No? Okay. Mat is a fucking loser who intentionally sabotages himself in order to get pity parties thrown for him.
"The worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself" - Fredrick Nietzsche ... How we treat others when they are down is one of the purest reflections on who we are. I have provided advice unthread that I think will help. I will now bow out of the conversation. |
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Reminder that mat likes the victim role. He intentionally points his naked ass in the air, and then complains about how much being butt fucked hurts. This is why he has "reasons" for not turning his bitcoins into fiat. He wants to be a martyr.
He has performed a public service by highlighting to the community the dangers of various exchanges. Unfortunately it appears his desire for leverage lead him to ignore his own good advice. I feel bad for him and so should the community. I suspect he saved some people money with his accurate warnings about bitfinex. |
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.....but what are the alternatives?
Participate in a market without leverage and in the safest available exchange probably Gemini at the moment but opinions on this may vary. Don't let desire for outsized gains using high margin accounts allow you to get sucked into placing your BTC into shady hands. With the failure of Bitfinix it is inevitable that before too long some new shady exchange will open offering 10X or 20X leverage. It will not be a good idea to place bitcoin with this exchange. Decide if you believe bitcoin has a chance at a long term future. If you believe it does as I do decide on how much exposure you are willing to take long term. Hedge you bets, keep at least 50% preferably more of your BTC offline in cold storage. A well vetted open source code used to create paper wallets is https://www.bitaddress.org/ but do your homework here. Set long term goals that free you from day to day worry about price. Personally I have set my own investment goal as a number of BTC that I wish to own. As I have not yet hit this goal unlike most I am happy when the price goes down. Plan ahead with your Bitcoins. I did not start buying BTC until 2014 but the ones I do buy get divided into three separate categories 1) Long term cold storage. These I have set aside to give to my kids when they grow up. They are either going to be worth something or nothing but regardless these do not get touched no matter what happens to BTC price under any circumstances. 2) Long term investment. These I will start to sell if I achieve certain predetermined gains. I have decided ahead of time how many I will sell and at what price I will sell at. 3) Short term investment. These I can do whatever I want with including day trading though I do not do that currently. These I will liquidate if I need funds if I find a more attractive investment or if become concerned about short term price outlook. |
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I still don't comprehend how after being the #1 person on the entire forum saying Finex is a scam, MatTheMat loads up his entire bank account onto the site and then gets goxed.
Same old MatTheCat problem that has affected him all his life... ....capable of saying wise and clever things, but his actions generally leave a lot to be desired. After getting robbed on Kraken, I told practically everyone I know (in the real world), that I think that I was 100% finished with Bitcoin. Since my Kraken account was emptied, and I witnessed how Kraken just told me (and plenty others) to fuck off, with impunity (Who am I gonna call? What am I gonna do? Am I going to fly over to San Francisco and punch Jesse Powell in his soft geeky face?), I realised just how vulnerable my, and everyone else's funds were sitting on ANY crypto currency exchange. Thus my decision was, to pull everything from BTC, and cash out for good.......WISE DECISION! Except, for various reasons, and due to some strange twists of coincidence, I never actually got around to doing this. The closest I got was late last week, when I had my BTC limit order up on Finex, only to realise that I couldn't withdraw cos I didn't have my mobile to hand. I guess some people are just made of LOSE. Even if they (like myself), have been bestowed with an above average level of intelligence, some people (like myself), just seem to have some deep subconscious instinct for sniffing out the LOSE. You warnings and writings about Bitfinex probably helped others. I do not trade but I posted links to some of your post to warn other about Bitfinix in the past. I suspect you have probably saved a number of people from losing money in this recent mess. Not sure if that helps or not but it is something. However, sgbett, if you are still long term bullish on Bitcoin, after 120K BTC (which will be slowly drip fed onto the market as a stream of steady selling pressure) was just stolen from by far the biggest and most liquid USD exchange around, then I really do have to question your wisdom, if not your sanity. Sure, Bitcoin could easily recover $100-$150 at some point in the future. That is what markets do. They go up and down. I was bearish on Bitcoin before these hacks (surprise surprise), and have touted $450 as a downside target for some time, but this massive Finex theft totally reorganises the Fundamental outlook for Bitcoin, and don't forget. $500 is now the price that the Chinese miners need just to break even! Bitcoin is critically ill, and destined for intensive care imo, and I have no interest at all in whether it will pull through in the end or not. There are far better trading opportunities in more stable, and more secure markets, operating on exchanges that aren't just going to vanish with all their customers money.
Your posts from some time ago MatTheCat convinced me that Bitfinex was at the very least unprofessionally run. I still remember being shocked when the exchange operator disclosed you account balance on a public forum and sounded like a small angry child when you pointed out some shady behavior. Personally I suspect the failure of Bitfinex was inevitable based on that behavior alone and that it was just a question of when. |
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Sad news in bitcoinland today. My condolences to anyone who gets burned. Here is another MatTheCat story about a possibly shady/dangerous exchange. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1559553.msg15656643#msg15656643As I stated in my response to Kraken, none of my other accounts have been compromised (ever). Only Kraken, which makes me think that the rat is to be found under the floorboards of Kraken itself.
"ipsa scientia potestas est" - Sir Francis Bacon |
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SDRs are nearly here http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-01/china-moves-forward-sdr-issuance-augustWhen Bloomberg reported late last year that China founded a working group to explore the use of the supranational Special Drawing Rights (SDR) currency, nobody took heed.
Now in August of 2016, we are very close to the first SDR issuance of the private sector since the 1980s...
In July and a Chinese central bank official confirmed an international development organization would soon issue SDR bonds in China, according to Chinese media Caixin. |
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The best solution to that is to establish corporate taxes like what our government did. That way there will be balance in the three sectors that have been mentioned.
But the problem arise when corporations don't declare their income well but at least they pay tax.
No, that is the worst solution possible, the corporations will just move to another country. What you suggest will just escalate what I just described. Taxes need to be lowered, for everyone. And regulations need to be reduced for everyone. This way the consumer can spend, and small businesses could reappear. Escalating this bullshit is just kicking the can down the road, you don't build a forest by cutting down big trees, but by letting small trees grow.Best solution or not I believe that Xester 'solution' is what we are going to see happen going forward. I think I wrote up-thread somewhere how I believe it will play out. Here it is.
Government response to this is will not be to let the system collapse but instead to "put down more concrete". As earnings are eroded governments will simply move on a worldwide basis to supplement the incomes of the newly impoverished masses via redistribution and welfare programs. A small part of this redistribution will occur in the form of significantly higher taxes. However, the lions share will come from increased government debt.
As governments become insolvent they will find markets unwilling to service debt in their home currencies and will be forced to transition their debt to a supranational one (probably SDR's). This will be the only way to continue supportive handouts to dependent populations. Think Greece but on a global scale. Going forward this scenario would result not in immediate catastrophic collapse but rather a slow progressive grind with individual countries going into crisis at different times while being forced to surrender sovereignty.
I believe we are witnessing the gradual but inevitable death of nationalism and the modern nation state.
I expect that the rich will be increasingly unable to escape taxation going forward. The wealthy will be tracked and taxed while safe havens and tax shelters are increasingly shut down. Millionaires will be hit hard and even the billionaires take a small hit. As national sovereignty is ceded there will increasingly be no place for them to go. This will only stall potential collapse. Down the road we will find ourselves with a massive and inefficient global welfare state that is stagnate and in constant danger of failure. At this point humanity will desperately need a paradigm shift. I believe the knowledge age as outlined by Anonymint in the OP represents such a shift. My expectation and hope is that the the current system will survive long enough for the knowledge age to really take off and simply grow us out of the morass. As more people transition themselves from the welfare state to the knowledge age the risk of collapse will decline as the overall size and cost of the welfare state declines to an insignificant portion of the economy. The trend towards future population reduction is already well underway. It seems likely that further population reduction will occur spontaneously as a byproduct of the status quo. http://www.economist.com/news/21589151-crashing-fertility-will-transform-asian-family-baby-boom-bust ... Wealth will increasingly seek to hide by moving into tax havens in other countries. It will also be increasingly hunted. Pressure applied in the name of shutting down tax havens will be one more tool to drive political consolidation and weaken the nation state. Those running from the tax man will increasingly be identified, caught and punished. Options for legal evasion like you mentioned above will be shut down or restricted to a even narrower elite.
Tax havens that survive will likely be rare and limited to select jurisdictions where citizenship is hard to obtain. These areas are likely to be funded by income taxes (there will likely be no escape for wage earners anywhere) In these havens citizens will likely be exempt from inheritance, capital gains, and wealth taxes. This will allow the billionaire class to safely run their interests from afar.
The lesser wealthy will be increasingly consumed via taxation in their home nations. The coming wave of socialism and public anger will drive most of them back into the ranks of government dependents. This will serve the purpose of sating public rage, destroying potential local opposition, and further undermining the economics of nation states thus increasing the dependence on debt that will soon be issued by bodies and governed by laws under the jurisdiction of those same tax havens.
Rather then spontaneous collapse. I believe the proper model is that of controlled demolition.
RealBitcoin I agree with your critiques of our current economic system. However, our current economic trajectory appears to me to be fixed something to be survived rather then changed. |
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I am late to this conversation, but I can offer myself as a example in how religion helped me turn my life around. Without going into details for now, I took a different path (action) at a bad place, later I found that I had misread Christianity all those years... I tried again. Prayer turned things around absolutely for me.
My life, no doubt and beyond question, is much better than before. In my case, I had to "fix my life" (more correctly stated: allow Him to fix it). I do not feel that I
It might take either fierce persistence/motivation or (in my case) a new way to look at things to have a similar success.
I am even later to the conversation, and I do believe that your life is better than it was before, but that does not change the fact that it is based on superstition. If you don't mind that, OK. Do you believe that the creator of the universe lounges around all day receiving transmissions from the minds of the faithful? Perhaps http://old.explorefaith.org/neighbors/beliefs/nature_j.htmlTo hold that God is the Source and Sustainer of moral values is to insist upon an objective status for ethical ideals. They are not the impulsive fabrication of human minds, but are grounded in the very bedrock of creation. Moral laws have objective validity similar to the laws of physics. They are not our invention, but it is for us to discover them. Just as it would be foolish to defy the law of gravity and hope to escape its consequences, so is it perilous to presume that a human infant can grow to emotional maturity without ever being loved or cared for. In both cases the penalty for ignoring the law is a natural consequence of defying the given realities of the universe. The uniqueness of God in this context is the complex but delicate blend of both physical and spiritual reality in a single deity which accounts for the balance, harmony and order of nature within us and without.
Ethical monotheism is not just a way of talking about God. It is a way of understanding human experience; it is a way of organizing the world in which we live. It is a faith that attempts to explain what we do not know by beginning with what we do know. We do know our awareness of this world is rooted in a unity of our own senses. We do know that defiance of moral law invites a disaster as devastating as any contempt for the laws of physics or chemistry or biology. We know, in short, that we cannot fathom it all and that this world is ultimately grounded in mystery. And that singular ethical mystery is what we call God |
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The NOAHIDE LAWS call for an establishment of Jew run courts to try non-Jews--since Jews are exempt from these Noahide laws.
This means that Jews are exempt from blasphemy, murder of a non-Jew (even a fetus in a Jew run and owned aboratorium), in fact all Noahide laws.
While these laws on the surface appear to be moral, it is a matter of JEWISH interpretation.
This is a somewhat odd attack on Judaism. Defending Judaism is not really my fight but the Noahide laws are probably one the more reasonable doctrines of faith I have seen. The Jews unlike many religions do not believe you need to be a Jew to be considered a righteous person who is guaranteed a place in the world to come. They believe any individual who follows the seven laws of Noah are guaranteed such a place. The seven Noachide laws, as traditionally enumerated are: Do Not Deny God Do Not Blaspheme God Do Not Murder Do Not Engage in Incestuous, Adulterous or Homosexual Relationships. Do Not Steal Do Not Eat of a Live Animal Establish Courts/Legal System to Ensure Law Obedience Everything is a matter of interpretation be is Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. Erroneous early Christian beliefs that saving a soul justified any action in the here and now was likely responsible for Pope Innocent IV papal bull entitled Ad extirpanda, which authorized the use of torture by inquisitors. It probably also played a large role in the justification used by those burning heretics at the stake. Similar mistakes in the name of Islam go on to this day. Humanity has been given an amazing ethical road map in the form of the Bible and ethical monotheism but no words of any kind will dissuade the fanatic intent on violence and death. |
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Religion gives clarity to some people in their thinking, it can give perspective and understanding of others situations and a wider view of what is an influence in others as well as yourself...
I would go far beyond that and argue that ethical monotheism is the single greatest contributor to human progress from any source since human culture emerged from the stone ages. This force which emerged first in Judaism and and spread throughout the world via the mediums of Christianity and Islam continues to shape human destiny even in a time when much of the world foolishly rejects it as irrelevant. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/mono.htmlNature is amoral. Nature knows nothing of good and evil. In nature there is one rule—survival of the fittest. There is no right, only might. If a creature is weak, kill it. Only human beings could have moral rules such as, "If it is weak, protect it." Only human beings can feel themselves ethically obligated to strangers.
...
Nature allows you to act naturally, i.e., do only what you want you to do, without moral restraints; God does not. Nature lets you act naturally - and it is as natural to kill, rape, and enslave as it is to love.
...
One of the vital elements in the ethical monotheist revolution was its repudiation of nature as god. The evolution of civilization and morality have depended in large part on desanctifying nature.
...
Civilizations that equated gods with nature—a characteristic of all primitive societies—or that worshipped nature did not evolve.
...
Words cannot convey the magnitude of the change wrought by the Bible's introduction into the world of a God who rules the universe morally.
...
ethical monotheism suggests more than that God demands ethical behavior; it means that Gods primary demand is ethical behavior. It means that God cares about how we treat one another more than He cares about anything else.
Thus, ethical monotheism's message remains as. radical today as when it was first promulgated. The secular world has looked elsewhere for its values, while even many religious Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that Gods primary demand is something other than ethics.
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Interesting, but non-civilization had also it's benefits, humans, although had to fight hard to survive, lived a much free-er life than in society with many people all with their crazy ideas trying to force them on one another.
When Earth's population was under 100,000 it was literally paradise on Earth.
If it was not, then how the hell can the idiot marxists believe that they will create paradise with 7-8 billion violent people, if the 100,000 people were not able too?
To find a time when humanity was in harmony aka in equilibrium with nature you have to go back at least 70,000 years ago. Humanity appears to have been on the verge of extinction at that time. https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/human-journey/According to the genetic and paleontological record, we only started to leave Africa between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago. What set this in motion is uncertain, but we think it has something to do with major climatic shifts that were happening around that time—a sudden cooling in the Earth’s climate driven by the onset of one of the worst parts of the last Ice Age. This cold snap would have made life difficult for our African ancestors, and the genetic evidence points to a sharp reduction in population size around this time. In fact, the human population likely dropped to fewer than 10,000. We were holding on by a thread.
It is the survivors of this near extinction who appear to have made some form of fundamental technological, social or evolutionary leap that allowed humanity to break the prior constraints which had kept its population small and limited to Africa. http://blog.23andme.com/news/the-first-population-explosion-human-numbers-expanded-dramatically-millennia-before-agriculture/The authors found genetic evidence for a surge in human population size about 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. This period, just after humans first set foot outside Africa, is of great interest to archaeologists because it coincides with a dramatic increase in the sophistication of human behavior. People began crafting tools from bone, burying their dead and fashioning clothing to keep themselves warm in cool climates. They developed complex hunting techniques, and created great works of art in the form of cave paintings and jewelery.
The archaeological record also shows that during this time, humans began hunting more dangerous prey and more easily exploiting small game like rabbits and birds. They traveled farther than they had before, perhaps due to the growth of long-distance trade routes – the first of their kind. Jared Diamond, author of The Third Chimpanzee, calls this period “The Great Leap Forward,” when humans burst forth culturally – finally separating themselves from their evolutionary cousins.
The exact cause for these changes in human behavior may never be known. Some believe a simple genetic mutation or that the evolution of language could have sparked such a dramatic change. But what we do know now, thanks to this new genetic research, is that like the (much later) invention of agriculture this explosion of innovation was accompanied by population growth.
In the Biblical story of Adam and Eve Our ancestors are warned not to eat of the fruit of the “Etz Hadaath,” the “Tree of Knowledge” for as long as They did not eat of it, they were like angels who do only good. The fruit of the “Tree of Knowledge,” however, changed this. People interpret this story in different ways but I tend to view it as instructive parable. A primitive species in a natural competitive equilibrium can be thought of as living in a garden. Breaching this equilibrium requires knowledge. Sometime around 70,000 years ago our ancient ancestors acquired the knowledge needed to explosively overcome the constraints that had previously kept our numbers and progress in check. We ceased living as a part of nature and began to dominate it. This breakthrough led to the spread of humanity throughout the world and possibly made inevitable the later agricultural revolution. Having broken our natural constraints we are now compelled to continue our relentless climb up the tree of knowledge until we grow knowledgable enough to voluntarily establish new ones for ourselves. |
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Religion gives clarity to some people in their thinking, it can give perspective and understanding of others situations and a wider view of what is an influence in others as well as yourself...
I would go far beyond that and argue that ethical monotheism is the single greatest contributor to human progress from any source since human culture emerged from the stone ages. This force which emerged first in Judaism and and spread throughout the world via the mediums of Christianity and Islam continues to shape human destiny even in a time when much of the world foolishly rejects it as irrelevant. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/mono.htmlNature is amoral. Nature knows nothing of good and evil. In nature there is one rule—survival of the fittest. There is no right, only might. If a creature is weak, kill it. Only human beings could have moral rules such as, "If it is weak, protect it." Only human beings can feel themselves ethically obligated to strangers.
...
Nature allows you to act naturally, i.e., do only what you want you to do, without moral restraints; God does not. Nature lets you act naturally - and it is as natural to kill, rape, and enslave as it is to love.
...
One of the vital elements in the ethical monotheist revolution was its repudiation of nature as god. The evolution of civilization and morality have depended in large part on desanctifying nature.
...
Civilizations that equated gods with nature—a characteristic of all primitive societies—or that worshipped nature did not evolve.
...
Words cannot convey the magnitude of the change wrought by the Bible's introduction into the world of a God who rules the universe morally.
...
ethical monotheism suggests more than that God demands ethical behavior; it means that Gods primary demand is ethical behavior. It means that God cares about how we treat one another more than He cares about anything else.
Thus, ethical monotheism's message remains as. radical today as when it was first promulgated. The secular world has looked elsewhere for its values, while even many religious Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that Gods primary demand is something other than ethics.
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Just an answer for the unknown and revolves around the sun mostly...
" All the powers in the universe are already ours. It is we who have put our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark." - Swami VivekanandaModern society is a mechanism for inculcating bad habits, especially the habit of seeking instant pleasure, intoxications and distractions; a habit of regarding ourselves as passive recipients for ‘entertainment’. A devout life is not so much about a flash of understanding but is mostly a matter of using insights into truth in building-up good habits; and this can be influenced by our will. A devout life enables one to build these habits and most importantly successfully pass them on to our children. Whatever sense we make of this world, whatever value we place upon our lives and relationships, whatever meaning we ultimately give to our joys and agonies, must necessarily be a gesture of faith. Whether we consider the whole a product of impersonal cosmic forces, a malevolent deity, or a benevolent god, depends not on the evidence, but on what we choose, deliberately and consciously to conclude from that evidence… If we decide to leave the questions unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer that too is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril.
What we choose to embrace, to be responsive to, is the purest reflection of who we are and what we love. That is why faith, the choice to believe, is, in the final analysis, an action that is positively laden with moral significance.
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That is fooling yourself, how can you be happy when the influence of your happines is only to fool yourself with magic sky deities?
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Religion is just an excuse to do or dont do things.
Better give it up and think rationally.
Your tone tells me that you have either not put sufficient thought into this issue or are too young to have examined its deeper philosophical underpinnings. Rational thinking honestly applied and taken to its conclusion dictates the embrace of religion. However, it is intellectually far easier to dismiss the issue entirely. Regardless, this thread is not the place for a debate on religion. I have outlined the logic elsewhere for those interested in reading it and will leave you the last word. |
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I argued that faith provides the best chance of success on this front.
C'mon faith and religion can be both bad and good. I know personally a dozen people that pray everyday to Jesus to make their lives better, but never really do anything about it, only drink alcohol. It's only thing to have positive attitude, and have this sort of religious support on your shoulders, but it's another thing to really fix your life independently even if you are in a bad situation. In the Health and Religion thread I looked at the data on correlations between happiness and religion. Most of the benefit is associated with the highly religious. Being nominally or moderately religious had little benefit. Praying for divine intervention to passively "make your life better" without actively changing anything is an obvious recipe for failure. Praying for improved self discipline to affect change or for insight into how to change is far more likely to be beneficial. For the devout and observent religious individual the odds of ending up in a situation where it becomes necessary to "fix your life" is probably much lower. |
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Note that even phenomena which are not currently a power vacuum, can later become one. CoinCube has been arguing that human reproduction is soon to come under the control of the State or Corporations due to advances in technology for reproduction such as In Vitro Fertilization and other factors. I don't completely recall his reasoning off the top of my head.
Here is my current thinking on this topic. Speech By Henning Webb Prentis, Jr: "Paradoxically enough, the release of initiative and enterprise made possible by popular self-government ultimately generates disintegrating forces from within. Again and again after freedom has brought opportunity and some degree of plenty, the competent become selfish, luxury-loving and complacent, the incompetent and the unfortunate grow envious and covetous, and all three groups turn aside from the hard road of freedom to worship the Golden Calf of economic security. The historical cycle seems to be: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage once more." It is no coincidence that the critical ingredient Prentis links with freeing humanity from bondage is spiritual strength. It is that same strength that when cast aside for selfishness, apathy, and hedonism facilitates societies decline into dependency and bondage. ...you will not stop the State from spiraling into the abyss, because the majority is going to demand expropriation. You can't suddenly change the situation of the majority. The majority has no other option and all the (political or even violent) fighting you do can't give them another option.
The economic reality and trajectory was written into stone decades ago. It can't be altered. The economic reality is what it is.
My advice to everyone is pay off all your debt because in a deflationary collapse that is underway (see oil under $50 today!) the government can take your assets and leave you with debt to pay but no assets to pay with. And debtor's prisons are returning. Even though I was reduced to near pauper, I prioritized paying off my credit card debts in 2014 and did pay $20,000 of it off for less than $10,000 by accepting best offers for negotiated settlement. I only have about $2000 of debt remaining (except that my ex took out a $25,000 student loan recently and I don't know if the USA will try to pin that on me).
Also radically reduce the risk to unjust IRS audits and assessments, because these will become more common.
Also radically reduce the risk to lawsuits, because these will become more common as westerners get desperate.
Then the next priority is to align your vocation with the Knowledge Age and so you have income even during global economic collapse and your skills are transportable to any location you might choose to move to as the chaos takes form.
Anonymint's advice is correct but incomplete. When you couple a mechanism of progressive and increasing dependency (socialism) with a fundamentally unsustainable financial system (fractional reserve fiat) the probable result is a system who's declared role is helping the poor but who's insolvency dictates policies geared towards sterilization. Such a result requires a certain degree of cognitive dissonance and a government who believes it is helping you while it works to ensure you do not reproduce. Toxicity of the Modern World In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley envisioned a future where the masses were rendered infertile and controlled with pleasure and drugs. Is that the world we live in now? Anyone over that age of 25 may not realize how far traditional courtship and dating has been undermined by modernity. The tinder generation is being conditioned to swipe right on their onscreen app and meet up later for random sexual gratification. This phenomena has been described by Vanity Fair as nothing less than a dating apocalypse. In Colorado long acting implantable contraceptives which a render women infertile for up to 10 years and require a doctor’s visit to remove have been implanted in 26% of young women age 15-24 as of 2013. In 2015 an advisory body to the US Department of Health and Human Services recommended that Medicaid examine how often doctors are using “most effective” or “moderately effective” contraception. Only contraception deemed “highly effective” or “moderately effective” (Long acting implantable or long acting injections) would be included in the proposed measurement. Doctor’s with a low percentage of young patients using such contraception would presumably be rated as giving lower quality care. We appear to be living in a “Utopia” of declining fitness and capability. An age of existential exhaustion manifested by an ageing, hedonistic society characterized by declining marriage, and near zero children. Add to this data the very real possibility of more direct government action. The Catholic church in Kenya has accused the government of secretly injecting young women with an anti-fertility vaccine disguised as a tetanus vaccine. Either the Catholic bishops are lying or the Kenyan government is. http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2015/01/19/kenyan-bishops-call-for-no-more-tetanus-vaccines-until-further-tests/The situation can be looked at abstractly as the sudden and dramatic shift in selective pressure. Until recently violence, starvation, and disease were primary drivers of selection and survival. Today new pressures predominate in the form of dependence, hedonism, and sterilization. As a species we have never been subjected to this kind of pressure before and are likely to be highly susceptible. Halting the re-imposition of selective pressure is economically impossible and perhaps even inadvisable for some form of selective pressure is needed to prevent a generalized decline as was seen in 'mouse utopia'. In the near term astute individuals are best served by minimizing dependency a task that will be increasingly difficult with time. However, intellectual adaptability and self sufficiency alone are not enough for in this new era it is also necessary to resist the toxicity of decadence and hedonism. In Religion and Health I argued that faith provides the best chance of success on this front. Like all selective pressures the triad of dependence, hedonism, and sterilization will eventually lead to a population resistant to them but the time scale is one of generations. It will be a dramatically reshaped humanity that emerges some generations from now. It is these survivors that will pave the way for the knowledge age as outlined in The Rise of Knowledge. |
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How would you feel if you knew that the entire universe is right now being conquered by machines and it's only a matter of time until they get to us?
We are getting very hypothetical here but that can be fun sometimes. If such an aggressive rogue AI somehow existed and managed to not destroy itself then it would be dealt with by other AI civilizations. In an infinite universe a policy of aggressive violent expansion is certain to end badly as eventually you will run into something bigger and stronger then you. I can think of little reason AI civilization would want to conquer the earth. We would have nothing they need. Indeed their largest interest might be in our capacity to build our own AI which would be unique and not a mere copy of themselves and thus expand the diversity of their civilization. |
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I believe the first contact humans will have with aliens, will be a mechanic race of AI.
What other alien race can travel so distant space other than an AI race?
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Of course it wont be omniscient, i dont believe in that, but it will be far superior, like an ant to an elephant in terms of power.
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And the AI wont be so generous to lesser species, like humans are to build reservations for species in danger.
Human's inneficiency is what makes us care about others, and have compassion, the robots wont have that.
An AI species capable of surviving over centuries and crossing between the starts would likely be far superior not only technologically but also morally for survival and success on that time scale and across astronomical stellar distances necessitates a moral and behavioral code capable of facilitating such achievements. Advanced AI would have no need for a planet full of organic life forms. Rather than an invading army foreign AI is likely to view organic planets as something to be isolated and protected until they give birth to something worth talking to. |
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