laotzu

Marshall McLuhan has an alternate but related theory for the difference between "close talkers" and those who like to be able to see the whole person when talking.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan infers that "close talkers" are often tribal cultures who rely primarily on the spoken word for means of communication whereas highly literate cultures like to be able to see the whole person because of the stress the print medium has on the eye.

Reminds me of the JFK quote "We have nothing to fear except fear itself"

>Human brain and human behavior is not "black and white" anymore, it's never going to be. It's a complex system of neuron junctions

Aren't those neurons fundamentally firing on and off, like that of a binary system? On and off is analogous to "black and white"

Success is as dangerous as failure.

Hope is as hollow as fear.

What does it mean that success is a dangerous as failure?

Whether you go up the ladder or down it,

Your position is shaky.

When you stand with your own two feet on the ground,

You will always keep your balance.

-Lao Tzu

This is indicative of how nationalism, a concept formed as a result of the effects of the Gutenberg printing press[1], is now obsolete and counterproductive in a globalized, electrically interconnected society.

[1] The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan

>The NSA is there to protect us, in theory.

who is "us"?

>"The mere existence of the "police state" anywhere is the sure sign of old arrangements being propped up by newer forms that have already rendered the older forms irrelevant."

-Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, Marshall McLuhan

It's doublespeak. Like the CNN article whose title reads "Encryption a growing threat to security".

In software, working around existing patents has resulted in vast fragmentation on every platform. Thereby greatly increasing the time investment needed per developer when creating cross platform compatible apps.

Want to reach your audience with a simple app? Learn to use all of the native android dev suite tools and language. Learn all of the native iOS dev suite too. Make a Web app. Make that web app compatible for all browser platforms: IE, Mozilla, Chrome, Safari. Make that web app responsive for mobile users for all the different device types they might be using...

If you want to stimulate innovation, cooperation is imperative. A cooperative society would realize that the more unified and open your innovation processes are, the less time investment is needed for everyone else.

>There is a lot of empirical evidence showing patents incentivize investment of resources into innovative efforts

Do you have any sources of this empirical data? In many cases especially with software the opposite is the case now. Legacy patent holders are able to obtain such broadly vague patents and then sit on them and do nothing but try to sue anyone who tries to actually innovate.

If the number one security vulnerability is the human element, then shifting a system's security from autonomous unbiased code to the human element is necessarily decreasing security.

Advocates for such are either deliberately malicious or grossly negligent.

>Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.

-Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

GDP and Unemployment rates are very poor measurements to look to for indications of "progress"

This hits on one of the most basic of economic principles which is often ignored. If the community becomes unemployed due to automation and is not reimbursed properly for the work done by the machine, then the community will not have the purchasing power to buy the goods produced by the machine. Thus rendering the machine useless.

Indeed, tribal cultures are far less reliant on all types of abstractions, whether it be money or the written word.

Therein lies the problem it may be: we have become lost in abstraction and confuse money with real wealth. It's like we can never get enough because we are starving ourselves eating the menus instead of the dinner while at the same time not realizing that there is only so much dinner one can eat before becoming sick.

The more we rely upon abstraction, the more disconnected we become from the reality which that abstraction is supposed to represent.

It is not so much indicative of human nature as a whole as it is of "civilized" or industrialized cultures. Tribal cultures often exhibit the opposite sort of sentiment.

>Primitive commodity money, like the magical words of non-literate society, can be a storehouse of power, and has often become the occasion of feverish economic activity. The natives of the South Seas, when they are so engaged, seek no economic advantage. Furious application to production may be followed by deliberate destruction of the products in order to achieve moral prestige...Potlatch is very widespread, especially where there is ease of food-gathering or food-production. For example, among the Northwest coast fishermen, or rice-planters of Borneo, huge surpluses are produced that have to be destroyed or class differences would arise that would destroy the traditional social order. In Borneo the traveler may see tons of rice exposed to rains in rituals, and great art constructions, involving tremendous efforts, smashed. At the same time, in these primitive societies, while money may release frantic energies in order to charge a bit of copper with magical prestige, it can buy very little. Rich and poor necessarily live in much the same manner. Today, in the electronic age, the richest man is reduced to having much the same entertainment, and even the same food and vehicles as the ordinary man.[1]

[1]Understanding Media, Ch. 14 Money: The Poor Man's Credit Card, Marshall McLuhan

Deflation is defined as:

>a decrease in the general price level of goods and services

In the Gutenberg era of paper based processes and hierarchies, as stated in your cited speech, a reduction in the price of goods and services is seen as a bad thing. This is no longer the case. The assumption of scarcity of renewable physiological resources (level 1 of Maslow's hierarchy) is no longer valid:

>In technology's "invisible" world, inventors continually increase the quantity and quality of performed work per each volume or pound of material, erg of energy, and unit of worker and "overhead" time invested in each given increment of attained functional performance. This complex process we call progressive ephemeralization. In 1970, the sum total of increases in overall technological know-how and their comprehensive integration took humanity across the epochal but invisible threshold into a state of technically realizable and economically feasible universal success for all humanity.

-Buckminster Fuller

In the era of electric automation, deflation flips into ephemeralization because everything is increasingly/exponentially produced better, faster, and cheaper. A reduction in the general price level of goods and services is the purpose of automation.

This is why goal #2 of maintaining stable prices is now obsolete and self-defeating. It completely ignores automation and renewable resources.

What do you really want?

What does it say about human nature?

"The government is always the most successful group of gangsters"

>The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is the one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.

-John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went

Even though the vast majority of monetary transactions are done electrically, it is still at heart a paper-based system built upon the constraints and assumptions of the paper/print medium that has dominated for the past ~500 years.

"It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means."[1]

I'd imagine the house of cards won't come tumbling down until a viable electric alternative outcompetes the legacy system.

The old goals of the Federal Reserve system are primarily:

1. Maximize employment

2. Stable prices

3. Low interest rates

These goals are no longer applicable in the new electic age of automation and ephemeralization.

[1] Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

What is there to research? Money is a debt based measurement of economic output. Measurements do not exist of themselves but describe something else.

Take an acre of land for example. It is measured at 1 acre. Just because we decide to pretend that it is 2 acres is arbitrary and makes no difference in physical reality.

Though I would agree that money is far more abstract and obfuscated as measurement system and is at heart a confidence game. So, it may be that arbitrarily doubling the money supply could alter psychological perceptions positively or negatively even though it is pure abstraction. The word Voodoo comes to mind

Juniper back door #1?

Many of the tribes were non literate and had no form of written language which also contributes to the historical obfuscation. Many of those who did use a form of writing, such as the Mayans, had their historical writings deliberately destroyed by the Conquistadors and Inquisitors because their culture was seen as deeply heretical:

>We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.

-Bishop Diego de Landa, 1562

It is characteristic of his role as a Heyoka, or sacred clown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heyoka

The argument that an electric system is not feasible because it cannot be made 100% secure is null and self defeating if at the same time it is implicitly in support of a legacy paper system which is already exploited and cannot be made 100% secure. A better argument would be a cost-benefit analysis of both systems instead of defaulting to hypocritical defeatism. Security risks will always be a given.

I would say, though, that it would not be feasible given the current state of internet architecture. Internet infrastructure would need to become much more universally distributed and control would need to be relinquished by the current "internet gatekeepers" (i.e. Time Warner, Comcast etc.) as Aaron Swartz called them.

There is also the irony that in the US and elsewhere, the paper system is actively exploited and used as a means to make the electric system more insecure i.e. weakening/backdooring encryption.

With any new system, there will be technical challenges and unknowns that will be sorted out(ish) after trial and error as was the case with the Articles of Confederation which failed but then lead to the current longest lasting constitutional government today.

Who is pretending it was a peaceful utopia? That's silly. Counting coup (showing bravery in battle) would earn a man great prestige. Of course there was war between tribes and people went hungry at times, during a harsh winter for example. However, before the railroads and the gold rush expanded out West many Sioux tribes lived in relative homeostasis with their environment and had a nearly constant buffet of Buffalo.

If you have anything of actual substance to say I'm open to debate. I see from your comment history you have specialized financial knowledge which might offer valuable comment on this economic theory.

Not but 150 years ago there were still hunter-gatherers who thrived in the form of native american tribes:

>Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we didn't have any delinquents. Without a prison, there can't be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white man arrived and I don't know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.

-Lame Deer

>dollar was near multi-decade lows ~2 years ago. oil was at near multi-decade highs ~2 years ago.

Yeah, that's exactly the correlation I am pointing out. Guess who started really blowing up ~2 years ago? ISIS.

More instability = less control over oil resources by the sovereign = cheaper oil for everyone else

Decrease the oil price, and you increase demand for oil.

Increase the demand for oil, and you increase the demand for the dollar.

Increase demand for the dollar and you increase its value. Basic economics.

6/7 of the richest companies in the world in terms of revenue are oil companies, and oil is primarily traded in dollars. You'll notice that when a country starts trying to sell oil in something other than the dollar, they go on the NATO shit list: i.e. Iraq, Iran, Venezuela.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency#Currencies_used_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...

"War is a matter not so much of arms as of money." -Thucydides