeled groups were blatant examples of bigotry/prejudice. But such things as kowtowing to some badly translated ancient texts or exulting in living in the penthouse persist.
Even the most ardent segregationists knew in their souls that they were in the wrong and would eventually go down in ridicule - remember Governors Faubus and Wallace, etc.
As we get more universally connected perhaps the lag 'twixt realization of a concept and its implementation will dwindle. I can hardly wait.
Love.
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