I'll keep this short. Some ASSHOLE has weighed up their profit against your entire life and the decision they came to is "screw you, I need at least 10,000,000 times more than you'll own in a lifetime, commoner!" and set their profit margins accordingly.
That's all. I won't even do my usual ask for sharing and support, because I'd rather you just let that article above sink in.
Cheers!
The news is meh or less - inflation is rampant according to this article and in this, they like ALL media are too scared to say it - this "inflation" is nothing more than corporate greed, opportunism, and total disregard for the wellbeing of their customers. We will never have anything approaching wealth justice and equality until we burn every one of their management/executive edifices to the ground, strip out the ideas of free market, capitalism, and predation, and replace that core with a newer one.
Ask anyone (if any are still alive) about the Great Depression. Ask anyone about the last Recession. They'll tell you one of two tales, either the situation was dire due to Depression/Recession, or they just say "we had to tighten our belts but we got through it." The former will have been the ones that were also relentlessly bombarded with the situation by a sensationalist media, the latter more likely to be the type to turn to the sports and social pages or even *gasp!* not even take in the news at all.
Media orgs aren't immune from this need to strip out their rotten cores and replace them with a new management. They too dance to the tune of money, money, über alles. They need sensationalism over journalism, because clickbait works online and in the media, and actual news is deemed too dry. Their best interests are served when they support the edifice that the money flows from.
Nothing shows that capitalistic system in action like this article from TND. The LNP Coalition (and frankly I'm surprised they are still 'coalescing' after their utter debacle at the last election) has nil, zero, zip, zilch, nada interest in the wellbeing of ANY member of the populace that isn't shoving money up the Honorable Members' various orifices.
There was a time (and not that long back) when such government styles attracted bricks, molotov cocktails, and protests in the streets that ran for weeks and were attended by a percentage of the populace to be reckoned with. And a mere two centuries back, people who were exploited by their landlords / bosses would often settle those matters with a small and personal crowd, and real clubs and pitchforks . . .
I'm not advocating for such base violence, but certainly I am an enthusiastic proponent of making our feelings known through emailing politicians, signing petitions both physical and online, and even going to see your local Member and speaking with them about whatever situation you feel needs redress. Many local Members actually will hear you out and, if they see enough public support for your point of view, adopt it.
Write to your local politician/CEO/owner/landlord/councillor if something seems unfair to you, and get your friends to also contact those people and support your view. This is one of few recourses left to us other than unimaginable ones, and if the government moves to shut down these last bastions of free speech as the previous government has shut down peaceful protest then they'll be regarded in the world as a totalitarian regime - and indeed, they will have become one and made themselves a target - and leave us no other peaceful options.
"COVID is over!" - "Uh - no, COVID has peaked!" - "Oh look! - MonkeyPox Virus! Lucky it isn't serious!"
What's your favourite piece of epidemiological epistemological ineptitude? Truth is, that if EVERY Government in the world realised it, there's one easy way to actually make all these diseases go away - another lockdown, for a few weeks.
The reason the lockdowns didn't work last few times is that not EVERYONE was locked down - banks kept on charging interest and expecting to accrue interest and collect loan repayments, landlords were not told to halt rents, companies weren't told to make essential goods, resources, services, and utilities available free for the duration of the lockdown - so these were asymetrically applied lockdowns. And that's just not on when there's a worldwide pandemic that threatens everyone, and is still killing hundreds of thousands of people.
But it does show you how weak and gutless governments are in the face of their economically superior bosses...
I'll point to this as a prime example, although we've had quite the same experiences here in Australia and I'm sure in every other country. In regard to this article, I'll pull bits of one longish quote:
“. . . if you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth . . . ? When your family, your company, and all the people in your orbit have become the targets . . . you have no choice.”
Pssst. I have one bit of advice for him - if you and your family and company and people you associate with are all innocent, then there is nothing that can incriminate you or any of them. That's what being honest is like.
Twenty years ago some people set out to prove that - hmmm... Actually, I no longer have any idea, do you? - but that they'd kill people for it. The violence that we abhor, writ large. Another reason to end a system that produces such huge wealth disparities. Anyhow, the Bali bombings themselves are now etched into our memories, even if Jemaah Islamiyah's purpose is inconceivable to me and no doubt quite a few of you.
But it did bring out the hero in many. And now that event is going to be made into a mini series, and I hope the series sufficiently shows that. I'm looking forward to people seeing it and realising that all that violence ended up achieving nothing, but that the hero people in the aftermath achieved greatness. I refuse to acknowledge the utter dregs of our species that perpetrated this, I'm glad I can't think of any of their names and even happier that I actually even had to look up the name of their organisation, so utterly has it sunk into obscurity.
In addition to writing these articles I'm also experimenting with ways of recycling waste that can be done at the cottage industry or community hub levels, not so much because it'll magically convert 100% of local waste into recycled useful articles, but because people who are doing these sorts of activities are likely to talk about them to people in their community, and so raise even more awareness of the issues and dangers.
So please - take a look at my News Stand where you'll see live updated links to everything I publish; And take some time and share the links to the News Stand and this article with your friends and readers.
Take a subscription to my weekly newsletter where you'll receive the same information;
Or maybe contact me via the webform; Or email me;
You can also donate either directly or here or at my Ko-Fi page for the price of a coffee, or even make a regular monthly donation there.
All donations are put towards keeping these websites online, and for developing devices, machines, and techniques to easily and safely recycle materials on a tiny scale.
Quick note for the old memory files. PFAS (the forever chemical that seemingly knows no bounds) in rainwater is now measured in unsafe concentrations in rainwater everywhere on Earth.
I'm going to presume that distillation is still good, but it's a bit of a blow if you were figuring on being a survivalist. After all, the rain cycle drives all water flowing on the planet. and while the article makes a distinction between developed and underdeveloped countries:
"Although in the industrial world we don’t often drink rainwater, many people around the world expect it to be safe to drink and it supplies many of our drinking water sources.”
- I can't. I refer to this and this and it seems that it's not easy to remove PFASs from water without major filtering. So how is the water I drink (and which fell as rain - contaminated with PFAS - and then collected in the water supply dam) any less contaminated than the rainwater?
Have you ever seen a 4 hectare-sized activated carbon filter in your town's water supply? Or a warehouse-sized ion separator gizmo? I sure as hell haven't...
We do use a filter jug to make clean drinking water but now I might have to make enough for cooking as well . . .
As always, please share this article and my others like it, go to my News Stand to see all my other posts and share links to the News Stand and any articles you found interesting, and if you can, donate here or here or here. Or subscribe to my once a week newsletter.
The tyre, car, and tile sales places along the roadsides will be stripped bare by rampaging berry growers, you mark my words! 😸
This on Linked-In that I found and reposted is interesting. I like that the ag robots are being used to the max, there's no point having these little tractors sitting in the shed for 75% of the year, after all. And I'm also a bit annoyed that I missed this point in the LI article, so I'm going to expand on that here.
Agbots are more and more becoming a thing - they drag harvest trailers from the orchard / field to the processing and packing shed, some are in use for controlling weeds between the rows, and I'm sure they have more functions that I'm not aware of.
So on that basis, adding an airdancer as a scarecrow makes sense, but it'll also increase the number of agbots being manufactured. On that, I do rest a case, that being that we're using more and more of the planet's scarce - and definitely not bountifully endless - resources. And we'll be doing it so everyone can have blueberries all year round, not for some profound planet-saving reason . . .
 |
| Sad CrAIyon art says "bai healthy soil." |
I say this on a day not long after the day of this year the number of resources we're taking from the planet has exceeded the capacity of the planet to supply them for this year, for about the 50th year running. We're in effect living on overdraft, consuming what tomorrow's generation will need - and won't have. In fact, we are that generation. And the next one will be even worse off if we don't slow down and leave a bit more for them.
Technology is one of the reasons we're in the situation we're in now. But our survival imperative is the reason for the technology. Bear that in mind. And in a way we can actually blame our DNA.
"DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music."
– Richard Dawkins
If DNA could find a way to just mingle, mutate, and multiply without a corresponding life-form, it would. Our survival imperative is put there by DNA to ensure it's survival imperative. But. . . What we do with that imperative is how we master the DNA.
The first neolithic male hominid that picked up a stick to beat another male hominid up in order to get to the female, was obeying DNA's survival imperative: "Spread my genes out into the world! Make ME the One And Only DNA on the planet!" In the process, that protohuman also invented technology, in this case a technology of conflict and war.
But the female, heavily gravid and needing more nourishment, became the dependant of Grog The Stick-Wielder, and when his Stick failed to bring down any birds no matter how fast he swung it, she probably clucked her tongue, grabbed the stick from him, and used it to dig up a few yams or onions, thus inventing a peaceful use for the technology.
But competition drove both inventions, because Grog and Georgina were also competing with many other hominids for the resources they could easily reach, to ensure that their combined DNA would survive. (This raises the question, is DNA's Ultimate Purpose to just keep breeding variations, stabilise on just ONE genome, or become something else entirely?)
- S. Jay Olshansky
As well, let's not limit the competition between DNAs to just humans. After all, the bit of the DNA that makes humans, humans, is tiny - somewhere between 1% and 7% depending whom you believe.
Maybe the ultimate aim of the game is to be the last DNA sequence on the planet, but without a host? Whatever. But DNA created family. And villages, clans, countries, religions, politics, love, hatred, fear.
That suited when we had little communication around the world, little travel between countries. We had to protect "our own." And now, we can speak to another person anywhere on the globe. We can go there and be with a person we're attracted to. We can see the damage we're doing to the planet, and as a result we're also becoming less rapacious and greedy for all the resources.
We could say that DNA is becoming aware, but that's not quite true. The intelligence that DNA has given us has become aware, and so - slowly - our approach to our use of the resources is changing. Birthrates are down due to infertility we've caused to ourselves with microplastics and chemicals rendering us less fertile. But there's a double whammy in effect here, with more and more people choosing not to have children.
More and more people are choosing not to consume meat. People are becoming environmentally conscious. Imagine this: three to two centuries ago we got agriculture to the point where we could comfortably feed our population at that time - but didn't. Instead we chose to industrialise and mechanise so that a chosen few could benefit from a surfeit of food, housing, consumer goods, automobiles, and entertainment.
Even among 'ourselves' we established a strict hierarchy of paucity and surfeit, workers and exploiters. In order to, you know, get just ONE genetic string ahead of the rest of the field. But finding compatible partners (and remember that it's basically been our DNA that predisposes us to identify and want a compatible DNA mix) across race and geopolitical boundaries has changed things.
While it seems that violence is on the rise, I think that perhaps our perception of it has become more acute, and is driving a trend towards less violence. Our population has doubled in fifty years, but I wonder if violence has doubled, or if we've just enabled violence by technology to do more damage?
Technology is making it possible for us to see more of the violence around the world. 300 - 200 years ago the situation in Ukraine would have come to us a month behind, with a grainy lithograph or photograph and a few paragraphs of text. Today we can see the destruction in realtime.
We can (and many do) go there and see it first hand, and send images and video back to the rest of our friends. We can help out by donating a drone or chipping in to a fund for that purpose. Should we desire and have the skillset, we can even pilot that drone. These are things technology can do. Also, make rapid advances in cleaning up the planet, removing some of our pollution, recycling what would otherwise be wasted resources, growing more food, distributing it faster a further.
And it gives us a truly global awareness of the planet and what we've done to it. I only hope that this awareness will sweep across the world faster than the attempts of the remaining throwbacks to take advantage of the confusion.
In addition to writing these articles I'm also experimenting with ways of recycling waste that can be done at the cottage industry or community hub levels, not so much because it'll magically convert 100% of local waste into recycled useful articles, but because people who are doing these sorts of activities are likely to talk about them to people in their community, and so raise even more awareness of the issues and dangers.
So please - take a look at my News Stand where you'll see live updated links to everything I publish; And take some time and share the links to the News Stand and this article with your friends and readers.
Take a subscription to my weekly newsletter where you'll receive the same information;
Or maybe contact me via the webform; Or email me;
You can also donate either directly or at my Ko-Fi page for the price of a coffee, or even make a regular monthly donation there.
All donations are put towards keeping these websites online, and for developing devices, machines, and techniques to easily and safely recycle materials on a tiny scale.
