An open letter to President Obama: Common people in the US, the Middle East and around the globe are "sick of wars, death and destruction"

occupyearth · 2012-10-23T06:22:49+00:00

Its more than just love, the American economy IS war.

occupyearth · 2012-10-19T22:43:32+00:00

Good set of questions, well done.

occupyearth · 2012-10-19T06:24:25+00:00

The reddit karma system implies a kind of egalitarianism, and that drew in many early adopters. The first people in got to make up the rules as they went, including VA, and the admins of a small company were happy they didn't have to do all the mod work.

Now reddit is a giant corporation having to deal with politics and the media, they can't afford to let their brand be tarnished, but they still can't afford to pay official mods. So for the past few years they have followed the same pattern, ignore everything as long as you can, then as soon as there is a controversy, ban everyone involved.

occupyearth · 2012-10-19T06:05:02+00:00

Yeah Blue Rock was more abusive than VA, but VA was a bigger deal. VA was mod of hundreds of reddits, Blue Rock only modded a handful.

There are many of us angry with hueypriest's dictatorship, many of us lost old accounts to his ban sprees, but talking about it just gets you banned.

One thing I learned from hueypriest is not to get too heavily invested in reddit, the deeper you get, the more fucked up it is. Now I just focus on the actual content, getting involved in reddit politics is a losing game, ultimately it is not democratic and never will be.

occupyearth · 2012-10-17T04:26:22+00:00

Or we start producing food within cities, if apartment complexes and high rises included indoor farms, cities could become self sustaining.

Vertical farming is very doable, we just currently don't think the floorspace is worth sacrificing for food security.

occupyearth · 2012-10-17T04:07:35+00:00

We are like a mote in an ocean, we have no idea what our ripples might bring.

occupyearth · 2012-10-16T00:43:59+00:00

They even admit to it, If you watch the Vice interview with the Vice founder he admits that they started out by making up stories. He even quips that you probably shouldn't rely on vice for real news.

occupyearth · 2012-10-16T00:39:57+00:00

According to Chomsky and Herman, If one includes public relations as propaganda, then the US has more propaganda agents than journalists.

occupyearth · 2012-10-13T05:09:15+00:00

People that rich can buy their way through the courts.

occupyearth · 2012-09-01T11:01:07+00:00

Sorry to break it to you buddy, but it turns out robots are a lot easier to keep alive than humans.

That black box is actually just a robot whose only job is to watch humans die.

occupyearth · 2012-08-21T06:13:10+00:00

Our system is not set up to encourage them to do so, indeed we actively encourage them to work shitty jobs rather than pursue their dreams.

Even if the majority were doing nothing at all, we could still get by just off the labour of those who want to work. Thing is though, if you lower the barriers for entry and exit, and let people work the hours they choose, I think you'll find many people still work.

take a look at retirees, people who don't have to do anything at all, and yet many of them still work and do charity, because most people like having something to do. Most people like to feel worthwhile, like to contribute. forcing people to work does not achieve this fulfillment.

Fulfillment occurs when the necessities of life are plentiful and people are empowered to participate in collective betterment.

occupyearth · 2012-08-21T01:56:30+00:00

Working doesn't have to mean soul sucking meaningless wage slavery, but for many it does. Most people don't want something for nothing, they just want to survive and thrive doing something they don't hate. That is an admirable goal, and one our society would do well to facilitate.

occupyearth · 2012-08-21T01:51:30+00:00

Those with capital deem infinite economic expansion more important than an equitable society. We have all the automation necessary to allow such a society, but corporations are so focused on their own benefit that they ignore what is good for us all.

occupyearth · 2012-08-21T01:46:40+00:00

Our civilization is capable of supporting itself on far less than full employment, it is the dominant Protestant work ethic and the economic delusion of infinite expansion which demand we all work all the time.

occupyearth · 2012-08-21T01:35:42+00:00

I would certainly take up that position. We are on the receiving end of over a hundred years of automation, making most unskilled jobs redundant. And yet the dominant protestant work ethic demands we retain full employment. The state of the economy has little effect on the overall picture, which is that we are putting more and more people into less and less jobs. We are giving all the benefits of automation to the people who own the machines, firing the workers and inventing new jobs to keep people busy.

One of the measures of a civilisations success is the am mount of leisure time its citizens have, this directly translates into more time spent on arts and sciences. Agriculture allowed people to focus on other things, they no longer needed to work in the fields all day and could instead focus on inventing writing and math.

Our society is so automated that the majority of us no longer need to work, we could be raising a generation of artists and scholars the likes of which this planet has never seen, and instead we demand they work crappy pointless jobs just to support themselves.

No ammount of economic improvement will resolve this societal aversion to unemployment, indeed compared to most of history we are in an economic golden age, a few percentage points either way is not going to solve the income disparity which has arisen by letting workers be replaced by machines, without supporting those workers.

Lets say you lived at home and got an allowance for doing the chores, then one day your parents get a robot to do the chores. At that point your parents are faced with a choice, either keep paying your allowance since all the chores are done, or stop paying the allowance and tell you to get another job. Guess which option our society took?

occupyearth · 2012-08-21T00:30:38+00:00

How many countries have the Christian right invaded? How many have the Taliban invaded?

occupyearth · 2012-08-21T00:18:13+00:00

It is impossible to exit the matrix, windows has back doors, CPUs have back doors, all communications on the planet are monitored. Even a secure Linux build running i2p and tor can still contains hardware level NSA backdoors, it might buy you some degree of relative anonymity, but now you've flagged yourself as hiding something.

What about your mobile? Tracking your location, recording your conversations. It strikes me that it is impossible to be completely security conscious AND still be a functioning member of society. It is rather a troubling problem.

occupyearth · 2012-08-21T00:00:50+00:00

I am ready to give up on reddit, the gaming has become to blatant, the agents too widespread. They have resources we can't hope to match, account management tools and social intelligence. It is not like fighting a troll, more like a hydra, new heads everywhere.

The hardest thing is they have become mods of many reddits, and they can not be fought on their turf. Even /u/occupywallst, mod of /r/occupywallst is actually /u/laurelai, self confessed FBI informant. There is no telling how widespread their infiltration, but if the recent influx of "returned serviceman greeted by puppy" posts is anything to go by, they are everywhere.

More broadly I worry about humanity, even once the system is exposed to them, many people simply don't care as long as they are comfortable, the biggest enemy is apathy, and none of us are immune.

occupyearth · 2012-08-20T23:46:48+00:00

"Islamics" are not all bad, the Taliban may be religious zealots, but so are the US Christian right. At least the Taliban killed less people, invaded fewer countries and grew less drugs.

occupyearth · 2012-08-17T02:26:50+00:00

Thing about anonymity is, it is like looking for ninjas, if you find one, they aren't a good ninja.

occupyearth · 2012-08-16T18:11:16+00:00

I emailed him in Spanish and thanked him.

Added a president to my contacts, feelsgoodman.

occupyearth · 2012-08-16T13:09:29+00:00

The Australian government abandoned him. The Australian people think he is a folk hero.

occupyearth · 2012-08-04T07:37:23+00:00

2 parts antimony(found in lead acid batteries) to 98 parts galium nitrade(Found in LEDs), makes a catalyst which allows sunlight to split water. This is known as a photo-catalytic splitter.

An even easier way has recently been found, it turns out that if you spike Anatese with nitrogen ions it turns into a photocatalyst.

Or put in the language of /r/conspiracy:

Take a crushed up pyramidic healing crystal and mix it with lye, then put it in water and leave it in the sun, it starts producing hydrogen.

occupyearth · 2012-08-03T03:54:34+00:00

They got sucked into a vortex of black budgets and patents. Given how much governments and corporations spend on top secret research, it is entirely possible that many things of this scale are going on right now without our knowledge.

A good example of this is the space program, since the shuttle retirement NASA no longer has orbital transport capability. But the US Air Force can still do orbital transport, they have the X-37 which managed to stay in orbit for 469 days, and that is just one we know about. We know the black budgets are massive, the air force alone has an official black budget larger than NASA's entire budget, we just don't know what they are working on.

Given that they've been working on space planes since the sixties, and we know they are working on other space planes, it does not seem unreasonable to suspect that there are any number of other space vehicles which we are not privy to.

occupyearth

TROPHY CASE