Category: government

$5 trillion COVID relief mostly gone to the RICH

On By Rick McIn ethics, GOP USA, government, health & fitness, things getting worseLeave a comment

American taxpayers are throwing around money like drunken sailers.

WHY have the outcomes been so lousy?

Just 400 wealthy families provide about half the funding for presidential campaigns, and they speedball their influence through think tanks, legal advocacy groups, and friendly media.

Rupert Murdoch, the Mercer family, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos all shape our views and influence national policy.  …

… $3 trillion in new money and historically low interest rates have been the nitro and the glycerin, respectively, of the stock market’s ascent.

The dirty secret is that there are two pandemics. While a quarter of America is food insecure and behind on rent, the shareholder class has experienced an explosion in net worth …

Professor Galloway

Why we LOVE Stacey Abrams

On By Rick McIn Apple, ethics, Facebook, good news, Google, government, human rights, internet, things getting betterLeave a comment

If you’re celebrating seeing Donald Trump and the worst of his deplorable followers driven off social media, thank Stacey Abrams.

She devoted years to building the Democratic Party in Georgia. Wrote a book about voter suppression and co-produced an Amazon Prime documentary, “All In: the Fight for Democracy.”

People in the know credit Stacey Abrams for flipping the 2 Senate seats from Republican to Democrat.

NOW the Biden team has control of all 3 branches of government for 2 years.

NOW the Biden team can enthusiastically regulate BIG TECH.

NOW Twitter, Facebook and pretty much every other major platform is banning Trumpy hate speech.

Thanks Stacey.

A Time for Mercy by John Grisham

On By Rick McIn books, ethics, governmentLeave a comment

A Time for Mercy is a 2020 legal drama by John Grisham, the sequel to A Time to Kill and Sycamore Row, which features Jake Brigance.

42nd published novel from one of our best story tellers.

Clanton, Mississippi. 1990. Jake Brigance finds himself embroiled in a deeply divisive trial when the court appoints him attorney for Drew Gamble, a timid sixteen-year-old boy accused of murdering a local deputy.

Many in Clanton want a swift trial and the death penalty, but Brigance digs in and discovers that there is more to the story than meets the eye.

Jake’s fierce commitment to saving Drew from the gas chamber puts his career, his financial security, and the safety of his family on the line.

jgrisham.com

Legal, ethical and moral issues. It makes you think.

Click PLAY or watch an excerpt on YouTube.

Excellent Video on Climate Change

On By Rick McIn bad news, clean water, climate change, economics, ethics, government, health & fitness, things getting worseLeave a comment

The best resource I’ve seen so far on the very alarming and complicated topic.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

We have to break-up BIG TECH

On By Rick McIn Facebook, Google, governmentLeave a comment

Professor Galloway recommends the American government mandates a break-up of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook shareholders would actually make MORE money after the split. And those companies would have a better chance to compete with one another.

Galloway recommends Amazon be split from Amazon Web Services (VIDEO).

He recommends YouTube be split from Google.

MORE COMPETITION is good for the consumer. Good for the economy.

MORE COMPETITION

Elizabeth Warren, for one, is keen to push that legislation. And I agree.

YES. I know governments will do a lousy job. Politicians don’t understand Tech.

But the alternative is even worse. Bezos and Amazon — at this rate — will have too much share of the world’s wealth.

Aggregation Theory postulates that it’s nearly impossible to compete with a company that is able to aggregate a majority of consumers.

How do you launch a company to compete against Amazon, for example.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller

On By Rick McIn books, ethics, government, science1 Comment

A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life

Great book.

One thread is the astonishing story of David Starr Jordan, Stanford University’s first president, a leading scientist of his day.

Did he murder Jane Stanford, wife of the University founder?

More interesting to me was the life story of the author, intertwined with her research into this obscure topic. Lulu Miller is hilarious.

One awful thread is the fact that the USA was the first nation to legislate eugenics. Forced sterilization was the law in 32 U.S. states, and actually inspired Hitler.

AND there’s the fact new to me that … Fish Don’t Exist.

Read the National Book Review.

The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly

On By Rick McIn books, economics, education, ethics, government, happiness, human rights, internetLeave a comment

Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

The Inevitable is a 2016 nonfiction book by Kevin Kelly that forecasts the twelve technological forces that will shape the next thirty years:

  1. Becoming: Moving from fixed products to always upgrading services and subscriptions
  2. Cognifying: Making everything much smarter using cheap powerful AI that we get from the cloud
  3. Flowing: Depending on unstoppable streams in real time for everything
  4. Screening: Turning all surfaces into screens
  5. Accessing: Shifting society from one where we own assets to one where instead we will have access to services at all times.
  6. Sharing: Collaboration at mass scale. Kelly writes, “On my imaginary Sharing Meter Index we are still at 2 out of 10.”
  7. Filtering: Harnessing intense personalization in order to anticipate our desires
  8. Remixing: Unbundling existing products into their most primitive parts and then recombining in all possible ways
  9. Interacting: Immersing ourselves inside our computers to maximize their engagement
  10. Tracking: Employing total surveillance for the benefit of citizens and consumers
  11. Questioning: Promoting good questions is far more valuable than good answers
  12. Beginning: Constructing a planetary system connecting all humans and machines into a global matrix

Though it might sound scary, the book is surprisingly upbeat and optimistic about the future.

Kevin Kelly (born 1952) is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review.

Amazon