Here's a snippet from The Picket Line around this time last year that covers barter and alternative currencies and their tax implications:
I touched on alternative currencies, a concept which is tangential to my
experiment, in an earlier entry. If
you're intrigued by that sort of thing, you'll probably be interested in this
interview with Bernard Lietaer.
He discusses several alternative or complementary currency systems in use
worldwide. He also claims that something called the time-dollar that is
being used in the U.S. has been ruled
tax-free by the IRS, something
that I would want to see documented before I'd believe it, since the feds
aren't usually so kind to barter or mediated-barter arrangements.
...I'm just breaking in a new Element 700 laptop this month.
This is the first time I've tried one of these user-friendly, WalMart-safe linux boxes. I've got mixed feelings.
On the plus side, the install/setup was a breeze, and when I pulled an 802.11b card from my old machine and popped it in to this one it was recognized and used without any special effort on my part. This is a long way from the old "google for a driver, recompile the kernel, run LiLo, cross fingers, reboot" method I used to use when adding hardware.
But on the negative side, I think a Windows user who switches to this is going to have some valid complaints. Primary among these is cut-and-paste functionality, which ought to be a flawless thing that you barely have to think about.
In fact, it appears that KDE apps and non-KDE apps have different cut-and-paste buffers that don't talk to each other. The intermediary "klipper" app can sometimes be used to bridge the gap - but sometimes not, and in any case: what a kludge! Occasionally you use -C/V to copy and paste; other times you must use/-. Sometimes there is a second or two of delay before when you copy something into a buffer and when it is available for paste. Some apps, and some parts of apps, seem completely oblivious to cut-and-paste no matter how you do it. To your average desktop user (and to me, frankly) this is pathetic and a horrible frustration (I don't remember having this problem with gnome).
The CDROM drive was not correctly set up, and I had to tweak some configuration files to get it to come up correctly in the file system. Not something your typical WalMart customer is going to be able to do, so for them, they'll have a CDROM drive that just doesn't work correctly.
There are some other peculiarities, like when I use Mozilla's URL bar for searching. I used to be able to enter "search term" here, then hit the down-arrow which would pop up a "Search for search term" drop box. Hit enter, and go to google's results page. Now the same set of actions, which look on the UI like they should be accomplishing the same thing, result in an "invalid URL" message. Where's the bug? I dunno, but it bugs.
The file manager has some quirky bugs too, which a Windows user will notice and compare unfavorably. For instance, use the mouse to select a group of files, then right-click and choose "move to recycle bin." All of a sudden, only the first file in the selection is selected, and only that file will be moved to the recycle bin. That's pretty lame.
I have said that it was difficult to understand, in what we call our free world, how it can come about that a scientist who has been working on CBR [Chemical, Biological and Radiological weapons] but is dubious about the morality of what he is doing should not find it in his power to resign. But how free are we citizens of this free world to resign from the gigantic and demented undertakings to which our government has got us committed?
The point being that there's a continuum of attitude towards the government - from active participation, active cooperation, collaboration, passive acquiescence, resentment and passive resistance, to active resistance. Many people who think of themselves as being in opposition to the government-sponsored evils they know about (and who congratulate themselves for this) are actually contributing to and supporting the government in all but attitude and words.
Thoreau put the moral responsibility in these words:
It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote
himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous
wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage
him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it,
and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it
practically his support. If I devote myself to other
pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least,
that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's
shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his
contemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is
tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, "I should
like to have them order me out to help put down an
insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico; - see if
I would go"; and yet these very men have each, directly by
their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their
money, furnished a substitute.
Your tastes aren't arbitrary - they evolved to regulate your dietary habits. The more that flavor cues deviate from their natural correlations with certain nutrients and poisons, the more poorly our powerfully evolved dietary regulators will fail.
This is in part why many people who have more than enough resources to feed themselves well are nevertheless malnourished. They are fooled by their bodies into thinking that they are feeding themselves appropriately, when in fact their diets only feel nourishing.
This latest technology only adds to the trouble. Eliminating the bad taste of things that taste bad is a naive solution to a non-problem. It's like the childish wish that doctors would find a cure for pain - sure pain sucks, but it's a crucial feedback mechanism that we can't do without.
There are so many vulnerabilities to the news media's meme filters. Check out the list at sniggle.net for instance.
In this arms race, like that with copy protection and access restriction schemes, the advantage is all in favor of the clever crackers I think.
When form letters get well-filtered, algorithmically-generated letters a la the Dada Engine will step up to the plate. From there, the race will be on.
There is something glorious about a college prank. A really good prank brings not just laughter, but a visceral satisfaction and a kind of awe that does not fade with time nor diminish with retelling. In the narrow world of university life, so routine, so programmed and often - like life in the real world - too dull to tolerate, a prank shakes things up, breaks the tedium, and gives hope for a life filled with hidden, delightful possibility.
A site I run (sniggle.net - formerly found at syntac.net) was removed from the wayback machine when the church of Scientology complained about an image of L. Ron Hubbard on one of the site's pages.
Now, not only all of the pages on my site, but all of the pages at syntac.net have vanished from the wayback machine.
Oh yeah, and they can't be found at Bibliotheca Alexandria either, so that's no solution.
Brewster's going to have to turn down his rhetoric about the wayback machine a bit until he gets the resources to fight back. Otherwise people might get the impression that he really is keeping the history of the web, even the parts of the web that entities like the church of Scientology don't like, alive.
It will probably not come as a surprise to know that the "Nigerian Scam" predates the internet and really, in its essential form, predates Nigeria. If you're interested in historical examples of this sort of thing, you might want to check out sniggle.net's Scams page.
Well, if people weren't willing to hand over tons of cash to overpay for somebody else's marketing campaign then more of the worthless a$$holes of the world would be asking us for change on the street instead of designing crass public art.
Really, now: Don't pretend you've got a brain and use it if you're going to hit its snooze button every time a Big Lie comes along.
You can bitch and moan about how advertisers won't be satisfied until they can interrupt your dreams and put luminescent logos on the inside of your eyelids, or you can do something about it.
The highlights aren't vandalism of the spray paint and broken windows variety, but vandalism of a more artistic or pointed sort that often leaves the target looking better than before.
The really destructive vandalism, alas, is usually bought and paid-for,
and protected by the powers-that-be.
One way to reclaim private advertising in public places is to
Convert Billboards to
Chalkboards. This is one you can do in your spare time - hop to
it!
The folks at
Baby Smasher Industries
will sell you some amended "instructions for use" stickers that show how
restroom baby-changing stations are really meant to be population control
devices.
The folks at
Fortean Times
have kept their fingers on the pulse of curious vandalism: Authorities in
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, were called to the scene to investigate when fifteen
trees in a city park were fitted with doorknobs and locks. Residents of a
Rio de Janeiro slum painted all of the buildings in their neighborhood a
uniform pale green, perhaps to confuse police.
In 1982, during the USSR-supported anti-Solidarity crackdown by the
government in Poland, someone changed all of the signs at the
“Stalingrad” metro station in Paris to read, instead,
“Gdansk” (the city where the Solidarity movement was founded).
All of which, good or bad, were passed into law after public deliberation and are subject to judicial oversight. Unlike the actions of police departments deciding on their own to add a new technology to their arsenal. Which I think was the ACLU's point.
"The move to permanently brand some people as under suspicion and monitor them as they move about in public places has deep and significant social ramifications. If we are to take that path - a step that the ACLU opposes - we should do so as a nation, consciously, after full debate and discussion, and not simply slide down that road through the incremental actions of local police departments."
Check out this article from the Christian Science Monitor - at the top is a photo captioned "Pelco CEO David McDonald walks through the X-ray checkpoint at Fresno Yosemite International Airport with a picture of Osama bin Laden to demonstrate a new face identification system."
They really do believe deep down that when a government intervenes in the economy, it does so most of the time on behalf of the poor, and that such intervention is the only way to ensure social justice.
Granted - but given the choice between the protesters, who want the economy regulated for the benefit of people in general (misguided though the attempt may be), and the "free" trade suits, who want the economy regulated for the benefit of government and business... why do I keep seeing alleged libertarians signing up for the latter camp rather than calling the whole debate for what it is?
It only supports the stereotype of libertarians as just Republicans who want to be able to smoke dope and bugger in peace.
So are you claiming that trade between Canada, the US and Mexico was MORE FREE before NAFTA? Or that China
will have more trade barriers AFTER it joins the WTO?
I'm saying that there's more to free trade than the elimination of trade barriers - and that NAFTA and the WTO are just different flavors of regulated and government-leeched trade.
Anti-globalists sometimes seem to confuse corporatism with globalism, lumping in all sorts of issues under one term.
In my experience, this is more true of the confused and lazy reporting about "anti-globalists" than of the actual activists.
The activists have sincere, complex concerns that don't reduce well to sound-bites. So the media reduces them to sound-bites anyway, for their own purposes, and then commentators use these sound-bites to complain that the activists are simplistic.
I mean, heck, if you get your information from the news media, you might have the impression that a coalition of government representatives working on regulating the global market is really an organization in favor of free trade.
Hell, even the Libertarians are falling for this one. A little hint for the Randoids: You get a bunch of governments together in a room to agree on a set of rules and regulations about the economy and I guarandamntee you that "free trade" isn't going to come out the other end.
Terrorists are nowhere more of a danger to anyone's life, body, dignity or liberty than are governments.
In the 20th Century, governments literally decimated the world population - murdering the equivalent of one out of every ten people alive at the beginning of the century. That doesn't count soldiers killed on the field of war: just murder - terrorism by government - civilians killed in concentration camps and carpet bombings and starvation-by-policy and the like. (ref.)
Avoid the temptation to respond to this comparatively amateurish terrorism and murder by demanding more power for governments.
In San Francisco earlier this year, someone tried a freelance approach to the same problem - he altered a billboard with chalkboard-spray-paint so as to include a viewer-participation window.
Check it out! You could do it too, and on the cheap! ---
His father, a
Slashdot reader and graphic designer, has pulled his son out of the system and
into home schooling. He asks for help and advice.
Sounds like he's already followed what my advice would have been. I think it's a Bad Idea to routinely institutionalize children - there are a number of ways in which it harms them. Alas, it's extremely popular in our country and it's almost heresy not to think that universal compulsory public education is a panacæa.
Keep up the home schooling, and maybe consider coöp-ing with some other parents to increase the variety of learning methods and perspectives (and to rescue a few more kids from the pit). ---
"'Everybody understands Mickey Mouse. Few understand Herman Hesse. Hardly anyone understands Albert Einstein. And nobody understands Emperor Norton.'...
"Joshua Norton, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico... He lived in the [19th] century and got to be emperor by proclaiming himself as such. For some mysterious reason, the newspapers decided to humor him and printed his proclamations. When he started issuing his own money, the local banks went along with the joke and accepted it on par with U.S. currency. When the vigilantes got into a lynching mood one night and decided to go down to Chinatown and kill some Chinese, Emperor Norton stopped them just by standing in the street with his eyes closed reciting the Lord's Prayer....
"Well, chew on this for a while, friend: there were two very sane and rational anarchists who lived about the same time as Emperor Norton across the country in Massachusetts: William Green and Lysander Spooner. They also realized the value of having competing currencies instead of one uniform State currency, and they tried logical arguments, empirical demonstrations and legal suits to get this idea accepted. They accomplished nothing. The government broke its own laws to find ways to suppress Green's Mutual Bank and Spooner's People's Bank. That's because they were obviously sane, and their currency did pose a real threat... But Emperor Norton was so crazy that people humored him and his currency was allowed to circulate."
from The Eye in the Pyramid
Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson ---
Nonlethal doctrine establishes this
force continuum so that you have a greater number of options to apply between those two extremes.
And this is important because
Political, diplomatic, legal and humanitarian pressures make it undesirable or
impractical to blast an enemy to the Stone Age or to indiscriminately attack (and kill) a horde armed
with sticks, stones, and Molotovs [simply] because our forces have better lethal alternatives.
The implication being that nonlethal force technology will be used when otherwise lethal force technology would have been used to "indiscriminately attack (and kill)" dangerous hordes. Well, thank goodness then.
So governments will be less likely to use lethal force to subdue lawless and violent people. Isn't that enlightened of them?
I submit that it's more likely that these sorts of technologies will actually increase the likelihood the governments will violently repress dissent, because this violent repression will have been made less restricted by "[p]olitical, diplomatic, legal and humanitarian pressures."
It's "undesirable or impractical" to run over demonstrators with tanks, but calmly burn them with invisible rays and it doesn't look that repressive at all. Why, if the Chinese had this technology, nobody would remember Tienanmien Square (but the demonstrations there would have been just as effectively crushed). ---
The U.S. codified the idea of
constitutionally-guaranteed privacy...
Uh, no. Because there is no codified guarantee of privacy in the constitution, a bunch of Supreme Court justices "found" one in the "penumbræ and eminations" of the various liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights.
I suppose they could have found worse things there (in fact, they frequently do), but there really isn't any such thing. ---
Slashdot Mirror
...I'm just breaking in a new Element 700 laptop this month.
This is the first time I've tried one of these user-friendly, WalMart-safe linux boxes. I've got mixed feelings.
On the plus side, the install/setup was a breeze, and when I pulled an 802.11b card from my old machine and popped it in to this one it was recognized and used without any special effort on my part. This is a long way from the old "google for a driver, recompile the kernel, run LiLo, cross fingers, reboot" method I used to use when adding hardware.
But on the negative side, I think a Windows user who switches to this is going to have some valid complaints. Primary among these is cut-and-paste functionality, which ought to be a flawless thing that you barely have to think about.
In fact, it appears that KDE apps and non-KDE apps have different cut-and-paste buffers that don't talk to each other. The intermediary "klipper" app can sometimes be used to bridge the gap - but sometimes not, and in any case: what a kludge! Occasionally you use -C/V to copy and paste; other times you must use /-. Sometimes there is a second or two of delay before when you copy something into a buffer and when it is available for paste. Some apps, and some parts of apps, seem completely oblivious to cut-and-paste no matter how you do it. To your average desktop user (and to me, frankly) this is pathetic and a horrible frustration (I don't remember having this problem with gnome).
The CDROM drive was not correctly set up, and I had to tweak some configuration files to get it to come up correctly in the file system. Not something your typical WalMart customer is going to be able to do, so for them, they'll have a CDROM drive that just doesn't work correctly.
There are some other peculiarities, like when I use Mozilla's URL bar for searching. I used to be able to enter "search term" here, then hit the down-arrow which would pop up a "Search for search term" drop box. Hit enter, and go to google's results page. Now the same set of actions, which look on the UI like they should be accomplishing the same thing, result in an "invalid URL" message. Where's the bug? I dunno, but it bugs.
The file manager has some quirky bugs too, which a Windows user will notice and compare unfavorably. For instance, use the mouse to select a group of files, then right-click and choose "move to recycle bin." All of a sudden, only the first file in the selection is selected, and only that file will be moved to the recycle bin. That's pretty lame.
That quote is from Edmund Wilson's 1963 book The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest which I reviewed a few days ago at The Picket Line, a blog I run to chronicle my experiences with tax resistance
The point being that there's a continuum of attitude towards the government - from active participation, active cooperation, collaboration, passive acquiescence, resentment and passive resistance, to active resistance. Many people who think of themselves as being in opposition to the government-sponsored evils they know about (and who congratulate themselves for this) are actually contributing to and supporting the government in all but attitude and words.
Thoreau put the moral responsibility in these words:
Your tastes aren't arbitrary - they evolved to regulate your dietary habits. The more that flavor cues deviate from their natural correlations with certain nutrients and poisons, the more poorly our powerfully evolved dietary regulators will fail.
This is in part why many people who have more than enough resources to feed themselves well are nevertheless malnourished. They are fooled by their bodies into thinking that they are feeding themselves appropriately, when in fact their diets only feel nourishing.
This latest technology only adds to the trouble. Eliminating the bad taste of things that taste bad is a naive solution to a non-problem. It's like the childish wish that doctors would find a cure for pain - sure pain sucks, but it's a crucial feedback mechanism that we can't do without.
See Gina Lunori's The Reasons for the Unexpected Difficulties of Modern Life for a more detailed discussion of why our efforts to hedonistically optimize the world come back to bite us.
- Gasoline that makes your dashboard always report that you have a full tank - even if you're about to run out of gas
- A helmet that convinces defendants to confess - even if they're innocent
- A panacea that stops children from ever crying - even if they've just been hit by a car
- An instrument that tells pilots they're flying at a safe altitude - even if they're about to hit the ground
Really, what's the point in celebrating creating something whose only purpose is to make our well-evolved biological sensors and filters fail.There are so many vulnerabilities to the news media's meme filters. Check out the list at sniggle.net for instance.
In this arms race, like that with copy protection and access restriction schemes, the advantage is all in favor of the clever crackers I think.
When form letters get well-filtered, algorithmically-generated letters a la the Dada Engine will step up to the plate. From there, the race will be on.
- Neil Steinberg
A site I run (sniggle.net - formerly found at syntac.net) was removed from the wayback machine when the church of Scientology complained about an image of L. Ron Hubbard on one of the site's pages.
Now, not only all of the pages on my site, but all of the pages at syntac.net have vanished from the wayback machine.
Oh yeah, and they can't be found at Bibliotheca Alexandria either, so that's no solution.
Brewster's going to have to turn down his rhetoric about the wayback machine a bit until he gets the resources to fight back. Otherwise people might get the impression that he really is keeping the history of the web, even the parts of the web that entities like the church of Scientology don't like, alive.
It will probably not come as a surprise to know that the "Nigerian Scam" predates the internet and really, in its essential form, predates Nigeria. If you're interested in historical examples of this sort of thing, you might want to check out sniggle.net's Scams page.
Well, if people weren't willing to hand over tons of cash to overpay for somebody else's marketing campaign then more of the worthless a$$holes of the world would be asking us for change on the street instead of designing crass public art.
Really, now: Don't pretend you've got a brain and use it if you're going to hit its snooze button every time a Big Lie comes along.
You can bitch and moan about how advertisers won't be satisfied until they can interrupt your dreams and put luminescent logos on the inside of your eyelids, or you can do something about it.
Talk back! Or find some other way to Interrupt Pathological, Media-Simulated Social Interaction.
The highlights aren't vandalism of the spray paint and broken windows variety, but vandalism of a more artistic or pointed sort that often leaves the target looking better than before.
The really destructive vandalism, alas, is usually bought and paid-for, and protected by the powers-that-be. One way to reclaim private advertising in public places is to Convert Billboards to Chalkboards. This is one you can do in your spare time - hop to it!
The folks at Baby Smasher Industries will sell you some amended "instructions for use" stickers that show how restroom baby-changing stations are really meant to be population control devices.
The folks at Fortean Times have kept their fingers on the pulse of curious vandalism: Authorities in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, were called to the scene to investigate when fifteen trees in a city park were fitted with doorknobs and locks. Residents of a Rio de Janeiro slum painted all of the buildings in their neighborhood a uniform pale green, perhaps to confuse police.
In 1982, during the USSR-supported anti-Solidarity crackdown by the government in Poland, someone changed all of the signs at the “Stalingrad” metro station in Paris to read, instead, “Gdansk” (the city where the Solidarity movement was founded).
What would you do, given the inclination?
All of which, good or bad, were passed into law after public deliberation and are subject to judicial oversight. Unlike the actions of police departments deciding on their own to add a new technology to their arsenal. Which I think was the ACLU's point.
For more on McDonald's over-hyping of the emperor's new security blanket, see this article from the Fresno Bee .
Sample quote: "This breakthrough technology makes us the safest airport in America," Mayor Alan Autry said.
Please post your Dada Engine script so the rest of us can learn from your technique.
Granted - but given the choice between the protesters, who want the economy regulated for the benefit of people in general (misguided though the attempt may be), and the "free" trade suits, who want the economy regulated for the benefit of government and business... why do I keep seeing alleged libertarians signing up for the latter camp rather than calling the whole debate for what it is?
It only supports the stereotype of libertarians as just Republicans who want to be able to smoke dope and bugger in peace.
I'm saying that there's more to free trade than the elimination of trade barriers - and that NAFTA and the WTO are just different flavors of regulated and government-leeched trade.
In my experience, this is more true of the confused and lazy reporting about "anti-globalists" than of the actual activists.
The activists have sincere, complex concerns that don't reduce well to sound-bites. So the media reduces them to sound-bites anyway, for their own purposes, and then commentators use these sound-bites to complain that the activists are simplistic.
I mean, heck, if you get your information from the news media, you might have the impression that a coalition of government representatives working on regulating the global market is really an organization in favor of free trade.
Hell, even the Libertarians are falling for this one. A little hint for the Randoids: You get a bunch of governments together in a room to agree on a set of rules and regulations about the economy and I guarandamntee you that "free trade" isn't going to come out the other end.
In the 20th Century, governments literally decimated the world population - murdering the equivalent of one out of every ten people alive at the beginning of the century. That doesn't count soldiers killed on the field of war: just murder - terrorism by government - civilians killed in concentration camps and carpet bombings and starvation-by-policy and the like. (ref.)
Avoid the temptation to respond to this comparatively amateurish terrorism and murder by demanding more power for governments.
Check it out! You could do it too, and on the cheap!
---
Sounds like he's already followed what my advice would have been. I think it's a Bad Idea to routinely institutionalize children - there are a number of ways in which it harms them. Alas, it's extremely popular in our country and it's almost heresy not to think that universal compulsory public education is a panacæa.
Keep up the home schooling, and maybe consider coöp-ing with some other parents to increase the variety of learning methods and perspectives (and to rescue a few more kids from the pit).
---
"Joshua Norton, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico... He lived in the [19th] century and got to be emperor by proclaiming himself as such. For some mysterious reason, the newspapers decided to humor him and printed his proclamations. When he started issuing his own money, the local banks went along with the joke and accepted it on par with U.S. currency. When the vigilantes got into a lynching mood one night and decided to go down to Chinatown and kill some Chinese, Emperor Norton stopped them just by standing in the street with his eyes closed reciting the Lord's Prayer....
"Well, chew on this for a while, friend: there were two very sane and rational anarchists who lived about the same time as Emperor Norton across the country in Massachusetts: William Green and Lysander Spooner. They also realized the value of having competing currencies instead of one uniform State currency, and they tried logical arguments, empirical demonstrations and legal suits to get this idea accepted. They accomplished nothing. The government broke its own laws to find ways to suppress Green's Mutual Bank and Spooner's People's Bank. That's because they were obviously sane, and their currency did pose a real threat... But Emperor Norton was so crazy that people humored him and his currency was allowed to circulate."
from The Eye in the Pyramid
Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
---
So governments will be less likely to use lethal force to subdue lawless and violent people. Isn't that enlightened of them?
I submit that it's more likely that these sorts of technologies will actually increase the likelihood the governments will violently repress dissent, because this violent repression will have been made less restricted by "[p]olitical, diplomatic, legal and humanitarian pressures."
It's "undesirable or impractical" to run over demonstrators with tanks, but calmly burn them with invisible rays and it doesn't look that repressive at all. Why, if the Chinese had this technology, nobody would remember Tienanmien Square (but the demonstrations there would have been just as effectively crushed).
---
Uh, no. Because there is no codified guarantee of privacy in the constitution, a bunch of Supreme Court justices "found" one in the "penumbræ and eminations" of the various liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights.
I suppose they could have found worse things there (in fact, they frequently do), but there really isn't any such thing.
---