http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-97210@Derivs “I’m not familiar with Armstrong” I think you would have needed to be in jail for a few years to know him personally. It’s been a long time since I have written a research paper, so someone needs to refresh my memory if there is a special way to footnote references by convicted fraudsters.
You need to do some research. Armstrong is not a fraudster. He has laid out a lot of evidence and explanation in his blog about he was framed for the Republic Bank fiasco as a way to cover up the fraud at the NY money center banks.
Indeed statist academia won't allow you to cite the truth, they would rather pontificate in ignorant bliss.
Sorry Michael for this blunt comment. I will leave it at that. Enough of this about Armstrong. It is up to each reader to decide for themselves.
|
|
|
|
I as an expert programmer with a reasonably deep understanding of the technical issues, assert that those who vote ‘ No’ without posting any justification in the thread don’t have correct logic. Note it is quite normal that I am usually 5 years ahead of most people in terms of seeing a budding trend. They are caught up in old paradigm thinking and can’t grasp my insight. If the ‘ No’ voters aren’t willing to discuss their logic, then they are not likely correct. Time for Bitcloud / Storj / MaidSafe
Those are not primarily trying to solve the anonymous networking problem, and certainly not general anonymous networking to any dynamic web site or service, e.g. a forum. You are comparing Apples and Oranges. They are to some degree trying to address the problem of anonymous hosting for the static resources of the web. But they have a fundamental design error or choice that most people don't realize. Their economic models are fundamentally (and apparently irrevocably) based on the quantity of storage, not the bandwidth transferred. Thus these are decentralized clouds for saving low traffic personal files, not for serving high traffic content of web sites. P.S. Returning readers note I have continued to edit the OP. In particular, note additions to the “Latency Incompatible With Stateless Content” section and footnote 3. |
|
|
|
Click here to commit a crime.
I think I'll take my chances with Obama. He is the smartest president of my lifetime and i trust him on this.  As I posited upthread, you want to be culled. . . . No I am stating the facts. He wants to be culled and is actively fighting for that. This is evolution at work so he can get his wish. Evolution makes no excuses for intent with ignorance. Actually it's just that I am not afraid of people. I think they are mostly the same and I get along with everyone. I believe this helps me see people for who they are instead of who I thought they should be. It may be comforting to see the world as black and white, good and evil, communists and 1776 patriots. Reality is never so simple, and you do yourself a disservice when you fail to take each person or event as a separate issue. You seem to fit the profile described by the following two authors, as you seem to think personalities and getting along with other people has anything to do with the issue we are discussing: http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/11/dont-mistake-masturbation-for-insight.html?showComment=1415915933934#c9120867661116148633It is always the same story.
Moron: Some stuff is bad, we need rules !! (or some stuff is good, we want it!)
Intelligent person: Rules implies a ruler. Do you understand all the (bad) consequences of having a ruler ? And why would anyone claim the right to decide for other people ? We should keep the current system, eg negociate issues case by case. The winners & losers will emerge naturally. No need for violence.
Moron: No we want that stuff now !! Shut your mouth! Eric S. Raymond's (the progenitor of the term "open source" in the infamous essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar") past writings about "net neutrality": Net neutrality: what’s a libertarian to do?Posted on 2008-11-13 by Eric Raymond ... Your typical network-neutrality activist is a good-government left-liberal who is instinctively hostile to market-based approaches. These people think, rather, that if they can somehow come up with the right regulatory formula, they can jawbone the government into making the telcos play nice. They’re ideologically incapable of questioning the assumption that bandwidth is a scarce “public good” that has to be regulated. They don’t get it that complicated regulations favor the incumbent who can afford to darken the sky with lawyers, and they really don’t get it about outright regulatory capture, a game at which the telcos are past masters. I’ve spent endless hours trying to point out to these people that their assumptions are fundamentally wrong, and that the only way to break the telco monopoly is to break the scarcity assumptions it’s based on. That the telecoms regulatorium, far from being what holds the telcos in check, is actually their instrument of control. And that the only battle that actually matters is the one to carve out enough unlicensed spectrum so we can use technologies like ad-hoc networking with UWB to end-run the whole mess until it collapses under its own weight. They don’t get it. They refuse to get it. I’ve been on a mailing list for something called the “Open Infrastructure Alliance” that consisted of three network engineers and a couple dozen “organizers”; the engineers (even the non-libertarian engineers) all patiently trying to explain why the political attack is a non-starter, and the organizers endlessly rehashing political strategies anyway. Because, well, that’s all they know how to do.In short, the “network neutrality” crowd is mainly composed of well-meaning fools blinded by their own statism, and consequently serving mainly as useful idiots for the telcos’ program of ever-more labyrinthine and manipulable regulation. If I were a telco executive, I’d be on my knees every night thanking my god(s) for this “opposition”. Mistake #2 for any libertarian to avoid is backing these clowns. ....
Why I won’t be signing the “Declaration of Internet Freedom” as it isPosted on 2012-07-03 by Eric Raymond ...
because libertarians – who understand why asymmetries of power and information are in general bad things – have very particular reasons to know better than this.
In the long run, open systems and networks are always better for consumers. Because, whatever other flaws they may have, they have one overriding virtue – they don’t create an asymmetrical power relationship in which the consumer is ever more controlled by the network provider. Statists, who accept and even love asymmetrical power relationships as long as the right sort of people are doing the oppressing, have some excuse within their terms of reference for failing to grasp the nasty second, third, and nth-order consequences of closed-system lock-in. Libertarians have no such excuse....
|
|
|
|
Is a Madmax outcome coming before 2020? - NO
Thus do we need anonymity? - YES
But I think there will be ww3, but it will not lead to a mad max scenario.
I consider the holocaust of WW2 to be Mad Max. Remember the genocide the Nazis did in Africa also. I think people are numb to the gruesome reality of world war because they been watching on CNN the USA drop cruise missiles on Iraq. In the local newspaper here in Davao, Mindanao, they published a photo today of two victims that were unidentifiable after being tortured by burning them to death. Their charred bodies were still in the clutched arms position so you can see the horrific agony they went through. Armstrong wrote, “...all the studies show China could take Japan in less than 30 days and Russian tanks could be strolling down the Champs-Élysées in Paris in less than 15 days...”, Russia has over 10,000 nuclear warheads, and Putin has been demonstrating he can fire nuclear tipped cruise missiles at major USA population centers―demonstrated more than once. Note I had already covered this upthread: If it came to this, your problems would all be solved... by your death.
The ammo would run out within a year, so would the food. Assuming it is a worldwide loss of civilized society, billions would starve. The only monies that would matter are food and slaves. I can't see this happening by 2020, but if we have a nuclear exchange, it could look like this in a week or two.
You are thinking only in terms of dipolar extremes. There are many gradients of economic collapse scenarios that are less extreme yet extremely disruptive to our lives. You will experience economic collapse in 2016. 100% guaranteed.True, I was. I thought the scenario was "MadMax". That's about as extreme as it gets! Although a more realistic post-apocalypse movie is "The road". That is a depressing movie and a chillingly real look at life in a dying world. Not as extreme as Mel Gibson's movie. Expect something similar to 1929 and WW2 was Mad Max in my opinion, but with much more State control in the USA (see below for reason): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmfaKT0_frE#t=92shttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwvDBeP9HkEhttp://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/11/04/judges-are-free-to-take-your-liberty-for-anything-didnt-cut-your-lawn-jail-time/http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=riots+in+Chinahttp://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=riots+in+EuropeThe reason why is before the collective society could afford FDR's New Deal, but this time we are bankrupt so these sort of socialist deals are going to result in hardship (state rationing via Medicare, Obamacare, 57 million on food stamps, etc.) which will lead to more rioting and spirals into uncontrollable chaos. http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/08/15/pentagons-1033-program-is-preparing-for-war-against-the-civil-population/The assault on the veterans who defended the world in World War I and were treated like garbage moved the nation. That incident was the final straw that led the people to elect FDR with a majority in excess of 60%. This use of these very same tactics today is outrageous and quite frankly warrants criminal action against those in charge. This is not war games. But we have to realize, what you see in Ferguson is the attitude that has engulfed the entire civil police force throughout the nation. Top military generals led the assault against the veterans. It was the lowest point in American military history. Because of this incident, when World War II came, Congress had to pass the GI bill to promise veterans would never be treated that way again. Daniel in the Bible predicts the time based on the Abomination of the Desolation, based on historical events such as the Holy war in 1967 (google can help you find the detailed calculations). Now we have all the signs as reported by NASA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9euK-koV-8k |
|
|
|
http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-96929He talks about how Spain will collapse any second now since at least 2011 I've been reading every blog post he made, and he never stated it the way you're attempting to spin it. What he said was that Spain's was descending in economic collapse and chaos, which it surely is. His model also predicted in advance the rise in separation movements, e.g. Catalonia.And the confidence in German Bonds is collapsing? By what measure? Current Yield 0.84%? He has not stated that. How can post meaningfully if aren't even going to read his blog from start to finish? (yeah I know that will require a lot of effort but you will learn a lot). You are conflating statements about the shift in international capital flows to the dollar and the imminent collapse of Europe (and Germany) with the fact that Armstrong has also admitted the core of Europe would get ingress of capital first (along the way to the end game).do you believe yourself in all these dates from Armstrong? I mean 25.6 year cycle? Seriously? Why not 25.6565656 year cycle, just to be exact? As for his performance on specific predictions and dates, indeed is model has been able to predict the exact day of events years in advance. I suggest you review his record as follows.His 1980s predictions made to US President and Treasury Secretary. Shaming Jim Sinclair. Why the mainstream press won't quote him. My expert (computer science) thoughts on A.I. as pertains to Socrates (his computer model). All the major turns since 1980s that his computer predicted in advance. Please understand what the model predicts and doesn't. It has been so stunning that governments have accused him of manipulating the world economy and imprisoned him in Supermax (overkill!) facility (where he almost died, I was following this back in 2009 or so) on a bogus contempt-of-court charge for 7 years in violation of his right to a speedy trial. He used to help manage 2.2 trillion of funds in Japan (Postal retirement fund and another sovereign wealth fund, both went bankrupt when Japanese government refused to allow them to hedge as Armstrong was advising at the top in 1989). There is (apparently very highly demanded) movie The Forecaster coming out about him and the manipulations he has uncovered and got him in trouble with the powers-that-be (specifically Republic Bank and the collapse of Russia in the 1990s). He has claimed his web site has over 500,000 unique readers.
Apparently Armstrong is legit and a very big time fish. He has connections amongst big bankers, billionaires, formerly heads of State (e.g. Margaret Thatcher), etc..
|
|
|
|
I think I'll take my chances with Obama. He is the smartest president of my lifetime and i trust him on this. As I posited upthread, you want to be culled. . . . The fellow, as with any, desires a liberty he cannot know by his own limitation. You, having thus scoffed him, demonstrate equivalent failings. No I am stating the facts. He wants to be culled and is actively fighting for that. This is evolution at work so he can get his wish. Evolution makes no excuses for intent with ignorance. |
|
|
|
Anonymity: Death of the Stateless Webby UnunoctiumTesticlesTo garnish more interest an apt title could have been, “Tor Is Not Anonymous—Web Paradigm Shift Underway”. I am referring to antithesis of the computer science term stateful—not to being without a nation-state. Googling “death of the web browser” returns many articles claiming smart phone apps are replacing the web browser 1. For example, Facebook’s app provides a more optimized experience than browsing the web site on the phone. However, I posit that more content instances 2 are being added to and accessed from the traditional web than are being solely accessed from apps; for example, the posts to blogs and forums. My assumption seems intuitively valid for at least two reasons. Two finger typing blog and forum posts on small screens is highly inefficient and error prone. Secondly, new web content instances are being added much faster than new apps because writing HTML is much easier than programming the Android OS or iOS. Even if there exists an app that facilitates authoring popular categories of stateless content, the data format of that stateless content would become a standard MIME type (whether it was an open standard or reverse-engineered because of the content popularity), that app is a content browser, and web browsers could support the content MIME type. The balance will tip in favor of apps because: - Android apps are coming to your laptop and PC8.
- To supplant the web browser because apps can often provide a superior experience. I enumerate some possible improvements provided by apps in The Stateful Web section below.
- As the demand for anonymity on the web grows, the stateless web browser must be replaced by apps because network anonymity requires high network latency and only apps have the capability to provide a reasonable user experience when there is high network latency.
Anonymity Requires LatencyThere are two fundamental types of anonymity mix networks: private information retrieval (a.k.a. PIR or “everyone sees everything”) a la Bitmessage and Chaum mixes such as onion routing a la Tor. PIR although low latency is not anonymous for any practical internet packet model because it would be impossible to dynamically adjust anonymity set groupings which balanced the traffic between all set members without revealing correlations that destroy the anonymity; also any practical design would not be entirely decentralized. Also PIR requires a high bandwidth burden on the clients since each client must receive all the server responses for all clients in the anonymity set. Onion routing is fully decentralized and does not require a high bandwidth burden on the clients. Although it also suffers correlations (intersections) from servers which dynamically exit the network, but if the persistent hidden services are the routing servers (which is not the case in Tor nor I2P) this will be a much less frequent event than the dynamically (constantly changing) balanced groupings required by PIR. The following frequent Tor attacks render Tor extremely unreliable, but could be fixed in an improved onion network. Fixing #1 and #2 requires a high latency design. Fixing #2 - #7 requires clients paying per packet for (and to) the hidden services in order to incentivize them to be also the routing servers. If users select only hidden services they are familiar with for routing, this prevents a Sybil attack against the network. So a high latency design with pay-per-packet economics can be truly anonymous, but it will require a stateful web at the client provided by apps. Whereas, Tor was designed to work with the existing stateless web employing low latency, exit nodes (instead of exclusively hidden services), and the stateless web browser. As a result, research claims up to 81% of Tor users can be identified 3. Latency Incompatible With Stateless ContentWeb content—even often when cached to check the current server file timestamp—requires HTTP retrieval from the host server. Network latency delays the user on every click in a stateless web browser, which could be on the order of double-digit seconds per click on a correctly designed, high latency, anonymous network. Even Tor’s slightly increased latency—albeit lower than required for true anonymity—can be maddening tsuris. Tor admits latency is a problem for hidden services (with its still tiny anonymity set of only 6 hops) and that solutions will likely come from restructuring the paradigm (“protocol” or “JavaScript hacks”). And Tor admits that supporting the “ low latency web” is a “hard problem” that they “still don’t know how to do it correctly”. Demand for Anonymity IncreasingGlobal police socialist nirvana cometh 3 6. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act forbade the use of armed troops on USA soil, but now it is openly violated by the legal switcheroo shell game of reconstituting the “peace officers” (a.k.a. police) so they are now effectively paramilitary. Even in Europe for example Switzerland is increasing gun control (oh grasshopper please understand why a lack of private arms means Putin’s ground forces can run over Europe like a hot knife through warm butter). The Stateful WebStrategies for minimizing the user’s perceived latency will vary and require client-side programming to be installed as client-side app. For example, a forum would persistently cache posts client-side, keep a persistent server-side record of cached posts for each client, and push new and edited posts to the client when the client is viewing a page which requires the updates. Note that latency doesn’t reduce throughput, so clients might be optionally programmed to preload updates and other predictive strategies such as a search engine initiating loading of the top results before the user clicks to view each of them. Rarely updated content (e.g. images, videos) could aggregated by hidden service hub servers which could continuously push 7 updates to client caches. HTML5’s Offline Web Applications and Web Storage is moving in the direction of the stateful web, but it lacks the interfaces, design, programming, and programming language flexibility of the Android OS which also has a superior security model. Android OS is coming to your laptop and PC 8. App installation is normally as simple as clicking to confirm that approve of installing the app and the app’s requested permissions. Note most apps in the Android security model don’t need any special permissions at least those developed for the latest Kitkat version. The title and content of this epistle is not about the death of all stateless content, rather I think it quite explicitly says death of the Stateless Web. This salient distinction is that per the Unix design principles of least presumptions, orthogonality, and separation-of-concerns, the content and rending model (e.g. HTML) shouldn’t have a monopoly over the transport model (e.g. HTTP). The Web is becoming more general, stateful, and the transport layer is detaching from market dominance by the rendering layer. This creates new opportunities and possibilities. | 6 |  | |
             [/list]
|
|
|
|
The real plot is to maintain control with rationing when the $227 trillion global total debt comes crashing down. This is precisely what happened to Nazi Germany with their Universal Health Care system which they could no longer afford so they reduced costs and generated revenue put the population in work camps (financed by President Bush Sr's father Prescott Bush's Union Bank) and killed them when they got too skeleton-ized from not being fed (no need to spend money on food on this dispensable human resource). Final Goal of the Surveillance State...
What happens when all nations are blanketed from stem to stern with surveillance?
Public utilities, acting on government orders, will be able to allot electricity in amounts and at times it wishes to. This is leading to an overarching plan for energy distribution to the entire population.
Claiming shortages and limited options, governments will essentially be redistributing wealth, in the form of energy, under a collectivist model.
National health insurance plans (such as Obamacare) offer another clue. Such plans have no logistical chance of operating unless every citizen is assigned a medical ID package, which is a de facto identity card. In the medical arena, this means cradle-to-grave tracking.
Surveillance inevitably leads to: placing every individual under systems of control. It isn’t just “we’re watching you” or “we’re stamping out dissent.” It’s “we’re directing your participation in life.”
As a security analyst in the private sector once told me, “When you can see what every employee is doing, when you have it all at your fingertips, you naturally move on to thinking about how you can control those patterns and flows of movement and activity. It’s irresistible. You look at your employees as pieces on a board. The only question is, what game do you want to play with them?”
Every such apparatus is ruled, from the top, by Central Planners. When it’s an entire nation, upper-echelon technocrats revel in the idea of blueprinting, mapping, charting, and regulating the flows of all goods and services and people, “for the common good.”
Water, food, medicine, land use, transportation—they all become items of a networked system that chooses who gets what and when, and who can travel where, and under what conditions.
This is the wet dream of technocrats. They believe they are saving the world, while playing a fascinating game of multidimensional chess.
As new technologies are discovered and come on line, the planners decide how they will be utilized and for whose benefit.
In order to implement such a far-reaching objective, with minimal resistance from the global population, manufactured crises are unleashed which persuade the masses that the planet is under threat and needs “the wise ones” to rescue it and us.
We watch (and fight in) wars and more wars, each one exacerbated and even invented. We are presented with phony epidemics that are falsely promoted as scourges.
The only response, we are led to believe, is more humane control over the population.
On top of that, we are fed an unending stream of propaganda aimed at convincing us that “the great good for the greatest number” is the only humane and acceptable principle of existence. All prior systems of belief are outmoded. We know better now. We must be good and kind and generous to everyone at all times.
Under this quasi-religious banner, which has great emotional appeal, appears The Plan. Our leaders allocate and withhold on the basis of their greater knowledge. We comply. We willingly comply, because we are enlisted in a universal army of altruistic concern.
This is a classic bait and switch. We are taught to believe that service for the greater good is an unchallengeable goal and credo. And then, later, we find out it has been hijacked to institute more power over us, in every way.
The coordinated and networked surveillance of Earth and its people is fed into algorithms that spit out solutions. This much food will go here; that much water will go there; here there will be medical care; there medical care will be severely rationed. These people will be permitted to travel. Those people will be confined to their cities and towns.
Every essential of life—managed with on-off switches, and the consequences will play out.
An incredibly complex system of interlocking decisions will be hailed as messianic.
Surveillance; planning; control.
... |
|
|
|
I think I'll take my chances with Obama. He is the smartest president of my lifetime and i trust him on this. As I posited upthread, you want to be culled.
The real plot is to maintain control with rationing when the $227 trillion global total debt comes crashing down. This is precisely what happened to Nazi Germany with their Universal Health Care system which they could no longer afford so they reduced costs and generated revenue put the population in work camps (financed by President Bush Sr's father Prescott Bush's Union Bank) and killed them when they got too skeleton-ized from not being fed (no need to spend money on food on this dispensable human resource). Final Goal of the Surveillance State...
What happens when all nations are blanketed from stem to stern with surveillance?
Public utilities, acting on government orders, will be able to allot electricity in amounts and at times it wishes to. This is leading to an overarching plan for energy distribution to the entire population.
Claiming shortages and limited options, governments will essentially be redistributing wealth, in the form of energy, under a collectivist model.
National health insurance plans (such as Obamacare) offer another clue. Such plans have no logistical chance of operating unless every citizen is assigned a medical ID package, which is a de facto identity card. In the medical arena, this means cradle-to-grave tracking.
Surveillance inevitably leads to: placing every individual under systems of control. It isn’t just “we’re watching you” or “we’re stamping out dissent.” It’s “we’re directing your participation in life.”
As a security analyst in the private sector once told me, “When you can see what every employee is doing, when you have it all at your fingertips, you naturally move on to thinking about how you can control those patterns and flows of movement and activity. It’s irresistible. You look at your employees as pieces on a board. The only question is, what game do you want to play with them?”
Every such apparatus is ruled, from the top, by Central Planners. When it’s an entire nation, upper-echelon technocrats revel in the idea of blueprinting, mapping, charting, and regulating the flows of all goods and services and people, “for the common good.”
Water, food, medicine, land use, transportation—they all become items of a networked system that chooses who gets what and when, and who can travel where, and under what conditions.
This is the wet dream of technocrats. They believe they are saving the world, while playing a fascinating game of multidimensional chess.
As new technologies are discovered and come on line, the planners decide how they will be utilized and for whose benefit.
In order to implement such a far-reaching objective, with minimal resistance from the global population, manufactured crises are unleashed which persuade the masses that the planet is under threat and needs “the wise ones” to rescue it and us.
We watch (and fight in) wars and more wars, each one exacerbated and even invented. We are presented with phony epidemics that are falsely promoted as scourges.
The only response, we are led to believe, is more humane control over the population.
On top of that, we are fed an unending stream of propaganda aimed at convincing us that “the great good for the greatest number” is the only humane and acceptable principle of existence. All prior systems of belief are outmoded. We know better now. We must be good and kind and generous to everyone at all times.
Under this quasi-religious banner, which has great emotional appeal, appears The Plan. Our leaders allocate and withhold on the basis of their greater knowledge. We comply. We willingly comply, because we are enlisted in a universal army of altruistic concern.
This is a classic bait and switch. We are taught to believe that service for the greater good is an unchallengeable goal and credo. And then, later, we find out it has been hijacked to institute more power over us, in every way.
The coordinated and networked surveillance of Earth and its people is fed into algorithms that spit out solutions. This much food will go here; that much water will go there; here there will be medical care; there medical care will be severely rationed. These people will be permitted to travel. Those people will be confined to their cities and towns.
Every essential of life—managed with on-off switches, and the consequences will play out.
An incredibly complex system of interlocking decisions will be hailed as messianic.
Surveillance; planning; control.
... |
|
|
|
Logic does not matter. Some here are willing to fight for their belief that a more powerful centralized power is good for humans, on a forum dedicated to an amazing fully working decentralized creation...
I will never get that.
Evolution at work my friend. They want to be culled.
The real plot is to maintain control with rationing when the $227 trillion global total debt comes crashing down. This is precisely what happened to Nazi Germany with their Universal Health Care system which they could no longer afford so they reduced costs and generated revenue put the population in work camps (financed by President Bush Sr's father Prescott Bush's Union Bank) and killed them when they got too skeleton-ized from not being fed (no need to spend money on food on this dispensable human resource). Final Goal of the Surveillance State...
What happens when all nations are blanketed from stem to stern with surveillance?
Public utilities, acting on government orders, will be able to allot electricity in amounts and at times it wishes to. This is leading to an overarching plan for energy distribution to the entire population.
Claiming shortages and limited options, governments will essentially be redistributing wealth, in the form of energy, under a collectivist model.
National health insurance plans (such as Obamacare) offer another clue. Such plans have no logistical chance of operating unless every citizen is assigned a medical ID package, which is a de facto identity card. In the medical arena, this means cradle-to-grave tracking.
Surveillance inevitably leads to: placing every individual under systems of control. It isn’t just “we’re watching you” or “we’re stamping out dissent.” It’s “we’re directing your participation in life.”
As a security analyst in the private sector once told me, “When you can see what every employee is doing, when you have it all at your fingertips, you naturally move on to thinking about how you can control those patterns and flows of movement and activity. It’s irresistible. You look at your employees as pieces on a board. The only question is, what game do you want to play with them?”
Every such apparatus is ruled, from the top, by Central Planners. When it’s an entire nation, upper-echelon technocrats revel in the idea of blueprinting, mapping, charting, and regulating the flows of all goods and services and people, “for the common good.”
Water, food, medicine, land use, transportation—they all become items of a networked system that chooses who gets what and when, and who can travel where, and under what conditions.
This is the wet dream of technocrats. They believe they are saving the world, while playing a fascinating game of multidimensional chess.
As new technologies are discovered and come on line, the planners decide how they will be utilized and for whose benefit.
In order to implement such a far-reaching objective, with minimal resistance from the global population, manufactured crises are unleashed which persuade the masses that the planet is under threat and needs “the wise ones” to rescue it and us.
We watch (and fight in) wars and more wars, each one exacerbated and even invented. We are presented with phony epidemics that are falsely promoted as scourges.
The only response, we are led to believe, is more humane control over the population.
On top of that, we are fed an unending stream of propaganda aimed at convincing us that “the great good for the greatest number” is the only humane and acceptable principle of existence. All prior systems of belief are outmoded. We know better now. We must be good and kind and generous to everyone at all times.
Under this quasi-religious banner, which has great emotional appeal, appears The Plan. Our leaders allocate and withhold on the basis of their greater knowledge. We comply. We willingly comply, because we are enlisted in a universal army of altruistic concern.
This is a classic bait and switch. We are taught to believe that service for the greater good is an unchallengeable goal and credo. And then, later, we find out it has been hijacked to institute more power over us, in every way.
The coordinated and networked surveillance of Earth and its people is fed into algorithms that spit out solutions. This much food will go here; that much water will go there; here there will be medical care; there medical care will be severely rationed. These people will be permitted to travel. Those people will be confined to their cities and towns.
Every essential of life—managed with on-off switches, and the consequences will play out.
An incredibly complex system of interlocking decisions will be hailed as messianic.
Surveillance; planning; control.
... |
|
|
|
The real plot is to maintain control with rationing when the $227 trillion global total debt comes crashing down. This is precisely what happened to Nazi Germany with their Universal Health Care system which they could no longer afford so they reduced costs and generated revenue put the population in work camps (financed by President Bush Sr's father Prescott Bush's Union Bank) and killed them when they got too skeleton-ized from not being fed (no need to spend money on food on this dispensable human resource). Final Goal of the Surveillance State...
What happens when all nations are blanketed from stem to stern with surveillance?
Public utilities, acting on government orders, will be able to allot electricity in amounts and at times it wishes to. This is leading to an overarching plan for energy distribution to the entire population.
Claiming shortages and limited options, governments will essentially be redistributing wealth, in the form of energy, under a collectivist model.
National health insurance plans (such as Obamacare) offer another clue. Such plans have no logistical chance of operating unless every citizen is assigned a medical ID package, which is a de facto identity card. In the medical arena, this means cradle-to-grave tracking.
Surveillance inevitably leads to: placing every individual under systems of control. It isn’t just “we’re watching you” or “we’re stamping out dissent.” It’s “we’re directing your participation in life.”
As a security analyst in the private sector once told me, “When you can see what every employee is doing, when you have it all at your fingertips, you naturally move on to thinking about how you can control those patterns and flows of movement and activity. It’s irresistible. You look at your employees as pieces on a board. The only question is, what game do you want to play with them?”
Every such apparatus is ruled, from the top, by Central Planners. When it’s an entire nation, upper-echelon technocrats revel in the idea of blueprinting, mapping, charting, and regulating the flows of all goods and services and people, “for the common good.”
Water, food, medicine, land use, transportation—they all become items of a networked system that chooses who gets what and when, and who can travel where, and under what conditions.
This is the wet dream of technocrats. They believe they are saving the world, while playing a fascinating game of multidimensional chess.
As new technologies are discovered and come on line, the planners decide how they will be utilized and for whose benefit.
In order to implement such a far-reaching objective, with minimal resistance from the global population, manufactured crises are unleashed which persuade the masses that the planet is under threat and needs “the wise ones” to rescue it and us.
We watch (and fight in) wars and more wars, each one exacerbated and even invented. We are presented with phony epidemics that are falsely promoted as scourges.
The only response, we are led to believe, is more humane control over the population.
On top of that, we are fed an unending stream of propaganda aimed at convincing us that “the great good for the greatest number” is the only humane and acceptable principle of existence. All prior systems of belief are outmoded. We know better now. We must be good and kind and generous to everyone at all times.
Under this quasi-religious banner, which has great emotional appeal, appears The Plan. Our leaders allocate and withhold on the basis of their greater knowledge. We comply. We willingly comply, because we are enlisted in a universal army of altruistic concern.
This is a classic bait and switch. We are taught to believe that service for the greater good is an unchallengeable goal and credo. And then, later, we find out it has been hijacked to institute more power over us, in every way.
The coordinated and networked surveillance of Earth and its people is fed into algorithms that spit out solutions. This much food will go here; that much water will go there; here there will be medical care; there medical care will be severely rationed. These people will be permitted to travel. Those people will be confined to their cities and towns.
Every essential of life—managed with on-off switches, and the consequences will play out.
An incredibly complex system of interlocking decisions will be hailed as messianic.
Surveillance; planning; control.
... |
|
|
|
http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-96652...
There is no way out for Japan. Japan will default, the Yen will crash, and expenses will skyrocket for Japanese citizens.
...
The reality is that Japan has entered a stagflationary phase. The country is seeing higher inflation from rising input costs while growth has been dropping. They can use monetary policy to increase growth by a little bit in the short term, but every single use will become less effective than the last. The only solution for Japan is default, which will happen after (and while) the Yen goes to 0. Japan is unique not only for having the highest sovereign debt-to-GDP ratio of any major nation, but also for that debt to be nearly entirely financed domestically. So in theory they could default on the debt (and/or increase taxes and decrease government services if politically palatable) without defaulting internationally on the Yen. The Yen might eventually rise in value because what would be remaining after implosion is a higher ratio of exports to imports, as well capital might rush in to invest in the much more competitively priced wages as labor supply would increase. In any case, I agree the burden is going to fall on the Japanese citizens in terms a greatly reduced standard-of-living.Who are they gonna be open to? The Chinese? The Koreans? They hate both of them. Japan, China, and Korea are likely to resort (with the Senkaku a.k.a. Diaoyu islands as one pretext) to the old pattern of mutual war to make the unavoidable economic implosion to politically palatable.
The global implications of a collapsing periphery (i.e. all nations except the reserve currency USA) is that all capital is being driven into the dollar, and this dollar hegemony means the USA laws will effectively govern the world, because for example if your country doesn't cooperate with FATCA and fledgling plans for internet licensing then the USA will blacklist your country or company. Essentially the same outcome of rising protectionism that worsened the Great Depression and lead to WW2 is repeating.
We are headed into the typical scorched earth paradigm (e.g. World War 2) that always throughout recorded human history exhibits at the times of peaking [global] socialism [and total global debt]. If we make it through to the other side, the balance of power will have shifted from West to East[1] and from multi-national corporations to individuals (by 2032), but the hell we have to go through before we get there is daunting.
[1] http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/08/05/the-shift-from-west-to-the-east/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/693-2/2012-2/we-are-on-the-verge-of-a-very-profound-systemic-global-meltdown/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/08/19/crisis-collapse-in-world-capital-flows/
P.S. I see this thread is the top performing thread in terms of Views per Replies for threads with more than 25,000 Views, and it is in the Top 10 for that metric amongst all threads with more than 10,000 Views (amongst which my [Anonymint's] Dark Enlightenment thread is another Top 10 member): http://kwout.com/quote/x2iyv7gy
|
|
|
|
It shows how far we have sunk. Now people just react based on politics without a clue as to what they are talking about. "oh, he's for it? Them I'm against it!".  I don't think very many people really understand what net neutrality means nor the potential consequences of imposing net neutrality rules on ISPs. IMO this is one example as to when it is good to have lobbyists that can educate the public as to what the effect of net neutrality are from both points of view You statist, socialist fools need some education. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6529&cpage=1#comment-1290942Eric, sorry for the off-topic comment, but I don't know if I can reach you by email. I've been anticipating and wondering if you are going to dip your toe into the debate about the rising trend (ah, the serendipity of that link ending in "911") to regulate the internet using for example "net neutrality" as the justification. I don't comment often on your blog any more, but I do read. I am interested to read your logic as always. I suppose I [am] thinking the forces of decentralization will win in the end, but what hell do we have to go through first to get there? I see my recent writings on this subject made all the same points that Eric made in 2008 as follows. Eric S. Raymond's (the progenitor of the term "open source" in the infamous essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar") past writings about "net neutrality": Net neutrality: what’s a libertarian to do?Posted on 2008-11-13 by Eric Raymond One of my commenters asked, rather plaintively: You mentioned net neutrality. I’ve read about this, and the opposition to it. I’ve read about this, and the opposition to it. As far as I can tell, net neutrality is more supported by liberals/democrats, while the opposition is made up more of conservatives/republicans. But for the life of me I can’t figure out which is the the more libertarian position. Your confusion is entirely reasonable. I’ve hung out with network-neutrality activists and tried to give them what I thought was useful advice. Their political fixations didn’t permit them to hear me. Here’s a summary of the issues and one libertarian’s take on them. Here’s where it starts: the wire-line telcos want to use their control of the copper and fiber that runs to your house to double-dip, not only charging consumers for bandwidth but also hitting up large content providers (Google, Amazon, etc.) for quality-of-service fees. There’s another question that gets folded into the debate, too: under what circumstances the telcos can legitimately traffic-shape, e.g. by blocking or slowing the protocols used for p2p filesharing. It is not clear that the regulatory regime under which the telcos operate allows them to do either thing. They haven’t tried to implement double-dipping yet, and they’re traffic-shaping by stealth and lying about it when they get caught. What they want is a political green light to do both. Let it be clear from the outset that the telcos are putting their case for being allowed to do these things with breathtaking hypocrisy. They honk about how awful it is that regulation keeps them from setting their own terms, blithely ignoring the fact that their last-mile monopoly is entirely a creature of regulation. In effect, Theodore Vail and the old Bell System bribed the Feds to steal the last mile out from under the public’s nose between 1878 and 1920; the wireline telcos have been squatting on that unnatural monopoly ever since as if they actually had some legitimate property right to it. But the telcos’ crimes aren’t merely historical. They have repeatedly bargained for the right to exclude competitors from their networks on the grounds that if the regulators would let them do that, they’d be able to generate enough capital to deploy broadband everywhere. That promise has been repeatedly, egregiously broken. Instead, they’ve creamed off that monopoly rent as profit or used it to cross-subsidize competition in businesses with higher rates of return. (Oh, and of course, to bribe legislators and buy regulators.) Mistake #1 for libertarians to avoid is falling for the telcos’ “we’re pro-free market” bullshit. They’re anything but; what they really want is a politically sheltered monopoly in which they have captured the regulators and created business conditions that fetter everyone but them.OK, so if the telcos are such villainous scum, the pro-network-neutrality activists must be the heroes of this story, right? Unfortunately, no. Your typical network-neutrality activist is a good-government left-liberal who is instinctively hostile to market-based approaches. These people think, rather, that if they can somehow come up with the right regulatory formula, they can jawbone the government into making the telcos play nice. They’re ideologically incapable of questioning the assumption that bandwidth is a scarce “public good” that has to be regulated. They don’t get it that complicated regulations favor the incumbent who can afford to darken the sky with lawyers, and they really don’t get it about outright regulatory capture, a game at which the telcos are past masters. I’ve spent endless hours trying to point out to these people that their assumptions are fundamentally wrong, and that the only way to break the telco monopoly is to break the scarcity assumptions it’s based on. That the telecoms regulatorium, far from being what holds the telcos in check, is actually their instrument of control. And that the only battle that actually matters is the one to carve out enough unlicensed spectrum so we can use technologies like ad-hoc networking with UWB to end-run the whole mess until it collapses under its own weight. They don’t get it. They refuse to get it. I’ve been on a mailing list for something called the “Open Infrastructure Alliance” that consisted of three network engineers and a couple dozen “organizers”; the engineers (even the non-libertarian engineers) all patiently trying to explain why the political attack is a non-starter, and the organizers endlessly rehashing political strategies anyway. Because, well, that’s all they know how to do.In short, the “network neutrality” crowd is mainly composed of well-meaning fools blinded by their own statism, and consequently serving mainly as useful idiots for the telcos’ program of ever-more labyrinthine and manipulable regulation. If I were a telco executive, I’d be on my knees every night thanking my god(s) for this “opposition”. Mistake #2 for any libertarian to avoid is backing these clowns. So, what are libertarians to do? We can start by remembering a simple truth: The only substantive threat to the telco monopoly is bandwidth that has been removed from the reach of both the telcos and their political catspaws in the regulatorium. Keep your eye on that ball; the telcos know it’s the important one and will try to distract you from it, while the “network neutrality” crowd doesn’t know it and wastes most of its energy self-defeatingly wrestling with the telcos over how to re-slice the existing pie. Go active whenever there’s a political debate about “unlicensed spectrum”. More of it is good. Oppose any efforts to make UWB (or any other technology that doesn’t cause destructive interference) require a license anywhere on the spectrum. If you are capable, contribute to the development of mesh networking, especially wireless mesh networking.
Oh, and buy an Android phone. As I noted in my immediately previous post, Google is our ally in this.UPDATE: I’ve summarized the history of the Bell System’s theft of the last mile here.
Why Android mattersPosted on 2008-11-12 by Eric Raymond ... I’m going to start with the relatively far future, like five or even possibly ten years out, because I’m pretty sure my projections for it are very similar to Sergei and Larry’s and that they are what is actually driving Google’s corporate strategy. Cellphone descendants are going to eat the PC... ... Now. You are Google. You make your money by selling ads on the most successful search engine in the world. One of your strategic imperatives is therefore this: you cannot allow anyone to operate a technological or regulatory chokepoint between you and people doing searches, otherwise they’ll stunt your earnings growth and siphon off your revenues. That’s why you ran a politico-financial hack on the Federal auction of radio spectrum to ensure a certain minimum level of openness. And that’s why you are [Google is], very quietly, the single most determined and effective advocate of network neutrality. [note Eric is referring to free market driven "net neutrality" not the political lie "net neutrality" which is actually the way to end "net neutrality"]Now, combine these two visions and you’ll understand why Google is doing Android. Their goal is to create the business conditions that will maximize their ad revenue not just two years out but ten years out. Those business conditions are, basically, an Internet that is as friction-free, cheap, and difficult to lock down as the underlying technology can make it. Under this strategy, Android wins in multiple ways. In the longer term, it gives Google a strong shot at defining the next generation of dominant computing platforms in such a way that nothing but customer demand will be able to control those platforms. In the shorter term, it outflanks the Baby Bells. As web traffic shifts to Googlephones (and things like them), telco efforts to double-dip carriage charges by extracting quality-of-service fees from Google and other content providers will become both technologically more difficult and politically impossible. By depriving them of the ability to lock in customers to gated and proprietary services, Android will hammer both the wire-line and wireless telcos into being nothing but low-margin bit-haulage providers, exactly where Google wants them. (A leading indicator will be the collapse of the blatant absurdity that is the ring-tones market, doomed when anyone can hook MP3s of their choosing to phone events.) As bad as this sounds for the telcos, Microsoft gets outflanked and screwed far worse... ... One of the coolest things about this chain of dominoes is that Google itself doesn’t have to win or end up with control of anything for the future to play out as described. It’s not even necessary that Android itself be the eventual dominant cellphone platform. All they have to do is force the competitive conditions so that whatever does end up dominating is as open as Android is. Given that one of the largest handset makers is already being forced to open source their stack for other reasons (Nokia figured out that they can’t afford to hire enough developers to do all their device ports in-house) this outcome seems certain. For the open-source community, it’s all good. The things Google needs to do with Android for selfish business-strategic reasons are exactly what we want, too. This isn’t an accident, because we’re both pulling in the direction of reducing the effects of market friction, transaction costs, and asymmetries of power and information. If Google didn’t exist, the open-source community would need to invent it.
Oh. Wait. We did invent them. Where do you suppose Sergei and Larry came from? Why do you suppose they’ve been running Summer of Code and hiring a noticeable fraction of the most capable open-source developers on the planet? Well, here’s a flare-lit clue: before those two guys [Sergei and Larry Page] were famous, they sent me fan mail once.That’s why I think those two know exactly what they’re doing. And that, if it’s true that their business strategy requires them to be open source’s ally, I think I can be allowed a guess that they chose their business strategy so that would be true. “Don’t be evil”; they’re not angels, but they’re trying. And, from where I sit? All I can say is this: Bwahahaha. The sinister master plan for world domination – it is working!
Telecoms regulation considered harmfulPosted on 2006-02-27 by Eric Raymond Doc Searls asked me to put the argument for total telecoms deregulation into a nutshell, then blog it so he could point at it. Here it is. Telecoms regulation, to the extent it was ever justified, was justified on the basis of preventing or remedying market failures — such as, in particular, lack of market incentives to provide universal coverage. The market failures in telecoms all derive from the high fixed-capital costs of conventional wirelines. These have two major effects: (1) incentives to provide service in rural areas are weak, because the amount of time required to amortize large fixed costs makes for poor discounted ROI; and (2) in higher-density areas, the last mile of wire is a natural monopoly/oligopoly.
New technologies are directly attacking this problem. Wi-Fi, wireless mesh networks, IP over powerlines, and cheap fenceline cable dramatically lower the fixed capital costs of last-mile service. The main things holding these technologies back are regulatory barriers (including, notably, not enough spectrum allocated to WiFi and UWB).
The right answer: deregulate everything, free the new technologies to go head-to-head against the wired last mile, and let the market sort it all out.
Un-ending the InternetPosted on 2006-02-07 by Eric Raymond Recently, The Nation ran an article, The End of the Internet, that viewed with alarm some efforts by telephone companies to hack their governing regulations so they can price-discriminate. Their plans include tiered pricing so a consumer’s monthly rate could be tied to the amount of bandwidth actually used. They also want to be able to offer preferred fast access to on-line services that pay for the privilege — and the flip side of that could be shutting down services like peer-to-peer networking that big media companies dislike. One of my regular visitors. David McCabe, asked me what a libertarian would do about this. A fair question, representative of a large class of problems about what you do to constrain monopolies already in place without resorting to more regulation. Here’s the answer I gave him: Deregulate and let the telcos have their tiered pricing — as long as
we also deregulate enough radio spectrum that the telcos
(evil monopolist scum that they are) will promptly be hammered flat by
wireless mesh networks. David replied “Beautiful. Blog it.” Hence this screed… The fundamental problem with the telecoms regime we have is that the Baby Bells inherited from Mama Bell a monopoly lock on the last mile (the cables running to end-users’ homes and businesses). More backbone capacity would be easy and is in no way a natural monopoly, especially given the huge overbuild of optical-fiber trunk lines during the Internet boom of the 1990s. But the ‘last mile’, as long as it’s wire lines, truly is a natural monopoly or oligopoly — nobody wants more than one set of telephone poles per street, and their capacity to carry wires is limited. That system doesn’t scale up. To a left-wing rag like The Nation, the answer is to huff and puff about more regulation. But more regulation would do nothing to attack the telcos’ real power position, which is the physical constraints on the last mile. The truly pro-freedom anwer is to enable the free market to take that power position away from them. Wireless mesh networking — flocks of cheap WiFi nodes that automatically discover neighboring nodes and act as routers — is the technology that can do that. With the right software, networks of these can be self-configuring and self-repairing. It’s pure libertarianism cast in silicon, a perfectly decentralist bottom-up solution that could replace wirelines and the politico-economic choke-point they imply. The main thing holding wireless mesh networking back is the small size of the bandwidth now allotted to it for spread-spectrum frequency hopping. With enough volume, competition would drive the price of these creatures to $20 or less per unit — low enough for individuals and community organizations to spot them everywhere there’s an electrical grid. Increments of capacity would be cheap, too; with the right software, your WiFi card could aggregate the bandwidth for as many nodes as there happen to be in radio range. (And that software? Open source, of course. Mesh networking relies on open source and open standards. Some of the node designs out there are open hardware, too. The mesh network would be transparent, top to bottom.) Today, many people already leave their WiFi access points open for their neighbors to use, even though DSL or cable costs real money, because the incremental cost of being nice is negligible. At the equilibrium price level of mesh networking, wireless free Internet access would be ubiquitous everywhere except deep wilderness areas. But the wireline backbone wouldn’t vanish, because mesh networking solves the bandwidth problem at the expense of piling on latency (cumulative routing and retransmission delays). Large communications users would still find it useful to be hooked up to long-haul fiber networks in order to hold down the amount of latency added by multiple hops over the mesh. The whole system would self-equilibrate, seeking the most efficient mix of free and pay networking. As usual, the best solution to the problems of regulation and imperfect markets is not more politics and regulation, but less of it — letting the free market work. Not that I expect The Nation to figure this out soon, or ever; like all leftists, they will almost certainly remain useful idiots for anyone, tyrant or telco monopolist, who knows that political ‘solutions’ to market problems always favor the powerful and politically connected over the little people they are ostensibly designed to help.
Why I won’t be signing the “Declaration of Internet Freedom” as it isPosted on 2012-07-03 by Eric Raymond There’s been some buzz in the last few days about the Declaration of Internet Freedom penned by some prominent libertarians. I wish I could sign on to this document. Actually, considering who appears on the list of signatories, I consider the fact that the composers didn’t involve me in drafting it to be a surprising mistake that I can only ascribe to a collective fit of absent-mindedness. But, because neither I nor anyone else from the hacker tribe was involved, it has one very serious flaw.
Humility, yes, Rule of Law yes, Free Expression, yes, Innovation, Competition, Privacy…most of this document is good stuff, with exactly the sort of lucidity and bedrock concern for individual freedom that I expect from libertarians.
But it all goes pear-shaped on one sentence: “Open systems and networks aren’t always better for consumers.” This is a dreadful failure of vision and reasoning, one that is less forgivable here because libertarians – who understand why asymmetries of power and information are in general bad things – have very particular reasons to know better than this.
In the long run, open systems and networks are always better for consumers. Because, whatever other flaws they may have, they have one overriding virtue – they don’t create an asymmetrical power relationship in which the consumer is ever more controlled by the network provider. Statists, who accept and even love asymmetrical power relationships as long as the right sort of people are doing the oppressing, have some excuse within their terms of reference for failing to grasp the nasty second, third, and nth-order consequences of closed-system lock-in. Libertarians have no such excuse.In the context of this Declaration, this defect is particularly sad because the composers could have avoided it without damage to any one of the other pro-market positions they wanted set forth. I actually agree that, as proposed in their next sentence, closed systems such as iOS should be free to compete against open systems such as Android; as the Declaration says, “let technologies evolve and intervene, if at all, only when an abuse of market power clearly harms consumers”. The proper libertarian stance in these contests is to tell government to butt out and then vote with your dollars for openness. I am disappointed in the Declaration’s failure to get this crucial issue right. I hope there is still the option to amend it; and if not, that my objection and correction will reach as many people as the Declaration itself, and the two together will convey important lessons about what we must do to preserve and extend liberty. |
|
|
|
It shows how far we have sunk. Now people just react based on politics without a clue as to what they are talking about. "oh, he's for it? Them I'm against it!". I don't think very many people really understand what net neutrality means nor the potential consequences of imposing net neutrality rules on ISPs. IMO this is one example as to when it is good to have lobbyists that can educate the public as to what the effect of net neutrality are from both points of view You statist, socialist fools need some education. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6529&cpage=1#comment-1290942Eric, sorry for the off-topic comment, but I don't know if I can reach you by email. I've been anticipating and wondering if you are going to dip your toe into the debate about the rising trend (ah, the serendipity of that link ending in "911") to regulate the internet using for example "net neutrality" as the justification. I don't comment often on your blog any more, but I do read. I am interested to read your logic as always. I suppose I [am] thinking the forces of decentralization will win in the end, but what hell do we have to go through first to get there? I see my recent writings on this subject made all the same points that Eric made in 2008 as follows. Eric S. Raymond's (the progenitor of the term "open source" in the infamous essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar") past writings about "net neutrality": Net neutrality: what’s a libertarian to do?Posted on 2008-11-13 by Eric Raymond One of my commenters asked, rather plaintively: You mentioned net neutrality. I’ve read about this, and the opposition to it. I’ve read about this, and the opposition to it. As far as I can tell, net neutrality is more supported by liberals/democrats, while the opposition is made up more of conservatives/republicans. But for the life of me I can’t figure out which is the the more libertarian position. Your confusion is entirely reasonable. I’ve hung out with network-neutrality activists and tried to give them what I thought was useful advice. Their political fixations didn’t permit them to hear me. Here’s a summary of the issues and one libertarian’s take on them. Here’s where it starts: the wire-line telcos want to use their control of the copper and fiber that runs to your house to double-dip, not only charging consumers for bandwidth but also hitting up large content providers (Google, Amazon, etc.) for quality-of-service fees. There’s another question that gets folded into the debate, too: under what circumstances the telcos can legitimately traffic-shape, e.g. by blocking or slowing the protocols used for p2p filesharing. It is not clear that the regulatory regime under which the telcos operate allows them to do either thing. They haven’t tried to implement double-dipping yet, and they’re traffic-shaping by stealth and lying about it when they get caught. What they want is a political green light to do both. Let it be clear from the outset that the telcos are putting their case for being allowed to do these things with breathtaking hypocrisy. They honk about how awful it is that regulation keeps them from setting their own terms, blithely ignoring the fact that their last-mile monopoly is entirely a creature of regulation. In effect, Theodore Vail and the old Bell System bribed the Feds to steal the last mile out from under the public’s nose between 1878 and 1920; the wireline telcos have been squatting on that unnatural monopoly ever since as if they actually had some legitimate property right to it. But the telcos’ crimes aren’t merely historical. They have repeatedly bargained for the right to exclude competitors from their networks on the grounds that if the regulators would let them do that, they’d be able to generate enough capital to deploy broadband everywhere. That promise has been repeatedly, egregiously broken. Instead, they’ve creamed off that monopoly rent as profit or used it to cross-subsidize competition in businesses with higher rates of return. (Oh, and of course, to bribe legislators and buy regulators.) Mistake #1 for libertarians to avoid is falling for the telcos’ “we’re pro-free market” bullshit. They’re anything but; what they really want is a politically sheltered monopoly in which they have captured the regulators and created business conditions that fetter everyone but them.OK, so if the telcos are such villainous scum, the pro-network-neutrality activists must be the heroes of this story, right? Unfortunately, no. Your typical network-neutrality activist is a good-government left-liberal who is instinctively hostile to market-based approaches. These people think, rather, that if they can somehow come up with the right regulatory formula, they can jawbone the government into making the telcos play nice. They’re ideologically incapable of questioning the assumption that bandwidth is a scarce “public good” that has to be regulated. They don’t get it that complicated regulations favor the incumbent who can afford to darken the sky with lawyers, and they really don’t get it about outright regulatory capture, a game at which the telcos are past masters. I’ve spent endless hours trying to point out to these people that their assumptions are fundamentally wrong, and that the only way to break the telco monopoly is to break the scarcity assumptions it’s based on. That the telecoms regulatorium, far from being what holds the telcos in check, is actually their instrument of control. And that the only battle that actually matters is the one to carve out enough unlicensed spectrum so we can use technologies like ad-hoc networking with UWB to end-run the whole mess until it collapses under its own weight. They don’t get it. They refuse to get it. I’ve been on a mailing list for something called the “Open Infrastructure Alliance” that consisted of three network engineers and a couple dozen “organizers”; the engineers (even the non-libertarian engineers) all patiently trying to explain why the political attack is a non-starter, and the organizers endlessly rehashing political strategies anyway. Because, well, that’s all they know how to do.In short, the “network neutrality” crowd is mainly composed of well-meaning fools blinded by their own statism, and consequently serving mainly as useful idiots for the telcos’ program of ever-more labyrinthine and manipulable regulation. If I were a telco executive, I’d be on my knees every night thanking my god(s) for this “opposition”. Mistake #2 for any libertarian to avoid is backing these clowns. So, what are libertarians to do? We can start by remembering a simple truth: The only substantive threat to the telco monopoly is bandwidth that has been removed from the reach of both the telcos and their political catspaws in the regulatorium. Keep your eye on that ball; the telcos know it’s the important one and will try to distract you from it, while the “network neutrality” crowd doesn’t know it and wastes most of its energy self-defeatingly wrestling with the telcos over how to re-slice the existing pie. Go active whenever there’s a political debate about “unlicensed spectrum”. More of it is good. Oppose any efforts to make UWB (or any other technology that doesn’t cause destructive interference) require a license anywhere on the spectrum. If you are capable, contribute to the development of mesh networking, especially wireless mesh networking.
Oh, and buy an Android phone. As I noted in my immediately previous post, Google is our ally in this.UPDATE: I’ve summarized the history of the Bell System’s theft of the last mile here.
Why Android mattersPosted on 2008-11-12 by Eric Raymond ... I’m going to start with the relatively far future, like five or even possibly ten years out, because I’m pretty sure my projections for it are very similar to Sergei and Larry’s and that they are what is actually driving Google’s corporate strategy. Cellphone descendants are going to eat the PC... ... Now. You are Google. You make your money by selling ads on the most successful search engine in the world. One of your strategic imperatives is therefore this: you cannot allow anyone to operate a technological or regulatory chokepoint between you and people doing searches, otherwise they’ll stunt your earnings growth and siphon off your revenues. That’s why you ran a politico-financial hack on the Federal auction of radio spectrum to ensure a certain minimum level of openness. And that’s why you are [Google is], very quietly, the single most determined and effective advocate of network neutrality. [note Eric is referring to free market driven "net neutrality" not the political lie "net neutrality" which is actually the way to end "net neutrality"]Now, combine these two visions and you’ll understand why Google is doing Android. Their goal is to create the business conditions that will maximize their ad revenue not just two years out but ten years out. Those business conditions are, basically, an Internet that is as friction-free, cheap, and difficult to lock down as the underlying technology can make it. Under this strategy, Android wins in multiple ways. In the longer term, it gives Google a strong shot at defining the next generation of dominant computing platforms in such a way that nothing but customer demand will be able to control those platforms. In the shorter term, it outflanks the Baby Bells. As web traffic shifts to Googlephones (and things like them), telco efforts to double-dip carriage charges by extracting quality-of-service fees from Google and other content providers will become both technologically more difficult and politically impossible. By depriving them of the ability to lock in customers to gated and proprietary services, Android will hammer both the wire-line and wireless telcos into being nothing but low-margin bit-haulage providers, exactly where Google wants them. (A leading indicator will be the collapse of the blatant absurdity that is the ring-tones market, doomed when anyone can hook MP3s of their choosing to phone events.) As bad as this sounds for the telcos, Microsoft gets outflanked and screwed far worse... ... One of the coolest things about this chain of dominoes is that Google itself doesn’t have to win or end up with control of anything for the future to play out as described. It’s not even necessary that Android itself be the eventual dominant cellphone platform. All they have to do is force the competitive conditions so that whatever does end up dominating is as open as Android is. Given that one of the largest handset makers is already being forced to open source their stack for other reasons (Nokia figured out that they can’t afford to hire enough developers to do all their device ports in-house) this outcome seems certain. For the open-source community, it’s all good. The things Google needs to do with Android for selfish business-strategic reasons are exactly what we want, too. This isn’t an accident, because we’re both pulling in the direction of reducing the effects of market friction, transaction costs, and asymmetries of power and information. If Google didn’t exist, the open-source community would need to invent it.
Oh. Wait. We did invent them. Where do you suppose Sergei and Larry came from? Why do you suppose they’ve been running Summer of Code and hiring a noticeable fraction of the most capable open-source developers on the planet? Well, here’s a flare-lit clue: before those two guys [Sergei and Larry Page] were famous, they sent me fan mail once.That’s why I think those two know exactly what they’re doing. And that, if it’s true that their business strategy requires them to be open source’s ally, I think I can be allowed a guess that they chose their business strategy so that would be true. “Don’t be evil”; they’re not angels, but they’re trying. And, from where I sit? All I can say is this: Bwahahaha. The sinister master plan for world domination – it is working!
Telecoms regulation considered harmfulPosted on 2006-02-27 by Eric Raymond Doc Searls asked me to put the argument for total telecoms deregulation into a nutshell, then blog it so he could point at it. Here it is. Telecoms regulation, to the extent it was ever justified, was justified on the basis of preventing or remedying market failures — such as, in particular, lack of market incentives to provide universal coverage. The market failures in telecoms all derive from the high fixed-capital costs of conventional wirelines. These have two major effects: (1) incentives to provide service in rural areas are weak, because the amount of time required to amortize large fixed costs makes for poor discounted ROI; and (2) in higher-density areas, the last mile of wire is a natural monopoly/oligopoly.
New technologies are directly attacking this problem. Wi-Fi, wireless mesh networks, IP over powerlines, and cheap fenceline cable dramatically lower the fixed capital costs of last-mile service. The main things holding these technologies back are regulatory barriers (including, notably, not enough spectrum allocated to WiFi and UWB).
The right answer: deregulate everything, free the new technologies to go head-to-head against the wired last mile, and let the market sort it all out.
Un-ending the InternetPosted on 2006-02-07 by Eric Raymond Recently, The Nation ran an article, The End of the Internet, that viewed with alarm some efforts by telephone companies to hack their governing regulations so they can price-discriminate. Their plans include tiered pricing so a consumer’s monthly rate could be tied to the amount of bandwidth actually used. They also want to be able to offer preferred fast access to on-line services that pay for the privilege — and the flip side of that could be shutting down services like peer-to-peer networking that big media companies dislike. One of my regular visitors. David McCabe, asked me what a libertarian would do about this. A fair question, representative of a large class of problems about what you do to constrain monopolies already in place without resorting to more regulation. Here’s the answer I gave him: Deregulate and let the telcos have their tiered pricing — as long as
we also deregulate enough radio spectrum that the telcos
(evil monopolist scum that they are) will promptly be hammered flat by
wireless mesh networks. David replied “Beautiful. Blog it.” Hence this screed… The fundamental problem with the telecoms regime we have is that the Baby Bells inherited from Mama Bell a monopoly lock on the last mile (the cables running to end-users’ homes and businesses). More backbone capacity would be easy and is in no way a natural monopoly, especially given the huge overbuild of optical-fiber trunk lines during the Internet boom of the 1990s. But the ‘last mile’, as long as it’s wire lines, truly is a natural monopoly or oligopoly — nobody wants more than one set of telephone poles per street, and their capacity to carry wires is limited. That system doesn’t scale up. To a left-wing rag like The Nation, the answer is to huff and puff about more regulation. But more regulation would do nothing to attack the telcos’ real power position, which is the physical constraints on the last mile. The truly pro-freedom anwer is to enable the free market to take that power position away from them. Wireless mesh networking — flocks of cheap WiFi nodes that automatically discover neighboring nodes and act as routers — is the technology that can do that. With the right software, networks of these can be self-configuring and self-repairing. It’s pure libertarianism cast in silicon, a perfectly decentralist bottom-up solution that could replace wirelines and the politico-economic choke-point they imply. The main thing holding wireless mesh networking back is the small size of the bandwidth now allotted to it for spread-spectrum frequency hopping. With enough volume, competition would drive the price of these creatures to $20 or less per unit — low enough for individuals and community organizations to spot them everywhere there’s an electrical grid. Increments of capacity would be cheap, too; with the right software, your WiFi card could aggregate the bandwidth for as many nodes as there happen to be in radio range. (And that software? Open source, of course. Mesh networking relies on open source and open standards. Some of the node designs out there are open hardware, too. The mesh network would be transparent, top to bottom.) Today, many people already leave their WiFi access points open for their neighbors to use, even though DSL or cable costs real money, because the incremental cost of being nice is negligible. At the equilibrium price level of mesh networking, wireless free Internet access would be ubiquitous everywhere except deep wilderness areas. But the wireline backbone wouldn’t vanish, because mesh networking solves the bandwidth problem at the expense of piling on latency (cumulative routing and retransmission delays). Large communications users would still find it useful to be hooked up to long-haul fiber networks in order to hold down the amount of latency added by multiple hops over the mesh. The whole system would self-equilibrate, seeking the most efficient mix of free and pay networking. As usual, the best solution to the problems of regulation and imperfect markets is not more politics and regulation, but less of it — letting the free market work. Not that I expect The Nation to figure this out soon, or ever; like all leftists, they will almost certainly remain useful idiots for anyone, tyrant or telco monopolist, who knows that political ‘solutions’ to market problems always favor the powerful and politically connected over the little people they are ostensibly designed to help.
Why I won’t be signing the “Declaration of Internet Freedom” as it isPosted on 2012-07-03 by Eric Raymond There’s been some buzz in the last few days about the Declaration of Internet Freedom penned by some prominent libertarians. I wish I could sign on to this document. Actually, considering who appears on the list of signatories, I consider the fact that the composers didn’t involve me in drafting it to be a surprising mistake that I can only ascribe to a collective fit of absent-mindedness. But, because neither I nor anyone else from the hacker tribe was involved, it has one very serious flaw.
Humility, yes, Rule of Law yes, Free Expression, yes, Innovation, Competition, Privacy…most of this document is good stuff, with exactly the sort of lucidity and bedrock concern for individual freedom that I expect from libertarians.
But it all goes pear-shaped on one sentence: “Open systems and networks aren’t always better for consumers.” This is a dreadful failure of vision and reasoning, one that is less forgivable here because libertarians – who understand why asymmetries of power and information are in general bad things – have very particular reasons to know better than this.
In the long run, open systems and networks are always better for consumers. Because, whatever other flaws they may have, they have one overriding virtue – they don’t create an asymmetrical power relationship in which the consumer is ever more controlled by the network provider. Statists, who accept and even love asymmetrical power relationships as long as the right sort of people are doing the oppressing, have some excuse within their terms of reference for failing to grasp the nasty second, third, and nth-order consequences of closed-system lock-in. Libertarians have no such excuse.In the context of this Declaration, this defect is particularly sad because the composers could have avoided it without damage to any one of the other pro-market positions they wanted set forth. I actually agree that, as proposed in their next sentence, closed systems such as iOS should be free to compete against open systems such as Android; as the Declaration says, “let technologies evolve and intervene, if at all, only when an abuse of market power clearly harms consumers”. The proper libertarian stance in these contests is to tell government to butt out and then vote with your dollars for openness. I am disappointed in the Declaration’s failure to get this crucial issue right. I hope there is still the option to amend it; and if not, that my objection and correction will reach as many people as the Declaration itself, and the two together will convey important lessons about what we must do to preserve and extend liberty. |
|
|
|
Open source Android is very important if you care about free market driven "net neutrality" (not this political "net neutrality" bullshit which is just a lie to enslave you and eliminate "net neutrality"). Perhaps Americans love iPhone because they've become socialist pigs. My prior post upthread shows how the highly regulated ("walled garden") iOS is falling way behind due to its paranoid top-down regulated design. This is the failure that comes to socialists who think they need to top-down regulate everything. ... I see my recent writings on this subject made all the same points that Eric made in 2008 as follows. Eric S. Raymond's (the progenitor of the term "open source" in the infamous essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar") past writings about "net neutrality": .... Why Android mattersPosted on 2008-11-12 by Eric Raymond ... I’m going to start with the relatively far future, like five or even possibly ten years out, because I’m pretty sure my projections for it are very similar to Sergei and Larry’s and that they are what is actually driving Google’s corporate strategy. Cellphone descendants are going to eat the PC... ... Now. You are Google. You make your money by selling ads on the most successful search engine in the world. One of your strategic imperatives is therefore this: you cannot allow anyone to operate a technological or regulatory chokepoint between you and people doing searches, otherwise they’ll stunt your earnings growth and siphon off your revenues. That’s why you ran a politico-financial hack on the Federal auction of radio spectrum to ensure a certain minimum level of openness. And that’s why you are [Google is], very quietly, the single most determined and effective advocate of network neutrality. [note Eric is referring to free market driven "net neutrality" not the political lie "net neutrality" which is actually the way to end "net neutrality"]Now, combine these two visions and you’ll understand why Google is doing Android. Their goal is to create the business conditions that will maximize their ad revenue not just two years out but ten years out. Those business conditions are, basically, an Internet that is as friction-free, cheap, and difficult to lock down as the underlying technology can make it. Under this strategy, Android wins in multiple ways. In the longer term, it gives Google a strong shot at defining the next generation of dominant computing platforms in such a way that nothing but customer demand will be able to control those platforms. In the shorter term, it outflanks the Baby Bells. As web traffic shifts to Googlephones (and things like them), telco efforts to double-dip carriage charges by extracting quality-of-service fees from Google and other content providers will become both technologically more difficult and politically impossible. By depriving them of the ability to lock in customers to gated and proprietary services, Android will hammer both the wire-line and wireless telcos into being nothing but low-margin bit-haulage providers, exactly where Google wants them. (A leading indicator will be the collapse of the blatant absurdity that is the ring-tones market, doomed when anyone can hook MP3s of their choosing to phone events.) As bad as this sounds for the telcos, Microsoft gets outflanked and screwed far worse... ... One of the coolest things about this chain of dominoes is that Google itself doesn’t have to win or end up with control of anything for the future to play out as described. It’s not even necessary that Android itself be the eventual dominant cellphone platform. All they have to do is force the competitive conditions so that whatever does end up dominating is as open as Android is. Given that one of the largest handset makers is already being forced to open source their stack for other reasons (Nokia figured out that they can’t afford to hire enough developers to do all their device ports in-house) this outcome seems certain. For the open-source community, it’s all good. The things Google needs to do with Android for selfish business-strategic reasons are exactly what we want, too. This isn’t an accident, because we’re both pulling in the direction of reducing the effects of market friction, transaction costs, and asymmetries of power and information. If Google didn’t exist, the open-source community would need to invent it.
Oh. Wait. We did invent them. Where do you suppose Sergei and Larry came from? Why do you suppose they’ve been running Summer of Code and hiring a noticeable fraction of the most capable open-source developers on the planet? Well, here’s a flare-lit clue: before those two guys [Sergei and Larry Page] were famous, they sent me fan mail once.That’s why I think those two know exactly what they’re doing. And that, if it’s true that their business strategy requires them to be open source’s ally, I think I can be allowed a guess that they chose their business strategy so that would be true. “Don’t be evil”; they’re not angels, but they’re trying. And, from where I sit? All I can say is this: Bwahahaha. The sinister master plan for world domination – it is working! ...
... You are apparently too retarded to understand that "net neutrality" existed as a natural result of the free market and Obama is preaching that we need government to sustain or implement (regulate) the concept, which is a fucking lie and how they will actually destroy the concept. Those who are bitching about not having net access in their communities are either wanting some subsidy from the government to drive service to their uneconomic rural location or their community is already suffering from lack of competition due to over regulation and regulatory capture by the vested interests. The free market did not fail to provide "net neutrality". Adding more government regulation only makes it worse! You pontificate about shit which you don't know about, because ... well let the progenitor of the term "open source" explain it to you: Those who can’t build, talkThose who can’t build, talk
Posted on 2011-07-28 by Eric Raymond
One of the side-effects of using Google+ is that I’m getting exposed to a kind of writing I usually avoid – ponderous divagations on how the Internet should be and the meaning of it all written by people who’ve never gotten their hands dirty actually making it work. No, I’m not talking about users – I don’t mind listening to those. I’m talking about punditry about the Internet, especially the kind full of grand prescriptive visions. The more I see of this, the more it irritates the crap out of me. But I’m not in the habit of writing in public about merely personal complaints; there’s a broader cultural problem here that needs to be aired. Eric like myself was actually active in building the internet: |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
