Topic: Economic Totalitarianism - page 128. (Read 345738 times)

There's no need to "sacrifice" economic growth.  The Italian Renaissance showed that it was possible to have great progress with totally free money and credit.  We would probably still get where we are, but not as quickly as we have.

If we keep arguing whether it's desirable to have better technology vs. better mental health and environment, we'll probably never finish, as we'd be comparing apples and oranges.  More clarity would probably be provided by a moral perspective in this case.  The modern system basically allows theft by the elites --it's only a side effect of this theft, ie the need to stabilize the system given this theft, that we have such fast economic growth.  A system that is built from moral dissonance at its core can IMO be viewed as something that will come back to haunt us, sooner or later.

Perhaps you'd prefer horse carriage delivered snail mail forums instead of the instant collaboration forum we are typing on?

Perhaps you'd prefer to adopt the lifestyle of the Amish Paradise.

So you cook with firewood and wash your butthole with dirt after taking a shit?

One of the signs of being too old is when you think everything was just about perfectly balanced in your generation but now everything has gone to hell.

Do you think it was similarly fair to criticize the engineers who created the first refrigerator.

RE advice on political candidates ... I hate being negative ... so I will post a link to a politician who tells it like it is ...
even if it means no chance of being elected ...
Amercians and TTP and TTIP proponents - you probably will not like this ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fDCbf4O-0s

"The Death of Democracy"

It's long, so get some popcorn, settle back, enjoy the show ...

It's in the nature of a state-controlled monetary system to have hyper-fast economic growth.  IMO this is unnatural and makes people unhappy and literally unhealthy.  And this includes the programming whiz kids who are in such demand in this economy.  You have to wonder how much of life they give up to "achieve" what they have.  But I noticed such people tend to come out of the woodwork in the performance-enhancement-drugged modern economy.

Essentially, when the state and its banking allies create so much money and debt (to benefit the elites, mainly), these have to be invested in something that eventually produces goods and services that people will buy, or the system would collapse.  All the nooks and crannies of the system tend to develop ways to incentivize people to be productive and innovative above all other goals of life.  That's why you see so much quick-buck mentality, fast-food culture, time poverty, mental stress, environmental pollution, etc.

Folks the following is an example of how to not succeed...


Broken link. Doesn't work.

Ditto your broken non-explanation.

To what do you refer when you write, “the powers-that-be” (TPTB_need_war)?

To some extent this can be a symptom of the peak in collectivism, because for example we have (highly unprofitable!) behemoths such as Facebook which are subsidized by the banksters (the bankster seed funding, controlled media, IPO, etc which of course the bankster cashed out profitably while leaving their clients holding the bag) so they can give away everything for free and thus a large swath of humanity is addicted and uninterested in exploring diversity. This swath of humanity is not motivated because they too are subsidized by the system and thus have no need to prioritize being realistic about how they use their time profitably. I am seeing this up close with my new social media site. It is very difficult to find a feature set that entices users away from "just give me your Skype, I don't want to be hassled with a new site".

More generally and abstractly what is happening is that we are becoming more specialized and thus the trend to maximum division-of-labor is intact. The problem with the maximum division-of-labor is that in the Theory of the Firm, this gives the corporation all the control and profits because the various specialists can't sell their skills independently into the final market and have to be bundled by the corporation into a final product.

What I am trying to do with my social network is share the revenue with the users and creators of the content and perhaps apps in the future. In other words, create an ecosystem instead of just a dumped down clientèle of zombies.

We need to radically upend the structure of the internet and the way we are interacting with it. This is an incredibly ambitious wall to climb and I was sick with Multiple Sclerosis for the past several years and had fallen away from my former high productivity.

Just now I am starting to get my mojo back and getting back up to my level of high productivity.

But I am only one person. Collaboration is nice but also can be a timesink to get coordinated. Breaking through with an ecosystem is the high economy-of-scale paradigm for synergistic collaborations, i.e. someone has to burn the path and lead.


Yeah but for as long as the safe haven of USA is still standing then won't that provide a some buffer against total collapse? The wealthy Europeans can move their capital out to the USA. It is when the USA turns down hard, that the world will really be chaotic.


I still have a lot of ideas for crypto-currency I'd like to implement. Again I am only 1 person and at the moment I am in need of fixing my finances which were destroyed by the illness. So I had to timeout from crypto-currency to go launch a social network (put the Android app on the backburner because I have less experience on Android and trying to choose the more sure project, but now I am wondering if I made a mistake  ).

If I could raise enough money to work full-time on crypto-currency, that would be ideal, but I sort of detest the idea of making promises and raising money for promises.

Also because of the politics of altcoins and investments, I had said I would never announce affiliate with an altcoin publicly. Also I was thinking any anonymous coin should most ideally have an anonymous developer because you want that developer to still be around long-term (not targeted for abuse by the powers-that-be). But that may or may not be realistic.

Any thoughts?

Erdogan, just been looking at the Iriduim Go! TPTB_need_war recently pointed out in the Economic Devastation thread that, “..the youth would ingeniously figure out how to turn the internet back on. They could probably do it with an adhoc mesh network with Wifi on smartphones. Ham operators would chime in with relay repeaters for long-range backbones, etc..” I freely admit this goes over my head. I can see that if effective they could have the potential to allow, say, a small community to maintain some sort of financial independence in continuing access to crypto. It would be useful if someone could produce a kind of “Idiot's Guide” in the use of these technologies for the relatively un-savvy. A growing knowledge base.

OROBTC, I hadn't come across James Howard Kunstler before. Like you, I prefer the diversification strategy, to hedge my bets against known and unknown possibilities. Who knows the way things could go. For instance, FerFAL seems unconvinced with bartering:

“...I dont believe much in barter items, mainly for two reasons. 1) I haven’t seen it work well myself. Almost everyone that ended dealing in a barter club after the economic collapse in Argentina did so out of pure necessity and they would tell you that cash would have been better. In many cases, people in barter clubs ended up hitting different fairs and markets, both dealing with cash and barter clubs. Most barter clubs would in fact end up using barter coupons, which are little else than an improvised fiat currency of their own 2)Other than some occasional bartering among friends, when studying different disasters around the world, I saw that bartering out of necessity was limited to certain types of worst case disasters, where even basic economic tools such as currency aren’t an option. Examples would be extensive economic collapse, or events in which occupation forces disrupt commerce, a country or town is sieged, or in a smaller scale a person is in jail. All these are rather unique, unnatural situations and when looking at the bigger picture they are very unlikely events and even if they do, a nice egg nest in an offshore account helps more than 100 pounds of nails, hammer and saws...”
www.themodernsurvivalist.com/archives/3744

I'm with you in that I have a certain ambivalence towards Armstrong. The ECM is clearly a brilliant resource and could possibly have attracted a Nobel prize if he hadn't been excommunicated by the financial establishment. His grasp and take on history is also very compelling. But I'm much less convinced by his solutions. He too seems closer to the establishment than the rest of us. There again, I read him just about every day!

Iridium Go! (Iridium Wifi hotspot) 2.5 kbps, should do it for spv wallets.

...

TPTB, Erdogan, BBZ,

Very interesting that the satellite phones never went down, I did not know that.  That is a good option to keep in mind of needing communication.  And billionaires typically want MOAR billions, so would likely WANT people using their satellites...

Is the bandwidth of those sat phones good enough for BTC transactions and similar?

[Ah!  Quick note re crony billionaires!: Obama crony WARREN BUFFETT just had another oil train crash spilling some huge amount of oil, much of it on fire, in ND I think, probably ZH and Drudge are covering it]

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BBZ also pointed out BIG investments recently in BTC (and possibly other technologies like the mysterious "21").

Billionaires almost by definition are part of TPTB!  Maybe communications will stay OK even in a SHTF.

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THX1138 brings up a "James Howard Kunstler scenario".  We could devolve back to 1800s technology (eg. barter, fixing wagon wheels, non-GMO food, etc.).  TPTB (I think, so has Kunstler) has also mentioned that JAPAN may wind up going back to medieval status...

You never know.  And that is why I LIKE diversification very much.  You never know what these powerful TPTB-types are going to try to pull, or maybe Mother Nature will have a laugh or two at our expense (a badass solar flare), or a take-down of the USA by dirty tricks from China/Russia.  You never know.

Best be prepared for a variety of scenarios.

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"Our" TPTB is to commended for re-awakening interest in the very bright (but flawed, but hey who isn´t) Martin Armstrong.  I still have not made up my mind on him (he does seem a tad statist in a funny way), but he clearly knows history and has brought the study of economic cycles forward...  Each day he seems to put up something on his blog, it is now part of my ever-growing daily reading list:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/armstrong_economics_blog

He has LARGE computational power looking at practically all tradeable things, so he isn´t just looking at the price of gold, oil, BTC, and the S&P 500 that I do.  He looks at ALL of it.  AND through time.

Whether that will make his predictions better, I don´t know.  But Armstrong is worth a look.

Alas, Martin does not give out PRACTICAL ideas for individuals, maybe he saves those for his big-$$$ conferences, LOL!

Buy up the fookers!

We have billionaires invested in bitcoin. If the government tries anything stupid, as stupid as trying to put a worldwide internet firewall to allow acces to certain services like BTC, the billionaires would launch their on satelites, so it would be pointless trying to stop it.

TPTB, I didn't mean to give the impression that I simply believe Knowledge Age = coding logic; I should have expanded. I get your point about “...eliminating the repetitive drudgery so humans can focus on what they do best, which is creativity...”. Of course, it seems increasingly (to me at least) that very few “creatives” can earn enough (or often anything) to live on, except the most talented ones. For instance, over decades I have had to move from practicing photography with chemicals to digital; from recording music in analogue to digital; I accept that. Even if successful, I understand that no-one can rest on the laurels of their career skills and feel an entitlement to earn from them for a working lifetime. As with nature as a whole, there is a need to constantly adapt. However, it seems like the city walls are getting smaller and smaller with more and more people locked out. You – and the other mavericks - are clearly gifted in what you do and stand a much better chance of economic survival in the years to come than many others, even though they are doing their damnedest to accommodate to the new normal. True, you might say, “too bad, you're not good enough”. Nature is frequently cruel, if you'll forgive the pathetic fallacy. On the macro level there is nothing to be gained in being sentimental, but on the micro, personal level this coming disruption will cause great distress for possibly billions. We will either rise up against totalitarianism in time, or we won't.

As for “...the worst of what is coming won't kick in until after 2016...” do you think this is still the case with the UK and Europe? I kind of got the impression that America would be going through what we will around 18 months afterwards.

It is reassuring that you assert, “...The decentralized network can't be stopped by the centralized morass...”. The skills to circumvent the grip of the “one-world NWO” will need to become available to more than just the technically savvy few – people like me in other words. I'm pursuing practical solutions for those of us who aren't likely to be in the Knowledge Age elite.

In saying ,“...if someone created something that was sufficiently innovative and generated significant market excitement...” are you suggesting that you are not necessarily still involved in developing an anonymous crypto? Hope not ;-)

Erdogan, thanks for your interesting points over short-lived internet cut-off and satellite phones.

Erdogan, they can't take away the internet entirely as you point out. Because there is too much entropy (a.k.a. life) enabled by the network effects. In short, a million people will be brainstorming how to route around the cancer and reestablish their networked contacts. The network is inherently distributed. Unlike the political morass and central banking which is inherently centralizing.

THX 1138, the Knowledge Age is not just about coding logic. It is about any creative activity that can't be automated. The Knowledge Age is about eliminating the repetitive drudgery so humans can focus on what they do best, which is creativity.

The pathway forward is obvious. The decentralized network can't be stopped by the centralized morass. No the Knowledge Age mavericks will not join the centralized morass! Why the hell would we join their failure. The one-world NWO morass will end up annihilating itself and anyone who depends on it.

As for "running out of time", I agree in some aspects (e.g. Bitcoin gaining a lot of mindshare, difficult to replace or overcome), but I also think the worst of what is coming won't kick in until after 2016. We have some time yet, if someone created something that was sufficiently innovative and generated significant market excitement.

Satellite phones have proved to be reliable even when a government cuts off everything. That was seen in the First Kuwait war, and the arab spring countries. An internet cutoff has always been rather short lived.

OROBTC, thank you for creating this thread. I have long hoped for some discussion relating to practical “do now” solutions (or at least attempts at!) relating to this subject. While the “philosophical terrain” you referred to of the “Economic Devastation” thread is often fascinating and thought provoking, I tend to get frustrated that time for an effective response is running out.

For over a year now I've been reading Anonymint / TPTB_need_war's ideas after stumbling across them on this forum while doing some research for a novel I was writing at the time, it being set against the backdrop of the 2008 crash – which in turn led me to the blogs of Armstrong and FerFAL (thank you!), and an unintended but enlightening trip down the rabbit hole.

I'm an INTJ with a 130 IQ, so while I stand to be perhaps two deviation points short of TPTB_need_war, I do however seem to possess other harder to quantify attributes which equip me to make the necessary leaps of perception (intuition?), if limited technical understanding, of much that he proposes.

While I'm  probably more computer literate than average, I am and never will be capable of coding; you have to face your limitations. So while I embrace the logical and economic argument supporting a move towards the Knowledge Age I am all too aware that I would more than likely be one of the millions / billions (?) not to make the cut for the Brave New World, so forgive me if my observations / questions might seem a little naive. I'm guessing there are numerous others like me who have been soaking all this up but are rather reluctant to raise their heads above the parapet for risk of being shot down - Dunning-Kruger syndrome?! I spent many years living in Oxford and was all too aware of the intimidating qualities of seemingly effortless intellectual fluency (and memory) of many I rubbed shoulders while I was there. But it was stimulating. One thing I did encounter  though was a lack of truly original conceptual thinking.

I live in a Dunbar number-friendly rural community here in the UK and hope for a pooling and bartering of skills (perhaps over optimistically?) with the people here should the SHTF – difficult to gauge quite how the UK will fair compared to the rest of Europe and the US. I plan to hedge my bets regarding cash / crypto / PMs / essential store of supplies; keeping aware of events changing quickly and to adapt as best I can. Of course, we all want our families to avoid the worst excesses; to retain as normal a lifestyle as we can manage, within the context of the “managed depression”.

Are we to expect two levels of elites? The corporate/oligarchic/govt state supported by the cream of the creative Knowledge Agers. A dwindling percentage of rare skills individuals gradually being replaced as bot learning advances. The remaining bulk of the population rendered surplus to requirements.

The gist of it seems to be that there is nowhere to run: not cash, not PMs... only maybe a bartering economy and anonymous crypto-currencies. What would prevent a malign government from selectively blocking access to the coming anonymous internet?  Is there a technical workaround to prevent this?

Interested to hear ideas and suggestions for how adaptable individuals amongst "the masses" are supposed to get by during the coming challenges.

I have that problem with the local currecy. 20 year old notes were cancelled. In the process, the central bank reported that X amount of cash where never converted, so large amount that you would think that lost notes were only part of it, people saving in the proverbial mattress were a big part. Thinking of old people, maybe dement, had their savings (and their descendants' heritage) confiscated. No outcry, people just laughed of the stupid old people who tried steal tax money from the socialist state god.

I try to do it for most everyday expenses. Take cash from the ATM, pay with in shops. Many things are more practical with internet bank these days, so it is still less than half of my expenses. At one point I refused to give name and paid cash (an electrical appliance outfit that has the habit of asking personal details allegedly for the purpose of completing the guarantee). (They don't formally need that, a receipt stating details about the stuff is enough) I said: There are so many spies everywhere. The cashier agreed and the trade went forward.  Small amount, however.

I highly doubt I will accomplish that. I am having enough difficulty just trying to get a "yet another" social networking site launched. 

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TPTB, yes they have done that before: canceling (or changing) the cash before.  Lots of times, good point.

But keeping some physical CA$H around (say three months worth of expenses) seems very practical.

If it looks like they will "pull a Peru" (change the cash fast like they did in 1990s), SPEND IT QUICKLY!

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What if our own TPTB (AnonyMint) winds up saving the world...?  Smile,,,