Fed Up With The Shape The Economy Is In? Why Not Create Your Own?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 8, 2013 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Part one of a three part series on why we should probably buck the banks and start printing our own money.
 The Epson R2000 is probably quite adequate for the task at hand. |
Have you ever wished you could just print your own money when you need some? I mean the US government does it, why can’t you? Well, the simple fact that you can may surprise you. Most of the laws that make printing your own money illegal have to do with printing someone else’s money. If you print off a bunch of US hundred dollar bills, there’s a really good chance you’ll end up in jail. Even if you’re just a brilliant aging artist who’s really just obsessed with doing a good job. But the fact is that as much as the people (and by “people” we mean banksters and politicians) who make it their entire life’s purpose to reap personal benefit from screwing you over a fictitious commodity would prefer that you think otherwise, in most of the states in America, there is nothing stopping you from creating your own fictitious commodity and using it for every day commerce. In fact it’s already happening with varying degrees of success all over the country; there are about 150 currencies on this Wikipedia list of local currencies, from the Berkshire BerkShares to the Detroit Cheers, to the Fairfax Fairbuck. And aside from these physical currencies, there are huge economies evolving right now that are entirely digital, like BitCoin or Ripple, and recently, even Amazon is getting in on the “let’s make our own money” game with Amazon Coins. I personally find it ironic that the people who claim to be the only ones who know how to manage currency and the economy are the ones who have made such a mess of both. All the while somehow managing to maintain their own hordes of cash and liquidity. Okay, actually it’s not ironic at all, we’re just a bunch of ignorant suckers who are taking part in the biggest con in the history of the world. Aren’t you getting tired of it? So let’s take things into our own hands. We couldn’t do any worse than the goons at the Fed, could we? And the time is ripe for a paradigm shift. One of the core problems with global economics right now is that speculative wealth is entirely untethered from the real-world resources that create it. There is a literal monopoly on the production and control of currency and wealth simply because we make it easy for the centralized power of banks to exist, simply by sheepishly playing along with the big Ponzi scheme. So there’s an interesting angle – maybe we could file a class action suit against the federal government and banks for colluding to monopolize the money supply! We jest of course. This is part one of a three part series; we’re just having some fun here, but in parts two and three we’ll look at the history of money, and the realistic obstacles to decentralizing the control of it. For now, I’m going to go make millions of dollars. On my fancy Epson inkjet.
Context here if you don’t get this joke
The Virtue of Shellfishness: Weebl’s Greatest Hits
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 7, 2013 by admin in Music
Do the surreal creations of Cyriak, SecretAgentBob, and Weebl constitute a genre? Who cares. Watch hours disappear as you watch clip after one minute clip.
Somewhere in the surreal realm between the audiovisual creations of Cyriak (who brought us cows & cows & cows, Baaa, and Welcome to Kitty City) and the musical animated storytelling of SecretAgentBob (who brought us Charlie the Unicorn and Ferrets) lies the repetitiously brilliant creations of mr weebl (we’ve included a few of these videos below). Is this a genre? I can’t decide. The musical portions of Cyriak and Weebl’s clips seem to reside somewhere in the microgenres of Bitpop or Chiptune, but to be honest, I decided to stop keeping track of microgenres ten minutes after I first heard the term back in the early nineties. So we’ll just let these offbeat creations be what they are. We’re focusing on Weebl today, because in spite of having the largest volume of work of the three on line by far, I personally didn’t know who he was until today, when I ran across Shrimp Glockenspiel. Why are internerds so shellfish with their clever links? Once I paid a little more attention, I quickly realized I was familiar with his NSFW Amazing Horse and Narwhals; I just didn’t realize he had such a huge body of work. You’re likely to either love Weebl (British flash animator Jonti Picking ) or hate him. His 200+ YouTube clips have received tens of millions of views, but his TV ad for Yell 118 247 Directory Heaven earned him the honor of sixth most irritating ad of 2009. Which I guess is actually a positive assessment when discussing TV commercials. Below are what I’d consider weebl’s “greatest hits”. If you actually like the music itself, he has hundreds of tunes on Amazon
I Have a Deep Dark Secret
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 6, 2013 by admin in Technology
And when I decide to share it, you can rest assured I won’t do it on the upload site MEGA using the Silent Circle app on my iPhone.
If I sold you a lock and key for twenty dollars, and told you that no-one in the world would be able to unlock it except you, would you believe me? Probably not. And that’s the analogy I keep thinking of as a result of the recent launches of two services that are supposedly going to revolutionize privacy and file transfers. You may have already heard of one of these services; the infamous Kim Dotcom whose MegaUpload file sharing empire was taken down when he was arrested last year launched MEGA last month. One of the cleverest things about the new service is probably the hilarious domain name “mega.co.nz”, because the basic idea behind MEGA is simply that, as they themselves put it: “All files stored on MEGA are encrypted. All data transfers from and to MEGA are encrypted” adding that “unlike the industry norm where the cloud storage provider holds the decryption key, with MEGA, you control the encryption“. This is all fine and dandy from a basic technical standpoint, but what about the human element? As the hilarious XKCD five dollar wrench gag points out, there’s a level where massive encryption simply becomes irrelevant. I mean, it wasn’t only the technology that tripped up alleged Anonymous member Higinio O.Ochoa when he got collared by the FBI, it was pride. And his girlfriend’s breasts. And it wasn’t rubber-hose cryptanalysis that allegedly broke LulzSec leader Sabu, it was the threat of never seeing his kids again. So – including human nature as an element in the equation, could you logically trust a guy who looks and dresses like this to be selling you a trustworthy product that only has your best interests in mind? Likewise with a service that was getting some spin yesterday called Silent Circle. No, not the band Silent Circle
Via XKCD
If This Page Gets One Million Likes I Won’t Shoot a Kitten
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on February 5, 2013 by admin in Missing Links
Our roundup of the dreaded “plea for Likes” meme.
Of all the insufferable things that Facebook has done to poison the inflection of online communication, I think we can all agree that the “Like” button has done more damage than emoticons, chat speak, and the “reply all” button combined. Remember when it was new? If you were one of the people who immediately stopped sharing actual thoughts on the first day, doing things like “Liking” my mother’s obituary, I just want to say: I hate you. The more articulate amongst us of course resisted for months, realizing that resorting to the Like Button was yet another step toward the brain dead consumer world uncannily prophesied in the movie Idiocracy
So if a “Like” really serves no purpose as a communication tool – having simply become a Pavlovian response that releases you from an obligation to use your brain for a second – what value does it have? Well, some would argue that it has a value of $3.60, but that’s clearly preposterous. It’s obviously not a reliable form of currency; even if one is able to manipulate that Like into some kind of real conversion, the value varies tremendously based on the quality of that conversion. If a person who regularly buys Luis Vuitton luggage “Likes” something, that’s worth a hell of a lot more than someone Liking a picture of your cat wearing a piece of bread on its head. And while there have been studies which demonstrate that Likes correlate with web traffic, there are two problems there. One is – as anyone who operates a website should know – that getting ten thousand visitors from Reddit in one day typically has less cash value than getting TEN visitors with whom you have any kind of relationship. And the other is the redundant and/or useless nature of that data. Okay, “Likes” correlate with page views. Duh. But this only tells you something about the Facebook users who visited the page. And I don’t know about you, but the most influential people I know aren’t avid Facebook users. Hmm. Maybe I should finally kick the Facebook habit so I can become one of them.
In any case, enough Like hating. Below are the worst and best desperate pleas to be liked that I could find. The winning plea is at the very bottom. Read the rest of this entry »
Can You Write Stupid?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on February 4, 2013 by admin in Comics
Try your hand at writing stupid, with the “Up Goer Five Text Editor”, which limits you to the thousand most commonly used English words.
 The Original |
This may be the most stupid thing you read today. Why? Because I am using only words that are in the ten hundred most used words. Why? because I’m trying out the up goer five word making thing. If people tell you that you use too many big or strange words, maybe you should give it a try too. It’s easy to stick to the ten hundred most used words if you’re talking about simple stuff like I am here, but things get a little harder if you are trying to explain stuff like the things that brain strong people do or movies. Interesting that the word “movies” is in the top ten hundred but not the word that I had to call “brain strong people”. Under here is one try a guy did at doing this about brain strong stuff. Probably the funniest shot at it was the first one on that funny computer pictures place. A piece of it is on the left. I still have one question. Why the hell is “goer” in the top ten hundred most used words? Read the rest of this entry »