"THE CAVEMAN OF ATOMIC CITY" - feature documentary [FULL FILM]
Populismo e Fake News / a rose is a rose is a rose
O populismo está mais popular?
“O populismo não emerge apenas da manipulação. É um sintoma de muitos problemas e desafios sérios, genuínos e complexos que o mundo contemporâneo está a enfrentar”, explica o académico finlandês.
“O que torna o populismo tão aliciante é o facto de “oferecer respostas simples para problemas complexos, construindo uma parede ou negando a ciência”.
A eficácia do populismo assenta nas “experiências reais e vividas de incerteza e de risco, na sensação de segurança e de direito” para as quais sugere “soluções nostálgicas e dramáticas”. “Há uma confiança na liderança carismática” e, por outro lado, uma “desconfiança no debate, na discussão e na evidência”.
Aqui
Time is memory
Mais uma receita para ludibriar as armadilhas cognitivas.
Para obter um crescimento exponencial de felicidade, contribuindo para um aumento da eficiência termodinâmica.
If time is memory, and we want more time... Then what we want is, more memories! Good ones preferably...
Time is memory and you control it | Lila Davachi
It is a red pill, indeed!
"We rarely talk openly about what’s required for a woman to have a good sexual experience, and so many heterosexual women learn the mechanics of sex and female orgasms from movies (most of which are written, directed and produced by ... men). What I like to call the three-strokes-of-penetration-bite-your-lip-arch-the-back-and-moan routine. [...] Many years ago I decided to take back my body and claim my confidence. This was about both owning my years of education and accepting only a worthy male partner. A man truly interested in learning what I like."
Aqui
Remembering memories, and happiness vs well being
The riddle of experience vs. memory | Daniel Kahneman
The experiencing self lives it's life continuously. And it has moments of experience one after the other.
What happens to these moments? ... The psychological present is said to be 3 seconds long...
– They are lost forever. Most of them don't leave a trace. Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self.
What defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings. Endings are very, very important.
The biggest difference between the experiencing self and the remembering self is the handling of time.
Time, has very little impact on the story.
But... It's the remembering self that makes decisions... We go on vacations in the service of the remembering self.
Why do we put so much weight on memory, relative to the weight we put on experience?
So... The two selves bring up two concepts of happiness.
The happiness of the remembering self is not about how happily a person lives. It's about how satisfied or pleased a person is when that person thinks about her life.
The main lesson that we (researchers) have learnt is that they're REALLY different. You can know how satisfied a person is with their life, and that really doesn't teach you much about how happily they're living their life.
We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like. Spending time with people that we like. There are other pleasures but this is dominant.
We should not think of happiness as a substitute for well being. It is a completely different notion.
It is very difficult to think straight about well being.
We do not attend to the same things when we think about life and when we actually live.
Throw it away
Abbey Lincoln: Throw It Away
I think about the life I live
A figure made of clay
And think about the things I lost
The things I gave away
And when I'm in a certain mood
I search the house and look
One night I found these magic words
In a magic book
Throw it away
Throw it away
Give your love, live your life
Each and every day
And keep your hand wide open
Let the sun shine through
'Cause you can never lose a thing
If it belongs to you
There's a hand to rock the cradle
And a hand to help us stand
With a gentle kind of motion
As it moves across the land
And the hand's unclenched and open
Gifts of life and love it brings
So keep your hand wide open
If you're needing anything
Throw it away
Throw it away
Give your love, live your life
Each and every day
And keep your hand wide open
Let the sun shine through
'Cause you can never lose a thing
If it belongs to you
There's a natural obligation
To what we own and claim
Possessing and belonging to
Acknowledging a name
So keep your hand wide open
If you're in need of love today
'Cause you can't lose that even
If you throw it all away
Throw it away
Throw it away
Give your love, live your life
Each and every day
And keep your hand wide open
Let the sun shine through
'Cause you can never lose a thing
If it belongs to you
'Cause you can never lose a thing
If it belongs to you
You can never ever lose a thing
If it belongs to you
You can never ever lose a thing
If it belongs to you
You can never ever lose a thing
If it belongs to you
Economia e privacidade
"Connecting everyone and everything in a neural network brings the human race out of the age of privacy, a defining characteristic of modernity, and into the era of transparency. While privacy has long been considered a fundamental right, it has never been an inherent right. Indeed, for all human history, until the modern era, life was lived more or less publicly, as befits the most social species on Earth. As late as the sixteenth century, if an individual was to wander alone aimlessly for long periods of time in daylight, or hide away at night, he or she was likely to be regarded as possessed. In virtually every society that we know of before the modern era, people bathed together in public, often urinated and defecated in public, ate at communal tables, frequently engaged in sexual intimacy in public, and slept huddled together en masse.
It wasn't until the early capitalist era that people began to retreat behind locked doors. The bourgeois life was a private affair. Although people took on a public persona, much of their daily lives were pursued in cloistered spaces. At home, life was further isolated into separate rooms, each with their own function – parlors, music rooms, libraries, etc. Individuals even began to sleep alone in separate beds and bedrooms for the very first time.
The enclosure and privatization of human life went hand-in-hand with the enclosure and privatization of the commons. In the new world of private property relations, where everything was reduced to "mine" versus "thine," the notion of the autonomous agent, surrounded by his or her possessions and fenced off from the rest of the world, took on a life of its own. The right to privacy came to be the right to exclude. The notion that every man's home is his castle accompanied the privatization of life. Successive generations came to think of privacy as an inherent human quality endowed by nature rather than a mere social convention fitting a particular moment in the human journey."
Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 90, 91]
The Gene / da essência da Natureza Humana
So... What normal human trait do you think is going to go first? [min. 28]
Siddhartha Mukherjee: The Gene
O livro: The Gene
Post truths / legitimizing reality through discourse / Narratives
 |
| Martin Luther |
 |
| Thomas Aquinas |
St. Thomas's description of God's creation bears a striking resemblance to the way feudal society was set up: everyone's individual survival depended on them faithfully performing their duties within a rigidly defined social hierarchy. Serfs, knights, lords, and the pope were all unequal in degree and kind but obligated to serve others by the feudal bonds of fealty.
[...] The cosmology of the Protestant Reformation that accompanied the soft proto-industrial revolution of the late medieval era performed a similar legitimizing role. Martin Luther launched a frontal attack on the church's notion of the Great Chain of Being, arguing that it legitimized the corrupt hierarchal rule of the pope and the papal administration over the lives of the faithful. The Protestant theologian replaced the church's feudal cosmology with a worldview centered on the personal relationship of each believer with Christ. The democratization of worship fit well with the new communication/energy/transportation matrix that was empowering the new burgher class."
Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pa 70, 71]
Context is everything
"Every great artistic movement is founded on a limited number of very young individuals who meet and feel this great desire to work together. It's very hard to be a great artist in isolation. I have an image in mind to describe this: you see a photograph of the Café Select in 1937. The place is packed, and there's a little "x" over one gentleman, with "Pascin" written by it. The others must also be artists, but they're unknown and most likely died in poverty. Yet if it hadn't been for them, there wouldn't have been Pascin. For an artist to do something, he or she must be surrounded by a whole compost of people. I don't think someone can exist without this compost. Maybe in literature, but not in painting. In my case, the crucial period, which stretches from 1969 to 1973, was completely made up of encounters, friendships, projects in common."
The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski, Catherine Grenier [pg 52, 53]
Oil giants and banks – what they depend on
"Three of the four largest shareholding companies in the world are oil companies – Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, and BP. Underneath the oil giants are ten banks – JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, BOA Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Barclays Capital, UBS, and Wells Fargo Securities – that control nearly 60 percent of the worlwide investment banking market. [...] beneath the financial investors are 500 globally traded companies – with combined revenue of $22.5 trillion, which is equal to one-third of the world's $62 trillion GDP – that are inextricably connected to and dependent on fossil fuel energy, global telecommunications, and the world's electricity grid for their very existence. In no other period of history have so few institutions wielded so much economic power over the lives of so many people. [...] This unprecedented – and unimaginable – concentration of economic power was not just happenstance or a byproduct of man's insatiable avarice. [...] on a more fundamental level, it flowed inexorably from the communication / energy / transportation matrices that were the foundation of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions."
Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 66, 67]
Antilibrary or Tsundoku,
"Whether you prefer the term antilibrary, tsundoku, or something else entirely, the value of an unread book is its power to get you to read it."
Here
O poder de conseguir que o leia e a, por vezes, terrível decisão de qual ler a seguir, e, não poucas vezes, o resultado de estar a ler vários em simultâneo, por não aguentar mais a espera.
The Auto Age
Automobiles consumed "20 percent of the steel, 12 percent of the aluminum, 10 percent of the copper, 51 percent of the lead, 95 percent of the nickel, 35 percent of the zinc, and 60 percent of the rubber used in the U. S." by 1933. One enthusiast, writing in 1932, marveled at the automobile's impact on the economy, noting that "as a consumer of raw material, the automobile has no equal in the history of the world."
Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 64]
Glad to be Grey
The positivity around the trend is in stark contrast to the way grey roots have been portrayed in the past. “Historically, women have been subjected to the double whammy of sexism and ageism once they show any physical signs of ageing,” says Mair. “A man with grey hair is a ‘silver fox’, but there are few positive words for older women.”
Here
The First Industrial Revolution – STEAM – Second half of 19th century
The convergence of coal-powered steam printing and coal-powered steam rail transport created an infrastructure for the First Industrial Revolution. The communications part of the infrastructure was augmented with the build-out of a nationwide telegraph network in the 1860's, allowing businesses instantaneous communication across their supply chains and distribution channels.
The coming together of steam-powered printing, the telegraph, and the steam-powered locomotive dramatically increased the speed and dependability with which economic resources could be marshaled, transported, processed, transformed into products, and distributed to customers.
[...] The vertically integrated business enterprise took off in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and became the dominant business model during the whole of the twentieth century.
[...] Virtually all the entrepreneurs who prospered during the takeoff stage of the First Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century succeeded in large part because they were able to raise sufficient financial capital by incorporating and becoming a publicly traded shareholding company. The capital allowed them to capture vertically scaled market opportunities and become the standard bearers of their respective industries.
Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 55, 56, 57]
The 18th and 19th centuries paradigm
"Mercantilist policies favored merchant exporters but hurt domestic manufacturers in the host countries as well as the colonies. Moreover, restricting the volume of domestic products that could be produced for the home market in order to keep export prices artificially high worked not only to the disadvantage of the domestic manufacturers, but also the rising middle class and urban working poor, who had to contend with higher prices for domestic goods.
Opposition to mercantilist policies in Europe and the colonies continued to mount, leading the 13 American colonies to break with England in 1776, followed by the French Revolution, which initiated the overthrow of that nation's monarchy in 1789. These two great defining moments in political history were as much about the struggle to secure private property through free trade in open markets as they were about securing political freedom and democratic representation.
Any doubt on that score was quickly put to rest as the far modern nation-states deliberated the question of who should be extended the right to vote. The United States, Britain, France, and most other nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries believed that the central mission of government was to protect private property and a market economy. With that rationale in mind, the right to vote was extended only to men of property, aligning the new nation-state with a market economy based on free exchange of private property."
Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 46]
Protecting data
"Solid is an exciting new project led by Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, taking place at MIT. The project aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy."
Tim's open letter: here
The Solid Community site: here
IoT
Minds + Machines: Insights from John Flannery on GE’s Digital Transformation
Everything you need to know about the industrial internet of things: here
C40 & Siemens │walking the talk for sustainable cities
Sieman's Sustainable Cities: here
System of Systems
IBM's Smarter Planet: here
All mentioned in "Zero Marginal Cost Society" (pg 17), by Jeremy Rifkin.
Paradigms and unnoticed tipping points
"... paradigm [is] a system of beliefs and assumptions that operate together to establish an integrated and unified worldview that is so convincing and compelling that it is regarded as tantamount to reality itself. [...] A paradigm's narrative power rests on its all-encompassing description of reality. Once accepted, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to question its central assumptions, which appear to reflect the natural order of things. Alternative explanations of the world are rarely entertained, as they fly in the face of what is accepted as unambiguous truth. But this unquestioning acceptance, and refusal to envision alternative explanations, leads to a festering of inconsistencies that pile up until a tipping point is reached where the existing paradigm is torn apart and replaced with a new explanatory paradigm better able to marshal the anomalies, insights, and new developments into a comprehensive new narrative."
Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 11,12]
Capitalism vs capitalism / ironia do destino!
"Profit is defunct, property is meaningless, and the market is superfluous. [...] A near zero marginal cost society is the optimally efficient state for promoting the general welfare and represents the ultimate triumph of capitalism."
Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 6, 11,12]
