HN user
I misread this as: "I recovered a lost email from my client’s memory". It made me think of the Black Mirror episode 'Crocodile', and I was quite amazed. Then I saw 'email' client... haha
Thank you for answering my questions, really insightful!
Really? I am curious to know what observations or evidence you base your arguments/predictions on? Do you believe they have an (even better than 'post-Snowden leaks') search-engine like PRISM, but for private networks all around the world?
Could a user tell it's happening? What signals would indicate this? Is it increased CPU usage disguised as a system process?
And are you talking about mainstream proprietary OS'es like MacOS and Windows? I already know a little about Intel ME and proprietary silicon, but I don't know where to find a proper analysis, or a blog or book that deep dives into the ramificitions of the existense of these backdoors.
It seems to also not be in the mainstream consciousness just how serious it could be?
Where are the activist blog posts about this?
I honestly have no idea. I think it's scary! I wrote this comment on this thread and it got flagged/removed:
"Remember, you are the product here. Free means they are working with the US government and the NSA, and this is straight up Orwellian surveillance capitalism. It’s a black box with backdoors which not even Google employees could be aware of. The NSA uses dragnet practices.[1] Don’t believe me? (Re)watch both Snowden and CitizenFour. [1] https://www.wired.com/2013/06/nsa-tapped-internet-servers/"
I will be forced to pay back everything I have pirated
There's nothing to 'pay back'. Rentier capitalism has us convinced copying is theft, but only because the propertied classes have created artificial scarcity and high exploitative rents. [1] After we move to Commons based peer production, we will have a new reality, and artificial scarcity will be seen for what it is: domination.
[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
staying in Spain felt safer to me than returning to the USA
Because of better adherence to social distancing rules? Are you a SWE working remotely?
Yay! Sugar water!
Ha! Nice find!
I just re-edited the above comment - does this new edit answer the question you ask?
You for instance (forgive me getting personal) don't have to engage in high volume trading products using Blackrock Aladdin. You can just get a job, get paid, and spend what you earn.
The problem is that because of the monopoly on today's money, I am literally unable to not take part in society (in the way you describe) without at some point being negatively affected by the slippery things Wall Street does. An example is the recent US government bailouts during COVID-19, which means we are basically paying to clean up corporate fuck-ups caused by the effects of the extremely risky and parasitic ‘financial products’ sold by these big financial institutions.
Leilani Farha, a Canadian human rights lawyer working as the UN's special rapporteur on adequate housing, provides an inside look into one of these dark patterns in the 2019 documentary 'Push'[1]. It focuses on the financialization of housing and in it Blackstone's blueprints are laid out in full. They've now started a new fund to buy more 'distressed real estate' in Europe [2], repeating the same heist they pulled off during the '08 crash. It comes down to buying up housing and becoming landlords en-masse for society's most vulnerable, extracting rents from them, turning neighborhoods (groups of homes) into financial instruments/products, and selling a stake in such a financial product as just another commodity on the market. Yet these are people's lives we're talking about - and they are being systematically destroyed in the pursuit of profit. Profits which are then used to pay for huge corporate bonuses.
In my eyes, the real parasites of today's society are the propertied classes. Not the Precariat class [3], who faces ever-more unstable labor contracts and precarious working conditions, in the global North as well as the South.
The proprietary protocols of the money system constrain and shape all my actions in the world. Unless I live with an indigenous tribe who live in a gift economy, I cannot escape the rules and constraints imposed by the rules of today’s money. This means I am at the mercy of the Rentier capitalist class, which is growing in power every day.
To be honest, we'd have to go deeper and examine Capitalism's move into digital property, and the government granting state backed monopolies - and thus violence backed, through the criminal justice system - in the form of 'intellectual property', which is what I believe is causing a lot of issues in a world:
"…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. 'Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.
Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions." [4]
I want us to move to what is commonly referred to as 'Commons based peer production' (Yochai Benckler) - in scholarly circles it would be called ‘Open Access development’. This is literally about connecting the whole world to a hyper-connected network of open source repositories [Ceptr.org], in effect moving us from Platform Capitalism to Protocol/Open Cooperativism. I believe this can start by first evolving or reinventing our wealth acknowledgement systems.
When we also start using Cooperative Open Value Networks instead of enclosed firm-based/Corporate Enterprise Resource Planning systems, we can have transparent supply chains that reveal to us all of the complex information and measurements that are important and which respect humans and planet (say the regenerative capacity of sustainable timber forest, or the productive capacity of a farm during one season).
What happens today is that we reduce everything to one number, it's $dollar value. By doing that we lose a lot of important and vital information about the complex relationships between people, places and resources. Those relationships are obscured. Today's system creates an impoverished one-dimensional view of the physical world where we lose depth by oversimplying things without respecting their complexity and intricacy. Basically the question I am asking is this: how do we fully exploitat the near-zero marginal cost of digital technologies in meeting the promise of a more empowered, less hierarchical, internet?
[1] https://vimeo.com/ondemand/pushthefilm, or available to watch for free with a VPN at https://www.tvo.org/video/documentaries/push-feature-version
[2] https://twitter.com/Noordam/status/1248313189332406273, more info here: https://theconversation.com/wall-street-landlords-are-chasin...
[3] https://progressiveeconomyforum.com/blog/rentier-capitalism-...
[4] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
--
Edit: the way you say I could 'just get a job and get paid', shows me that you might not see that money is merely a human creation, and something without inherent worth. It then stops you from knowing about the possibility for locally-stewarded mutual credit community currencies, together with Commons based peer production. This view however is something I am seeing surprisingly often. When I started learning about the money system, it was all a bit of a mindfuck to me. I found this blog post to be an exciting read and it helped me a lot:
https://howwegettonext.com/the-future-of-money-depends-on-bu...
If it wasn't useful, people wouldn't be paying for the services it provides, they're all optional.
Honestly, in my opinion this could not be a more misinformed take on the reality of banking. Today there exist no alternatives to commercial money (private bank debt), because our governments' demand taxes in it.
Finance and banking are also different, yet you seem to use the words interchangeably.
Banking = creation of credit.
Finance (today) is about creating overly complex financial products to take part in the game of high volume automated trading, such as with the use of BlackRock's Aladdin - where the same financial products are sold and resold hundreds of times in an hour. Pure speculation/extraction/Rentierism.
As the comment you replied to wrote:
The first step to fixing this is to give citizens the ability to opt out of private banks and bank directly with the central bank. Private banks should not be the only ones with this privilege.
"The problem is largely in the system of exchange we call “money,” and in the banks that store and distribute it. Rather than allowing the free exchange of labor and materials for production, our system of banking and credit has acted as a tourniquet on production and a parasite draining resources away.
Genuine economic freedom requires that credit flow freely for productive use. But today, a handful of giant banks diverts that flow into an exponentially-growing self-feeding pool of digital profits for themselves. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, much of the global economy has been battling economic downturn, with rampant unemployment, government funding problems, and harsh austerity measures imposed on the people. Meanwhile, the banks that caused this devastation have been bailed out at government expense and continue to thrive at the public trough. All this has caused irate citizens to rise up against the banks, particularly the large international banks. But for better or worse, we cannot do without the functions they perform; and one of these is the creation of “money” in the form of credit when banks make loans.
This advance of bank credit has taken the form of “fractional reserve” lending, which has been heavily criticized. Yet historically, it is this sort of credit created out of nothing on the books of banks that has allowed the wheels of industry to turn. Employers need credit at each stage of production before they have finished products that can be sold on the market, and banks need to be able to create credit as needed to respond to this demand. Without the advance of credit, there will be no products or services to sell; and without products to sell, workers and suppliers cannot get paid.
If banks have an unfair edge in this game, it is because they have managed to get private control of the credit spigots. They use this control not to serve business, industry, and society’s needs but for their private advantage. They can turn credit on and off at will, direct it to their cronies, or use it for their own speculative ventures; and they collect the interest as middlemen. This is not just a modest service fee. Interest has been calculated to compose a third of everything we buy."[1]
The strongest alternative I am seeing emerge at this point is a new distributed peer to peer cryptographically secured accounting framework/pattern called Holochain. It allows us to rapidly prototype, and start using, new types of mutually sovereign asset backed Mutual Credit 'currencies' [2] (wealth-acknowledgement systems), based on productive capacity and measuring this wealth in new ways that isn't possible to integrate with today's money system. This includes the use of reputation currencies (think FairTrade labels, Organic veggie labels etc.). Building on this are projects like http://valueflo.ws.
[1] https://ellenbrown.com/what-are-public-banks-and-how-do-they...
[2] https://medium.com/holochain/beyond-blockchain-simple-scalab...
“Alkalinity
Thanks largely to the work of Dr. Robert O. Young, the public are becoming more widely aware of the benefits of a high alkaline diet. Most junk foods and heavily processed foods are acidic, causing a stress on the body which increases weight gain and decreases immunity. Ideally, the diet should be made up of at least 70% alkaline foods. A raw food diet high in vegetables easily satisfies this requirement. When our systems are alkalized, we feel calmer, can think more clearly, feel more on top of things, and have a stronger immune system.”
- Kate Magic, Raw Magic (you can find this book on libgen)
There are many calls for public banking by people such as Ellen Brown [1], as well organizations such as the MetaCurrency Project [2] and Positive Money [3].
[1] https://ellenbrown.com/what-are-public-banks-and-how-do-they...
The banking industry is the arbiter and credit in our society and decides where money get allocated.
Thanks for your comment. In my experience this is the most misunderstood aspect about money. Your comment explained it really well. I wish this was more widely understood and talked about.
I do not think the original commenter understands the monopolistic as well as parasitical nature of today's money, as they write:
- Part of it is deciding who to lend money to. Makes sense for the bank to decide this with its own money.
...which is wrong. Banks do not have their 'own money'. They create money out of nothing. They get a license to create debt out of nothing (fiat). Many times today they do not even have to have the fractional reserves for any of it.
If anyone has any doubts please check out Anthropologist David Graeber's book 'Debt: The First 5,000 Years' as well as his explanation of the money system in this article:
"In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it's backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There's really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it. They will never get caught short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans out will just end up back in some bank again. So for the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What's more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity.
What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow. Government spending is the main driver in all this (and the paper does admit, if you read it carefully, that the central bank does fund the government after all). So there's no question of public spending "crowding out" private investment. It's exactly the opposite."[1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/18/truth-...
Slow carbs instead fast carbs. Consume way less sugar. Eat way more veggies.
Honestly if you can afford it, just start shopping at farmers markets and buy local seasonal veggies.
Without context, we may not even be talking about the same thing.
I hear you. But maybe this is also because of the brainwashing of the American mind by advertising and corporate-funded biased studies. I've found that in the US it is hard not to buy 'processed food', because nearly everything is processed. I also believe processed foods are why average American life expectancy is so low.
corporate management is the default union
Such a great way of saying it. Also the quote from the original comment:
"We agree with the overwhelming majority of our Team Members that a direct relationship" [lengthy justification] "is best."
With 'direct relationship', they mean: unmoderated control over employees through corporate management
Real food is food that has a high nutritional value and is not a processed food.
Inverting this: for many years Burger King and other fast food chains poisoned people with non-nutritious food [1][2]. Now they want a pat on the back for making nutritious food for the first time.
"“Consuming these preservatives has been shown to increase our risk of colon cancer and should be limited in our diets,” she said."[3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1Lkyb6SU5U
[2] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/101/6/1251/4626878, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6146358/, https://blog.usejournal.com/the-united-states-has-an-epidemi..., https://flo.health/menstrual-cycle/lifestyle/diet-and-nutrit...
[3] https://globalnews.ca/news/5792891/artificial-preservatives-...
It is so incredibly heartwarming to me to see this thread stay as one of the top submissions/threads as long as it has.
Thank you HN community.
Awesome similar DWeb projects for those interested/inspired:
Ceptr/Holochain: http://developer.holochain.org/
DAT protocol: https://datprotocol.github.io/how-dat-works/
I think the only way will be by growing an agent centric web, where companies don't have much power over us to begin with.
I think they meant an actual home, not the home directory (I could be mistaken).
This sounds similar to Holochain [1], which uses a BitTorrent type DHT for validation.
Sure, it's not like they have complex admin tools, customer service systems and lots of other internal systems...
Rent.
"…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.
Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions." [1]
[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
Yes! A sugary drink that has no nutritional value - which is shit for the human body - is a great product! // sarcasm [1]
Jesus, the twisted logic of this current system that encourages excluding-enclosures (proprietary 'recipes') is so damaging to humans as well as to the planet.
Maybe those who were violently 'other'-ed or marginalized in our dysfunctional technological society? Those who developed a subsequent unconscious (euro-centric) savior-complex? The harmful ubiquity of the lone genius myth doesn't help.
Alexander Karp talks about 'terrorists', and seems to be very patriotically committed to the American empire:
there is strong evidence China was able to maintain access to Nortel's internal networks for over a decade (!!)
Who is this China you speak of?
It will be so fun if we turn real life into the game of Monopoly. Oh wait...
Imagine that, tax money going to the propertied and elite rentier class.[1][2][3]
[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/sep/10/push-fi...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/apr/17/who-owns-engla...
Thanks!