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Tag Archives: technology
Stairway to Heaven
Stairway to Heaven “Let us stop talking about collapse, peak oil, and global weirding and begin a conversation about what is cool and what is uncool.“ In Nine to Five Jane Fonda’s character, Judy Bernly, is the office newbie. In a scene evoking Lucille Ball on the assembly line, she pushes too many buttons on an enormous Xerox machine and […]
True Believers
True Believers There is a special species of idiot at large in the financial media space who believe absolutely in the desperate and tragic public relations bullshit that this society churns out to convince itself that the techno-industrial high life can continue indefinitely, despite the mandates of reality — in particular, the fairy tales about […]
Pennsylvania to Become First State to Use “Precrime” Statistics in Criminal Sentencing
Pennsylvania to Become First State to Use “Precrime” Statistics in Criminal Sentencing Criminal sentencing has long been based on the present crime and, sometimes, the defendant’s past criminal record. In Pennsylvania, judges could soon consider a new dimension: the future. Pennsylvania is on the verge of becoming one of the first states in the country […]
Energy, the repressed: Paging Dr. Freud
Energy, the repressed: Paging Dr. Freud Jeremy Rifkin announced the end of work in a book by that title in 1995. Today, we are once again being told that the end of work is nigh. The Atlantic Monthly tells us so in a piece entitled, “A World Without Work.” Automation and computer technology will bring unimaginable change and prosperity–and result in […]
EXCLUSIVE: Edward Snowden Explains Why Apple Should Continue To Fight the Government on Encryption
EXCLUSIVE: Edward Snowden Explains Why Apple Should Continue To Fight the Government on Encryption As the Obama administration campaign to stop the commercialization of strong encryption heats up, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden is firing back on behalf of the companies like Apple and Google that are finding themselves under attack. “Technologists and companies working to protect […]
Liberty Movement Needs More Innovations To Counter Technological Tyranny
Liberty Movement Needs More Innovations To Counter Technological Tyranny The great lesson from history that each consecutive generations seems to forget is that the tools of tyranny used outward will inevitably be turned inward. That is to say, the laws and weapons governments devise for supposed enemies abroad will ALWAYS and eventually be used against […]
Greece and Global Class War
Greece and Global Class War Then By 2008 the neoliberal project that had been propelled by bullshit, wishful thinking and copious quantities of bank money freed from any pretense that it could ever be repaid was coming unwound. The same ‘favor’ that American mortgage lenders had done communities of color and exurbs in the U.S. […]
Twenty-Three Geniuses
Twenty-Three Geniuses If there is a Pulitzer Booby Prize for stupidity, waste no time in awarding it to The New York Times’ Monday feature, The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion. The former “newspaper of record” wants us to assume now that the sky’s the limit for human activity on the planet earth. Problemo cancelled. The article and […]
Is the slowdown in productivity growth a result of energy costs?
Is the slowdown in productivity growth a result of energy costs? Slowing productivity growth in the United States has been in the news in recent months. It has become a concern to policymakers because they believe it is one of the primary contributors to a middle-class economic squeeze according to the annual report of the White […]
How Sustainable is Stored Sunlight?
How Sustainable is Stored Sunlight? One of the constraints of solar power is that it is not always available: it is dependent on daylight hours and clear skies. In order to fill these gaps, a storage solution or a backup infrastructure of fossil fuel power plants is required — a factor that is often ignored […]
Muskular Magic
Muskular Magic Elon Musk, Silicon Valley’s poster-boy genius replacement for the late Steve Jobs, rolled out his PowerWall battery last week with Star Wars style fanfare, doing his bit to promote and support the delusional thinking that grips a nation unable to escape the toils of techno-grandiosity. The main delusion: that we can “solve” […]
How Sustainable is PV Solar Power?
How Sustainable is PV Solar Power? Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems generate “free” electricity from sunlight, but manufacturing them is an energy-intensive process. It’s generally assumed that it only takes a few years before solar panels have generated as much energy as it took to make them, resulting in very low greenhouse gas emissions compared to […]
A Degrowth Response to an Ecomodernist Manifesto
A Degrowth Response to an Ecomodernist Manifesto A group known as the “ecomodernists,” which includes prominent environmental thinkers and development specialists such as Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, Stewart Brand, David Keith, and Joyashree Roy has recently published a statement of principles called An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015). Many of the authors of the Manifesto are connected to an influential think […]
