“You know the drill. The bills will be in your hands before the pain medications wear off” … and your credit rating obliterated before you can finish filling out the redundant claims forms that wastefully repeat the information that is already in the insurance company’s computers.
“PBS pointed out that the health and insurance industries are spending more than $1,400,000.00 a day just to destroy the Public Option. Most of this money is going to, and through, Republicans. The evil truth is, the insurance industry, along with the hospitals, HMO’s, pharma, nursing homes — it owns Democrats, too. Not the whole party … hundreds of Democrats have taken campaign money from the health sector without handing over their souls as receipts. But conveniently, the owns that ARE owned have made themselves easy to spot in a crowd. They call themselves Blue Dogs.”
MUST VIEW video!
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The Spirit of the American Corporation
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=1208
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Bernie Madoff, Scapegoat
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=992
On Huffpost: Yes, he stole $65 billion from some already quite wealthy people. I know that’s upsetting to them because rich guys like Bernie are not supposed to be stealing from their own kind. Crime, thievery, looting — that’s what happens on the other side of town. The rules of the money game on Park Avenue and Wall Street are comprised of things like charging the public 29% credit card interest, tricking people into taking out a second mortgage they can’t afford, and concocting a student loan system that has graduates in hock for the next 20 years. Now that’s smart business! And it’s legal. That’s where Bernie went wrong — his scheming, his trickery was an outrage both because it was illegal and because he preyed on his side of the tracks. Had Mr. Madoff just followed the example of his fellow top one-percenters, there were many ways he could have legally multiplied his wealth many times over. Here’s how it’s done. First, threaten your workers that you’ll move their jobs offshore if they don’t agree to reduce their pay and benefits. Then move those jobs offshore. Then place that income on the shores of the Cayman Islands and pay no taxes. Don’t put the money back into your company. Put it into your pocket and the pockets of your shareholders. There! Done! Legal! But Bernie wanted to play X-games Capitalism, run by the mantra that’s at the core of all capitalistic endeavors: Enough Is Never Enough. You have the right to make as much as you can, and if people are too stupid to read the fine print of their health insurance policy or their GM "100,000-mile warranty," well, tough luck, losers.
Here’s the full article.
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Obama Cracking Down On Tax Havens (huffingtonpost.com)
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Jon Stewart Skewers CNBC, His Finest Hour Yet
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=940
Possibly Stewart’s finest hour, yet.
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Social Collapse Best Practices; Creative Social Collapse Event on FRIDAY Feb. 13
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=905
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 10:38:35 -0800From: Stewart BrandSubject: [SALT] Creative social collapse FRIDAY Feb. 13 [Note 2 ways to assure yourself a seat, below] A close observer of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe twenty years ago, engineer Dmitry Orlov finds a similar sequence of events taking shape in America. His savagely humorous presentation spells out how Russia was better prepared than the US is now for the stages of collapse — which begin with financial meltdown. Renewal awaits on the other side of collapse, and there are ways to hasten that process. Orlov is the author of Reinventing Collapse: Soviet Example and American Prospects. “Social Collapse Best Practices” Dmitry OrlovCowell Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco7pm, FRIDAY, February 13 The show starts promptly at 7:30pm. Admission is free — if there’s room. To be sure of a seat, become a Long Now member and reserve a seat or order an advance ticket ($10). Recent SALT talks have overflowed, and latecomers had to be turned away. To head off the problem, here’s the new arrangement: You can also purchase tickets for $10 HERE Please note, Members and Ticket holders: if you arrive after 7:25pm we may not be able to seat you in the theater. All tickets and RSVP’s are Will-Call; advance sales and RSVP’s end at 3:00pm on Feb. 13. Please allow time for traffic, parking, walking to the theater, and check-in. The Seminar will be simulcast in the lobby with free overflow seating, and any extra seats in the theater will be released right before the lecture starts.
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What if 25% and Growing Real U.S. Unemployment is Equilibrium?
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=901
From Capitalism++ For starters, it would be called Structural Unemployment; and there is mounting, compelling evidence that this is precisely where we’re headed. Not as punishment — unless we are stupid and inflexible about it — but as the logical outcome of the overwhelming success of industrialization. Nevertheless, it’s also observed in nature that every metamorphosis is an excruciating process; an epiphany of existential crisis.
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Singularity University: FutureSkew U ?
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=895
Let’s see if I read this right: Pay $25,000 for the privilege of pitching the VC’s so you can give away 80% of your total Return on Innovation to the same 8% of the population who already owns 80% of the wealth? Please do blast my biases to smithereens, but this doesn’t exactly strike me as a Roadmap to Postscarcity.
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Job Application
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=858
Hello to my fellow digital native interwebz tweeple. I’d like to once again suggest that the era of top secret insider trading 19th century paper resume fluffing and pimping is long over; therefore, you are reading this open application even before the hiring board members and founding team leaders read it. In part because, today, every hiring manager is participating in an increasingly open and transparent team-building process wherein new norms need to be modeled both from the bottom up and the top down. Individually, none of us is perfect; however, each can pledge to continually do our best to fulfill our own part in building a more sustainable, adaptable, accessible world, moving forward. As always, I look forward to learning from the next steps of this ongoing, collectively co-constructed and implemented experiment called life. Subject: Revolutionary startup seeks C-level consumer Internet professional (palo alto) Date: 2009-01-27, 8:41AM PST Position and company highlights: –very competitive salary plus significant equity –work within a dynamic team within a unique, growing company Requirements: –Excellent grasp of Consumer Internet growth strategy, methodology and measurable prior experience. –Ability to design, implement and manage local and regional marketing plan Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster. Please, no phone calls about this job! Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests. Cover Letter Hello, Below, please find my resume, comprehensive digital identity, and more background check material than one could readily pay for: http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/ I am interested in working with the team to attain category leadership through continuous creative innovation in parallel with superior business execution. I believe it is important that we seize the current global market opportunity to model more sustainable, adaptive business norms, derived from already proven best practices. Therefore, I am interested in a progressive company structure; one that enthusiastically adopts a 20x multiple salary cap on all executives; obviously, including myself. Please see http://tr.im/sharedfate for the concept. We can work out the math together if we agree with this principle. I am also interested in a company whose equity structure improves upon the now defunct winner-take-all VC model, by proportionately rewarding each and every team member with an equity stake that parallels the prescribed salary caps, above. We may need to work together to create that new model from scratch. I understand legacy VC risk-reward philosophical justifications; however, we are in a new environment that requires more realistic thinking and recalibrated expectations for what constitutes reasonable returns on capital, moving forward. Within a day-to-day team context, I am consensus-driven and prefer a role wherein I can help to provide the team with the tools and resources required to achieve its objectives; however, wherever consensus conviction or clear direction are lacking, I am able to articulate creative, actionable strategic visions and pragmatic tactical product marketing road maps, as required. I will constantly challenge the team with original, sometimes orthogonal, and even unorthodox thinking. Upon a foundation of daily Specific Task Accomplishments, I will encourage cognitive diversity and open, transparent communication among all team members. I will advocate for a company culture derived from the final published issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, as recently highlighted in Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, namely: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish, @silverton Related articles by Zemanta
Steve Jobs on the Stupidity of Living in the Past and Uncertainty of the Future [Steve Jobs] (i.gizmodo.com) “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” (longnow.org) Remember the Whole Earth Catalog? (greatthinkers.suite101.com)
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Dr. Ben, Sir Ken, and Capitalism++
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=749
Today, I am very happy to discover more leading intellectual energy applied to these urgently pragmatic and timely matters. By way of preface, I’d like to first share a few preliminary observations from a morning radio program that I hope will further help to humanize the technical and operational requirements inherent to architectures for Capitalism++. The purpose will become more clear when we later introduce the relevance of “economic mechanisms in their social context.” This morning on KQED Forum, 10-year veteran network engineers were told that they were right to consider “mowing lawns” or “retooling” for new “relevant” skills. When did IT expertise become irrelevant to Web 5.0 or whatever the marketers call it next? Added insult was piled on to injury by virtue of the hasty ambivalence conveyed through both content and tenor of the remarks when one bold listener called in with sufficient bravery to share his success at becoming healthy thanks to treatment for some version of bipolar disorder. This is a spectrum of affliction that plagues many of the best and brightest in the field, but which is still shunned and hushed with plague-like ignorance and fear. The caller could in all likelihood be healthier than the modal norm for his cohort, due in no small part to the all too rare enlightened self-knowledge that often leads to successful treatment and oft-consequent “better than baseline” emotional health outcomes. Instead, the caller will most likely continue to fall victim to increasing career ostracization in recompense for such conscientious and objectivity lucid behavior. Getting emotionally healthy is arguably the only prudent healthcare decision that is, in effect, still the functional equivalent of a sociological — and certainly professional — crime. Hence, try as I may, I simply can not believe that these highly respectable public voices can mete out such outmoded advice with a straight face. While the foregoing biases against the obvious benefits of improved emotional health may be arguably absurd on a number of post information-age levels; added to this morning’s program was the persistent denial of the obvious rampant ageism which is increasingly undeniable in a rapidly consolidating labor market. Much of the double speak surrounding this matter borders on the intellectually abject. These are tech jobs for which highly motivated 50 year-olds are ideally and superiorly qualified in every way, with many even willing to accept sometimes grotesquely depressed wages. But the message from authoritative voices for the status quo of lifelong wage slavery is, “you’ve accrued too much market value by virtue of your strong moral character, diligence, and hard earned cross-disciplinary experience; so go do something for which you lack such accrued value.” This Blame the Victim “retooling” message is part and parcel of the timeless and implicit wage slavery mantra encoded into such utterly bankrupt cliches as “overqualified.” Such tired, cheap, amateur Jedi mind tricks may have worked on illiterate railroad workers and dam builders, but they just ain’t gonna’ cut it for today’s displaced and fully self-aware engineers, MBA’s, doctors, and lawyers. Nope, you’re just not going to weasel and waffle out of this one, Mssrs. Forbes & Kudlow. Against the backdrop of many other such socioeconomic realities, and with typical intellectual incisiveness, Dr. Ben Goertzel cuts to the heart of the systems side of such matters as they pertain to retooling our economic system, captured briefly in the following excerpts. Please read the full post for his complete and accurate context. [T]he recent crisis could be viewed as a failure of the rational-actor model — and a validation of the need to view socioeconomic systems as complex self-organizing systems, involving psychological, sociological and economic dynamics all tangled together … a need that will only increase as technology advances and makes it harder and harder for even smart rational-minded people to approximate rational economic judgments. As a semi-aside: In terms of traditional economists, I’d say Galbraith’s perspective probably accounts for this crisis best. He was always skeptical of over-mathematical approaches, and stressed the need to look at economic mechanisms in their social context. [T]he novel problem that we have here (added on top of the usual human problems of dishonesty, corruption, and so forth) may be that, in a world that is increasingly complex (with financial instruments defined by advanced mathematics, for example), being a rational economic actor is too difficult for almost anybody. The rational-actor assumption fails for a lot of reasons, as many economists have documented in the last few decades … but this analysis of the current financial crisis suggests that as technology advances, it is going to fail worse and worse. The economy is, in some senses, becoming fantastically more and more efficient (at producing more and more interesting configurations of matter and mind given less and less usage of human and material resources) … but it’s doing so via complex, self-organizing dynamics … not via libertarian-style, rational-actor-based free-market dynamics.
File under, “more WHY’S of Capitalism++” and why Basic Income.
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