Futures

polystyle

Well-known member
(Possible) futures ...
Japan will get an effective Prime Minister - and not someone who used Mom's $ to help get elected.
US' 'third political party' wins a Presidential election.
Europe and the Euro survive 5 years of slow. Or was it 10 ?
Recent serial earthquakes , followed by volcanics has ended - or is only pausing for reload
The bloody faced Sinonaut hits Youtube http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/world/asia/04china.html?hp
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Some last legal days in some States , but can't see this going away now that it's here
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/us/11k2.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

What's ridiculous is that all those stories about people freaking out and admitting themselves to ER are all no doubt true, because that stuff is so stupidly strong - but of course, people smoke it because it's "the legal alternative to weed". Just one of so many examples of drug law making drugs much more dangerous that they'd otherwise be, which of course to lawmakers is justification for even more drug legislation...
 

polystyle

Well-known member
What's ridiculous is that all those stories about people freaking out and admitting themselves to ER are all no doubt true, because that stuff is so stupidly strong - but of course, people smoke it because it's "the legal alternative to weed". Just one of so many examples of drug law making drugs much more dangerous that they'd otherwise be, which of course to lawmakers is justification for even more drug legislation...

hear that Tea,
trend here in States tho' is towards 'medical marijuana' coming on ,
and sometimes becoming the job many are betting their economic recovery on.
Future = Legal skunk and illegal synthetic weed ? that'd be ... new !
 

polystyle

Well-known member
"Blue Gold" / Water Wars

This docu was just on Sundance http://www.bluegold-worldwaterwars.com/

Coming: Every drop of fresh water on the planet will be owned by ...
Suez
Veolia > Vivendi's water interest
Thames - these three privately owned water companies own or are getting their hands on water rights in a country near you or under you.

First the WTO softens up the host country by directing it to sell water rights ... open markets or else.

Just wait a bit longer and GM among other US giant companies will own the rest because the Law says after they have purified it, desalinated it - they own it.

S Africa - in some place only Coca Cola's Desani brand water is available- at a higher price then Coke.

Bolivia - after Bechtel came in - citizens were prohibited from collecting rainwater ...
people power eventually booted B out.

Nestle tries to buy the Great Lakes. And keeps trying , state by state

Canada, Brazil, Russia become water superpowers
 

lanugo

von Verfall erzittern
Earth 2 discovered!

The planet, found by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, is orbiting in the middle of the "habitable zone" of the red dwarf star Gliese 581, which means it could have water on its surface.

Liquid water and an atmosphere are necessary for a planet to possibly sustain life, even it it might not be a great place to live, the scientists said.

The scientists determined that the planet, which they have called Gliese 581g, has a mass three to four times that of Earth and an orbital period of just under 37 days.

Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky planet and has enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere, according to Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the leaders of the team that discovered the planet.
 

sufi

lala
can we maybe do this thread again with luka's asclepius staff collection wherever that got to?
who-emblem.png
 

polystyle

Well-known member
Had been hearing about Kim Stanley Robinson, noted a title or two,
then Red Mars showed up in the local Book bin.
Then Green Mars and Blue Mars, even The Martians !
Then the heavy tome 'Ministry Of The Future ' whew , some of it reads like a government


" Geoengineering, carbon credits and carbon taxation, the Paris Agreement, divestment, voting in people of good conscience and voting out the people without any — yes, all of these are important and useful, but none of them alone can save the future. The Ministry for the Future needs a black ops division, too. What passes for hope here is thus a very particular, very narrow trail somewhere between reform, revolution, and revenge. "
 

polystyle

Well-known member
Wow that was a really tight one - getting rid of Trump.
By the time he decided to visit NYC, there was one guy waiting for him to pass.
One.

In talks w friends over the COVID months, before the last election there was palpable yearning on the left about how and what Biden would do, how we have to 'make do' with him.
As it appears now, he may be getting better advice and has better people around him then Obama did. I mean smarter and not as chained to the Democrats bs.
3rd party ?
not sure but maybe not quite yet.
And who , what would it be ?
Donnie boy's new social network ?

Not sure the world is waiting for him - anymore.
Europe got the third Covid wave.
Japan never got it but tightened border anyway ( Olympics are coming in July , they want it spic and span beforehand, even with no audience present ).
WHO in the end did say they thought COVID came from animals it had jumped to - from humans.
As it is goes, and has humans do, the Chinese Gov. had developed a chain of animal farming locations in order to create jobs for rural citizens !
It was a pride and a joy , until it wasn't.

Still have 2 Chinese friends who swear it came from the Lab adjacent to the live market @ Wuhan.

For much of the last 4 years both Russia and China played together, made plans ,
have a vision to do a MoonBase together.
But they were caught out- as was everyone else- and in some instances badly wrong footed.
Well, karma goes around.

It will take oh 4 years , 8 years to really get on with it.
Moon is def hot.
A Marius Hills address.

The next 10 -20 years will shake many things out- genetics, vis Crispr, software,
neural nets, bio everything. Bio punk and it's discontents.
 

polystyle

Well-known member
Excerpt on 'if you knew your future'

EZRA KLEIN: So you have a few different stories around this question of, if the future’s already happened, we could potentially know it. And what would knowing the future do to a person? So in one of your stories, it inspires people to act to bring about that future, to play their assigned role. In another, it leads many to stop acting altogether, to fall into this almost coma-like existence. What do you think it would do to you?
TED CHIANG: I don’t know. I don’t think anyone can know because I don’t think the human mind is really compatible with having detailed knowledge of one’s future. I should clarify that I believe in free will. And we can talk about that in a minute. I don’t want my stories to be taken as an argument that human beings lack free will. I believe that human beings do have free will, if you think about the question correctly.
However, what some of my stories address is, the idea that, OK, given that Einstein seems to have proven that the future is fixed, if you could get knowledge of the future, what would that do to you? This is not a situation that any of us need to worry about because we’re never going to get information from the future. But for me, it is a very sort of philosophically interesting question as to how would a mind cope with that. Could a mind cope with that? I don’t think that there are any really good solutions to that situation in terms of trying to reconcile sort of logical consistency with our experience of volition. I think that would be very, very difficult.
EZRA KLEIN: Let me ask you a question that I think about fairly often, I think partly because I’m Jewish culturally. If I could tell you, if you could know with certainty the date of your death, would you want to know it?
TED CHIANG: Yeah, I probably would. I probably would.
EZRA KLEIN: Really? Oh, I would not, under any circumstances, want to know.
TED CHIANG: I mean, it seems like it might be useful so that you could make some preparations. It might be good to get your affairs in order. We’re not talking about a lot of detailed information because I think the more information you have, yeah, the more that it’s going to mess with you. The more information you have, the closer we get to this situation that I sometimes write about, where, yeah, if you have perfect knowledge of what’s going to happen to you, yeah, that, I think, is kind of incompatible with human volition. But very limited pieces of information could be helpful.
EZRA KLEIN: I think the rationally correct response is yes. I mean, if I knew I was going to die 10 years from now as opposed to 50 years from now, I would live the 10 years differently, or I think I would. At the same time, I think if I knew that, the problem is I would be overwhelmed by anxiety for many of those 10 years. So, however I wanted to live them, it might be hard for me to approach them in that way, which may be simply a psychological failing on my part. But it’s that collision between the information would be good, and the mind does not feel built to handle the information that I always find fascinating about that question.
TED CHIANG: I don’t think anyone would claim that it would be easy to have this information, that it would be fun or pleasant. But we do have examples of people who have some idea that they will die in the near term, and it’s no cakewalk. But I think largely, people are able to cope with it. And it doesn’t seem like it’s permanently debilitating. It is difficult in the short-term, but I think people are mostly able to cope.
 

polystyle

Well-known member
Day by day we go.
This time we call the 21st century

Did we already go past or through 'the elbow' in terms of getting onto at least some positioning towards some kind(s) of acceptable world(s) ?
Or has COVID really been the prime mover ...

Never before have we all had to do it for yourselves.
Surviving the last 4 years was not easy, the daily level of *hit and hate coming from a channel that could not be shut up.
Until it did get shut.

Shift shift shifting with some up for new exposure to the sun ,
and at same time new lows ( " still collating " )
Nation states - down
States - up
Corporations - did reach the info baron stage , esp. one Mark Z @ FaceBook
- anyone has any doubt, just see that movie Fincher did.
That's MZ. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Musk's Space X, Teslas, home batteries
and they all reached some point in these last years.
As what we call capitalism came to some places, maybe people had stopped doing much sometimes during COVID and could just sit, be bored and just maybe take new looks at everything.
It's all in play.

The downsides and upsides have never been distributed nicely, anything approaching evenly.
Will the overall accumulating effects and impact of the recent killing of 8 Asian women south in the Carolina's by white Baptist 'sex addict'
followed by last week's broad daylight, middle of the sidewalk of 43rd savage kick down of the 65 year old Philippine lady begin to add up enough in people's minds to make them consider and vote for Andrew Yang as mayor of NYC ?
After the above, to see a US born cat, of Taiwanese descent become mayor at this time well, that would be interesting.

Once a box has been opened , one has to go through all contents.
All contents.
Another example is race , it's much better to try and deal with the many issues when the wound is re opened / never did close.
Trial of the cop who had his damn knee on George Floyd's neck is going on now.
We are not in the same place we were 6 months ago.

Hell, we may get together a plan to drain the melt currently pouring down inside the glaciers and get a few more years.
Odds are it would take a massive kill or something like that to make us move quick enough.
Wouldn't bet against that happening though, any year now ,
ref. Kim Stanley Robinson's "Ministry Of The Future".

Outmoded Gov.'s, present day corporations ( the tech 4 above and an adjacent 50 in mind here ), the Peter Thiel's, Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys, Eric Schimdt's of the world now can see others have moved up, and around and out horizontally from what they used to see as center.
And they dunno wtf
 

polystyle

Well-known member
Day by day we go.
This time we call the 21st century

Did we already go past or through 'the elbow' in terms of getting onto at least some positioning towards some kind(s) of acceptable world(s) ?
Or has COVID really been the prime mover ...

Never before have we all had to do it for yourselves.
Surviving the last 4 years was not easy, the daily level of *hit and hate coming from a channel that could not be shut up.
Until it did get shut.

Shift shift shifting with some up for new exposure to the sun ,
and at same time new lows ( " still collating " )
Nation states - down
States - up
Corporations - did reach the info baron stage , esp. one Mark Z @ FaceBook
- anyone has any doubt, just see that movie Fincher did.
That's MZ. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Musk's Space X, Teslas, home batteries
and they all reached some point in these last years.
As what we call capitalism came to some places, maybe people had stopped doing much sometimes during COVID and could just sit, be bored and just maybe take new looks at everything.
It's all in play.

The downsides and upsides have never been distributed nicely, anything approaching evenly.
Will the overall accumulating effects and impact of the recent killing of 8 Asian women south in the Carolina's by white Baptist 'sex addict'
followed by last week's broad daylight, middle of the sidewalk of 43rd savage kick down of the 65 year old Philippine lady begin to add up enough in people's minds to make them consider and vote for Andrew Yang as mayor of NYC ?
After the above, to see a US born cat, of Taiwanese descent become mayor at this time well, that would be interesting.

Once a box has been opened , one has to go through all contents.
All contents.
Another example is race , it's much better to try and deal with the many issues when the wound is re opened / never did close.
Trial of the cop who had his damn knee on George Floyd's neck is going on now.
We are not in the same place we were 6 months ago.

Hell, we may get together a plan to drain the melt currently pouring down inside the glaciers and get a few more years.
Odds are it would take a massive kill or something like that to make us move quick enough.
Wouldn't bet against that happening though, any year now ,
ref. Kim Stanley Robinson's "Ministry Of The Future".

Outmoded Gov.'s, present day corporations ( the tech 4 above and an adjacent 50 in mind here ), the Peter Thiel's, Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys, Eric Schimdt's of the world now can see others have moved up, and around and out horizontally from what they used to see as center.
And they dunno wtf
Oh yeah was going to post on this book :
Some great stuff here , rural doing it for themselves ? sure.
A CCP plan to give helping hand to have citizens make some Party tracked money by raising livestock ?
Guess what that just might have bred ?

Blockchain Chicken Farm


"
It’s good to turn on the klieg lights here. Rural China is a part of the world Americans likely ponder very little, despite being economically entwined with it. To the extent China looms in the American imagination, it’s mostly as an economic adversary, a land that has mercilessly stolen American manufacturing jobs by offering dirt-cheap labor in gleaming factories. (At least, that’s the message the White House has hammered for years now.) It’s certainly true that the country’s manufacturing explosion has helped create a much wealthier China. But it has also produced a rural-urban economic schism that neatly mirrors that of the United States itself. While the cities have gotten rich, the countryside has been left behind, with higher infant mortality, lower life expectancy and markedly lower educational attainment.
This divide worries China’s leaders deeply."
 
Top