A story of inappropriate technology: in the 1970s it was decided to modernize the rice farming of Sri Lanka, whose system that had not changed much for 3000 years. The goal was to replace the water buffalo with the modern tractor, but the attempt had disastrous consequences...

Buffalos create "wallows", pools of muddy water without which they cannot control their temperatures. Always filled with water, these wallows create many eco-services: in the dry season the become a haven for fish that then migrate back to the paddies when these fill with water.

The fish is a valuable source of proteins for landless laborers and greatly help control the population of malaria causing mosquitoes who breed in the rice paddies. The vegetation around the wallows are breeding and hunting grounds for snakes and water monitor lizards who prey...

...on rats that eat the rice and the crabs that burrow into the sides of the rice paddies eventually causing them to lose integrity, leading to collapses of entire paddy systems.

Without the water buffalo wallows, villagers no longer had a place to soak the palm fronds they needed to thatch their roofs, leading them to rely on locally made clay roof tiles, which caused massive deforestation as trees were cut down to fuel the tile kilns.

Pittsburgh is an American Apartheid city. Here’s the reality.

(THREAD)

(2) As sociologists Nancy Denton and Doug Massey wrote in their seminal book, American Apartheid, “Although America’s apartheid may not be rooted in the legal strictures of its South African relative, it is no less effective in perpetuating racial inequality.”

(3) Pittsburgh, the city I love, remains one of the most racially segregated cities by neighborhood in America.

(4) Pittsburgh has one of the highest rates of occupational segregation between Whites and Blacks.

(5) Fetal deaths are 2 times more likely among Black women than White women.

When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

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We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

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Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like @amyklobuchar's #CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech - it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

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Capitalism demolishes society and, with it, itself.

A thread.

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Prior to capitalism, there were plenty of elite-centric, exploitive systems in place. European and Japanese feudalism. Roman mass slavery. The corvee labor of the ancient hydraulic state. Etc.

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But as exploitive and repressive as these systems were, they still retained some sense of mutual obligation among classes. Elites depend on the masses to survive and thrive. You can only exploit them up to a certain point, beyond which you threaten your own labor supply.

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Consider this quote from Kenneth Jupp on European feudalism. Feudalism entailed *mutual obligations* between rich and poor.

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These obligations were not equal, uniform, or always universally respected. But they were at least *there.* In return for labor and agricultural surplus, a feudal lord was obligated to protect his villeins, provide them justice, and respect their usufruct land rights.

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When a new president is sworn in, they gets told a lot of secret stuff - launch codes, backup plans, etc. But one of the best-kept presidential secrets is the "Enemies Briefcase," a collection of "presidential emergency action documents" (PEADs).

https://t.co/A6Jh3Gkip7

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These aren't just revelations about the fallback plans for things like a nuclear strike - they are a meticulously maintained collection of emergency authorities that the administrative branch claims it is entitled to.

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These authorities are analyzed in legal memos that give the president to unilaterally declare an emergency "imposing martial law, suspending habeas corpus, seizing control of the internet, imposing censorship, and incarcerating so-called subversives."

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The PEADs were incredibly well-kept secrets, known only through fragmentary redaction failures, appropriaions and declassifications...Until Trump starting bragging on 'em:

"I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about." -Donald J Trump

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PEADs are particularly ominous given how many non-secret emergency powers the president has - more than 100 powers granted by Congress and never rescinded, dating back to the Civil War, from freezing bank accounts to deploying troops domestically.

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Human, local, oriented, taken, and iterative, these are the change-harvester's bywords. In iterative change, we not only accept the reality of gradual stepwise refinement -- changing what we've already changed before -- we actually anticipate it and take advantage of it.

Before we begin: Folks, I know many are celebrating last week's results . I see them as one small pass towards the change I seek. Take a short break, then it's back to work?

Black lives matter.
Voting rights matter.
Women matter.

Stay safe, stay strong, stay angry, stay kind.

(And a *second* prefatory note: I've been not writing for six weeks. It was a combination of several factors, including illness, distraction, and the need to finish a gig. I'm happy to be back at content, now, but also very nervous. Bear with me while I regain my sea legs.)

With iteration, I think a great starting point for the concept is to watch just about any youtube video where a skilled artist draws a realistic rendering. What you will see almost inevitably is a direct implementation of iterative change.

The strokes begin quite broadly, faintly indicating the broad contours of the subject. Experience is relevant here: those who are most familiar with drawing that particular kind of subject, will make contours that seem "right" more quickly than those less experienced.

Every crisis becomes a religion if it lasts long enough.

One factor in that transformation is the Beautiful Theory phenomenon: the power elite insists its remedies are logical and politically correct so they MUST work, even if the actual evidence shows they obviously don't.

You know why they didn't try anything like this in the 1970s? Because a generation which remembered WW2 & were still strong enough would not have let them. Politicians were scared of people's reactions back then. They were literally scared for their lives. What happened?

Also, the State did not simply consist of politicians backed by a few regime journalists. There was a much stronger judiciary & military. We would already have seen the military remove deranged politicians leading any country into ruin like this.

The military would have turned against any government which indicated their role was to swab violate children or help inject people with unsafe experimental RNA altering drugs for a virus with a 99.7+% survival rate. They would have taken power by now. What happened?

The most important lesson we can teach our children are the lessons the parents who remembered WW2 taught theirs: how to say NO to a government that is going in a direction you disagree with before it's too late.

This has to start at refusing schools being turned into biosecurity propaganda outposts, asymptomatic testing stations, anti-science brainwashing institutions on masks, repeated swab violation of children's bodies for no gain & to artificially create false positive disruption

The US peoples could create an organization that issues a RENT token that is nominally worth 1 USD each of debt as a kind of bond to every homeowner so there is no excuse and you will not be making other people homeless.

The government can do this kind of thing very easily and in fact, every government is doing this, but if your government won't and you have the tech and the social climate to pull this off without being assassinated then you should do it because it would work.

Social debt can be redeemed by anyone, anytime. The origination mechanism of a token tells the story of whether it will be redeemed by society in an entirely volunteer fashion.

If a RENT token exists, you know that it was created by people to avoid other people being evicted. Then you can choose to honor it if (i) you can (iia) you think rent is legitimate or (iib) you think it's strategic to help pretend rent is legitimate (iii) you believe the issuer

Democratic, bottom-up currency creation is a technology that we must hand to people. It must be trivial to create tokens, and we must learn the power of volunteering *towards currencies*. This is an entire social language that's going to emerge.

1. Fri. 15 Jan. Lin Wood Recent Tweets:

#1 Lin Wood: Over the next 10-14 days you will learn shocking information about many of our government officials and wealthy elite.

Chi*ld se*x traffic*king and pedo*philia are a worldwide pandemic.

If you want to know how the United States went from being the most admired to the most hated nation today, you have to read this thread. It exposes the insanity of the American liberal media, which by the way is the major cause of the decline of the western society.

Between 2013 and 2015 the Nigerian government practically begged for the sale of specialized aircraft to fight the insurgency, the A-29 Super Tucano to be precise and its compliment of precision guided munitions and smart bombs. Nigeria was willing to pay over half a billion.

The U.S found every reason they could to delay the deal. Even when they agreed upon the sale, one mishap and the deal is cancelled. This went on for years. Hillary Clinton herself fought for two years not to include Boko Haram on the U.S list of terrorist organizations.

Then there was a disruption. President Trump won the 2016 presidential election. Ever a pragmatic man it didn't take long for him to see the absurdity in denying Nigeria weapons it needed to BHT. He cancelled Obama's ban and approved the sale of the A-29. ALL HELL BROKE OUT

The U.S mainstream media went beserk. They accused President Trump of supporting a brutal and abusive Nigerian government. Why, they asked was the U.S identifying itself with an autocratic regime. To say this is hilarious will be an understatement.

Wikipedia is all but admitting what our historians do gymnastics to avoid admitting: Sea Peoples = Phoenicians. We can ignore “Illyrians” and “Tyrrhenians,” which are just poorly devised synonyms for Phoenicians.

Wiki tells us Tyrrhenian is what the Greeks called a non-Greek person, but then states that Lydia was “the original home of the Tyrrhenians,” which belies the fact that they were known as people from a specific place, not just any old non-Greek

Wiki then cleverly tells us “Spard” or “Sard” was a name “closely connected” to the name Tyrrhenian, since the Tyrrhenian city of Lydia was called Sardis by the Greeks. (By the way, coins were first invented in Lydia – so they were some of the earliest banksters).

But that itself is misleading, since the Lydians also called themselves Śfard. Nowhere is the obvious suggested – that Spard/Śfard looks a lot like Sephardi, as in
Sephardi Jews.

These refer to Jews from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), the word coming from Sepharad, a place mentioned in the book of Obadiah whose location is lost to history.

#2020yearinreview
My coverage and commentary of San Francisco homelessness in the past year.

To make it more interesting, I'm interspersing quotes throughout this thread ⬇️

‘The letters or cards that I had… they could never be replaced. It just meant more to me than a zillion dollars.’ -- Derrick, who lost his tent, ID and letters from his mother to sweeps by

'We’re essentially under arrest. On an equally interesting note, I haven’t had any medical examination since my arrival — a bit strange considering what I’m here for.' -- Ken, shelter client who was tested positive for

'The shelter in place has given us permission to be out here, otherwise it was just cat and mouse' -- Toro, whose tent camp in Castro District was temporarily reprieved from police

'It’s scary coming here, especially for people using on the street and with mental health issues, there’s a lot of paranoia. I didn’t know if I was being taken to a black site.' -- Joshua Owens, on his initial trepidation about entering a SIP hotel

Oh the Meltdown. Thread 👇
Editor of RW propaganda website.

By IT cell member

Another troll. Owns right wing website 'The Frustrated Indian'

One more IT cell member.

So called Bollywood actress.

I spend a lot of time looking in detail at abusive situations where tech plays a starring role: stalkerware, bossware, remote proctoring, etc. But nothing I'd read really prepared me for the tale of @arisevsinc, an abuser without parallel.

https://t.co/olExnSwEcW

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Arise sells itself as a "virtual call center" and boasts of blue-chip clients like Disney, Carnival Cruises, Comcast, Airbnb, Intuit etc. If you've ever called one of these companies, you may have spoken to an Arise worker.

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But that "worker" was not an employee. Arise is a pioneer in worker misclassification, and treats all the people who work for it as "independent contractors." So even though these workers are more tightly supervised and managed than any regular employee, they have no rights.

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You have to pay Arise for the privilege of working for them. Not just buying your own computer, but also paying to be trained in how to pretend to be an employee of Disney or Airbnb and Arise's other customers.

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Execs at these giant corps listen in on your calls while they are in progress or after the fact - and if they detect so much as a squeak from a child, or a noisy neighbor, they can terminate your contract and you lose the money and unpaid labor you spent on training.

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Let’s talk about money and the State (Sovereign).

Since everyone constantly gets this wrong.
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So look: there never was a barter-centric state of nature.

That’s a nice story but when we look at the historical record, it’s just flat out false.

In point of fact:

- Debt predates money.
- Money predates barter.
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The way the Sovereign first got involved with debt was something like this:

King: “If you don’t give me 3 goats during harvest season, my soldiers will come burn your fucking house down.”

And in this way, the King originated a debt.

By fiat.
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But moving goats around sucks (horrible creatures) and is just sort of logistically annoying, so a new plan was devised, like this:

King: “Same deal with the soldiers and the burning and the profanity, but now it’s 50 pieces of silver instead of goats.”

Presto! Money!
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Money is a token that settles debts - always has been. The reason it’s useful is because it allows society to function like an abacus with N players.

In lieu of just the sovereign playing debt, these tokens are ‘debt settlement bearer assets’ which allow…well... the economy
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