> why would you ever trust Huawei?
Why would you ever trust any US corporations?
Snowden, Intel Management Engine etc.
(Corporate) backdoors everywhere...
I think RISC-V, open hardware and OSS has to be the future.
1 karma · joined April 8, 2021
Why would you ever trust any US corporations?
Snowden, Intel Management Engine etc.
(Corporate) backdoors everywhere...
I think RISC-V, open hardware and OSS has to be the future.
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In the digital age, information is everything. And information usually precedes action, so in my eyes your argument is wilfully ignorant to the larger reality of a complex globalized world.
I think the US and other Global North countries have a massive shadow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j800SVeiS5I
If unfamiliar, this is a guide to Jung's concept of the shadow: https://highexistence.com/carl-jung-shadow-guide-unconscious...
"Check out, for example, mutual credit systems like Sardex, where small businesses get together to issue money as credit to each other. Everyone starts from zero in the system, and then goes into and out of short-term debt to one another by either receiving goods and services — which creates a future obligation owed — or by being prepared to offer goods and services to people on the system, which earns you positive claims on others—otherwise known as money." [2]
[1] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
[2] https://howwegettonext.com/the-future-of-money-depends-on-bu...
Maybe because this is a website for American venture backed corporations who use the American intellectual property system to create and sustain powerful and influential entities in a newly digital world?
> Maybe you should try not getting outraged about every comment that doesn't propose somehow creating utopia.
Please don’t shame me. And if you do, think about this: why am I shaming someone for desiring a better world?
I think the fact that you are not angry about this situation means your golden handcuffs (whatever they look like) are causing you to be blind to underlying structural or systemic issues.
“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.” ― Toni Morrison
+
A reason I post here is because I don’t know everything and I enjoy learning about different views. I have learnt a lot from reading the discussions people have on here.
Sometimes this also means that I produce counterpoints and weigh in with stories or some counter-arguments when the topic seems interesting/relevant to me. If you believe I react strongly (or as you described me: “outraged”), then I’m glad to know it and I will bear it in mind for the future, and try my best to be even more nuanced/curious.
I believe we are all beautiful complex humans who just happen to be pushing plastic buttons and sending our thoughts into cyberspace. I am grateful for the possibility to talk with you, and it is not my intention to hurt you.
I’m saying corporations are abusing our common inheritance by plundering the commons and not contributing back to it.
“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable. “
— Aaron Swartz
Big Pharma is standing on the shoulders of giants, but are biting the hand that fed them.
We have much shared wealth, but without open or public access, and cooperative business models that steward and keep a healthy commons alive, the trend towards extortion of the lower and middle classes of America by Corporations (through rent from IP) will keep increasing, as well as US brutality towards the Global South, in trying to upkeep the US-led Global North Imperial IP regime [1].
In that future, the class divide will keep growing and many more people will continue to suffer.
In the end, without sharing and socializing progress, we run the risk of the Precariat taking down the systems completely, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I believe our ideal future lies in something described as Protocol Cooperativism, using distributed technologies like Ceptr and Holochain.
I would also like to see an unenclosed p2p intellectual property system that honors authorship, yet allows access for all [1].
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/76166b6a-03ca-11e2-9322-00144feab... or https://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/GENPRESS/F...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-...
That's not a personal attack? Hypocrite.
Stop being a fool.
Through sharing we can reveal our hopes and frustrations.
Dialogue is step 1. It's a brave, difficult first step.
Bravo Hackernews community.
What ever pains people have, I'd like to ask them to try and see it as temporary growing pains. That maybe those who disagree with this development can see that others are sharing their unmet needs, as a request to help get help in getting those needs met. Exploring new strategies.
I believe we will make it through and come out stronger.
And finally, technology hero worship tends to distort our visions of the future. Why should governments do the hard work of fixing and expanding California’s mass transit system when Musk says we could zip people across the state at 760 miles per hour in a “hyperloop”? Is trying to colonize Mars, at a cost in the billions of dollars, actually the right direction for future space exploration and scientific research? We should be able to determine long-term technology priorities without giving excessive weight to the particular visions of a few tech celebrities.
Rather than placing tech leaders on a pedestal, we should put their successes in context, acknowledging the role of government not only as a supporter of basic science but as a partner for new ventures. Otherwise, it is all too easy to denigrate public-sector investment, eroding support for government agencies and training programs and ultimately putting future innovation at risk. As Mazzucato puts it, “It’s precisely because we admire Musk and think his contributions are important that we need to get real about where his success actually comes from.”"
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/539861/techs-enduring-gre...
https://medium.com/metacurrency-project/the-future-of-govern...
I can’t wait for the web to be an archive of torrented Git-versioned repositories à la Ceptr.org.
Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions.”
- Prof. Guy Standing, The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
In my experience; just because something is in use today does not mean that it can’t be critiqued, and evolve.
Do you grow your own food? If not, you are partaking in prostitutional farming.
Do you make the write the books you read? If not, you are paying for prostitutional authors.
> every last human stands more to gain from defecting than cooperating.
Is it human nature, or is it the design of money? [1][2]
[1] The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer
[2] http://ceptr.org
You write below that you work in mathematical biochemistry. What research are your conclusions based on; which authors, measurements etc.?
> All of us reading this right now are going to die just barely seeing the true extent of the outcomes.
Do you feel scared of this collapse you are predicting? Are you distraught by humanity's destruction of our home, because you would you like to see Earth and humanity's beauty continue?
I guess the overarching theme/question for me is: if all this is true, where, and in what, do you find meaning?
Edit: to be clear, I am asking for your personal experiences and strategies. I am not looking for any advice.
Corporate programmers get access to monopolized technologies, improve them for the owners of the 'intellectual property' they create, so that the corporation they work for can (continue to) extract rents.
Professor G. Standing says this about 'rentiers':
“[Rentier capitalists] assert a belief in ‘free markets’ and want us to believe that economic policies are extending them. That is untrue. Today we have the most unfree market system ever created….
How can politicians look into TV cameras and say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for twenty years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give a guaranteed income for seventy years after a person’s death? How can they claim free markets exist when one person or company is given a subsidy and not others, or when they sell off the commons that belong to all of us, at a discount, to a favoured individual or company, or when Uber, TaskRabbit and their ilk act as unregulated labour brokers, profiting from the labour of others?"
"…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.
Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions."
Source: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
Is tax avoidance a failure of business then? What about the billion dollar lobbying inudstry?
“[Rentier capitalists] assert a belief in ‘free markets’ and want us to believe that economic policies are extending them. That is untrue. Today we have the most unfree market system ever created….
How can politicians look into TV cameras and say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for twenty years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give a guaranteed income for seventy years after a person’s death? How can they claim free markets exist when one person or company is given a subsidy and not others, or when they sell off the commons that belong to all of us, at a discount, to a favoured individual or company, or when Uber, TaskRabbit and their ilk act as unregulated labour brokers, profiting from the labour of others?"
"…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.
Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions."
Source: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
"The idea of “great men” as engines of change grew popular in the 19th century. In 1840, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle wrote that “the history of what man has accomplished in this world is at bottom the history of the Great Men who have worked here.” It wasn’t long, however, before critics questioned this one–dimensional view, arguing that historical change is driven by a complex mix of trends and not by any one person’s achievements. “"
and:
"Hero myths like the ones surrounding Musk and Jobs are damaging in other ways, too. If tech leaders are seen primarily as singular, lone achievers, it is easier for them to extract disproportionate wealth. It is also harder to get their companies to accept that they should return some of their profits to agencies like NASA and the National Science Foundation through higher taxes or simply less tax dodging."
For me the point is that innovators stand on the shoulders of giants (all the advancements made up until this point).
Another source talking about the same author (Mariana Mazzucato) and using her arguments (from her book: the Entrepreneurial State):
“Lone genius:
"An individual at the head of a private enterprise who has achieved fame through effective PR designed to create an arbitrary association of that person with successful commercial innovation, instilling in the public’s mind the absurd belief that the insight behind the innovation emerged from a social, economic and intellectual vacuum”
Source: https://qrius.com/the-myth-of-innovation-and-the-lone-genius
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/539861/techs-enduring-gre...