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Innovation Blues

Audacity: Free Audio Editor and Recorder - 0 views

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    Audacity is a free, easy-to-use and multilingual audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to: Record live audio. Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs. Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files. Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together. Change the speed or pitch of a recording. And more! See the complete list of features.
Innovation Blues

Comments on Economics: An ordinary Joe | The Economist - 0 views

  • Finally, countless Americans are, by world standards, vastly over-paid and have been found out. There is nothing a laborer in Manhattan can do that someone just as competent but living in El Salvador cannot do for perhaps one-fifth the price. It should be no surprise that 6% of the world's population can no longer enjoy 25% of the world's output -- there was no place to go but down.
  • Normally, the lack of a middle class would preclude a nation from being a world power, but the Anglo-American establishment was able to pay for American industrialization by borrowing British capital; from America’s inception until World War I, it was a debtor nation.
  • Unlike England, which prior to the welfare state of 1909, really did have a large middle class (roughly 40% of the population) America never did; for most of its history the middle class have never been more than 6% of Americans (probably less the 3% today). Middle Class values were the preserve of the WASP establishment, a small elite of German Jews, an even smaller elite of African-Americansand an assortment of assimilated white “ethnics”, but for the most part the American population was working class; focused on today, consuming all they produced.
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  • When Pat gets old he can retire comfortably and leave his widow comfortable as well, again was this because of savings, no; Pat got a company pension (inflation adjusted) and health care for the rest of his life with right of survivorship. All of this sounds great, but it wasn’t real; it was all a result of America ability to overcharge the world for capital goods; the costs of all these benefits were passed on to the rest of the world in higher priced capital good and dollar inflation. These programs allowed people to live middle class lives they never earned and could never keep (absent the programs). In fact, by 1970 it cost an American producer more in labor cost per ton of steel than what he could get for it on the world market. The fantasy world America has built post-World War 2 has been falling apart since the 1980s and the last leg, the dollars reserve currency status, is about to go. The disappearance of the American Dream is simply America reverting back to where its populations core values and behavior patterns would naturally take it.
  • The American Dream is rapidly fading because it was never real or at least never genuinely earned by Americans. When I speak of the “Middle Class”, I don’t simply mean possessing a middle class income, but rather having middle class patterns of behavior and world views. To be middle class is to be future time preference oriented; to accept short term pain for long term gain; to always be looking to get ahead and to plan ahead. Simply put, to be middle class is to consume less than what you produce, reinvesting the excess to produce more in the future.
  • America was the only large industrial power left standing after World War 2 and because it could charge the rest of the world what it wanted for capital goods, it could extract “rents” to support the fantasy of the American Dream. Consider the 1950s, the beginning of universal White middle-classdom and take a typical Irish guy; Pat. Pat grew up in an ethnic Irish slum like his father and grandfather, but he now can afford to buy a house; is it because he diligently saved his money and stayed focused, no; it is because he can get a VA loan or an FHA loan with no money down and easy payments. Pat dropped out of school at 16 and is not too interested in expanding his skills, is he on the streets, no; because of unions he can get an assembly line job. Moreover, because the NLR act effectively unionized every major industrial company and industry, Pat can look forward to annual raises (regardless of productivity) for his entire working life. When his children are old enough, Pat can afford to send them to college, is it because he saved before each child was born and spaced his children accordingly, no; they can get government loans , grants, and go to a subsides state college. When Pats parents get old they are not a burden, is it because they learned middleclass values and started to save, no; his parents rely on social security and Medicare (after 1965).
  • Europe is on the verge of a complete and total economic collapse...why?...because for decades their government has used force to take money from those who work hard and then give that money to those who don't work hard.
  • The capitalist equivalent of a socialist revolution is a Great Depression that wipes out the value of the paper assets the wealthy had accumulated, leaving the government to reallocate the real assets more equally. We almost had this happen in 2008, but the 1 percent blackmailed the rest with fear of collateral damage.
Innovation Blues

Nineteen Eighty-Four - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel by George Orwell published in 1949. It is a dystopian and satirical novel set in Oceania, where society is tyrannized by The Party and its totalitarian ideology.[1] The Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public mind control, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (Ingsoc) under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as thoughtcrimes.[2] Their tyranny is headed by Big Brother, the quasi-divine Party leader who enjoys an intense cult of personality, but who may not even exist. Big Brother and the Party justify their rule in the name of a supposed greater good.[1]
  • George Orwell "encapsulate[d] the thesis at the heart of his unforgiving novel" in 1944, and three years later wrote most of it on the Scottish island of Jura, from 1947 to 1948, despite being seriously ill with tuberculosis.[4] On 4 December 1948, he sent the final manuscript to the publisher Secker and Warburg and Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949.[5][6] By 1989, it had been translated into sixty-five languages, more than any other novel in English at the time.[7
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four is on Spacious Planet's list of "21 most surprising banned books" for having being banned in Russia and very nearly banned in the UK and the US.[29]
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  • The effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four on the English language is extensive; the concepts of Big Brother, Room 101, the Thought Police, thoughtcrime, unperson, memory hole (oblivion), doublethink (simultaneously holding and believing contradictory beliefs) and Newspeak (ideological language) have become common phrases for denoting totalitarian authority. Doublespeak and groupthink are both deliberate elaborations of doublethink, while the adjective "Orwellian" denotes "characteristic and reminiscent of George Orwell's writings" especially Nineteen Eighty-Four.
  • In September 2009, an album entitled The Resistance was released by English Alternative rock band Muse, which was based entirely on 1984[citation needed], including songs such as "Resistance", "Uprising" and "United States of Eurasia". The album resulted in Muse receiving a Grammy for Best Rock Album at the 53rd Grammys.
  • In November 2011, the United States government argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that it wants to continue utilizing GPS tracking of individuals without first seeking a warrant. In response, Justice Stephen Breyer questioned what this means for a democratic society by referencing Nineteen Eighty-Four. Justice Breyer asked, "If you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States. So if you win, you suddenly produce what sounds like 1984...."[65] In 1984, the book was made into a movie. In 2006, the movie V for Vendetta was released, which has many of the same running themes and principles.[66][67] In Nineteen Eighty-Four, John Hurt portrays Winston Smith, while in V for Vendetta he plays the Big Brother-like figure.[68][69]
Innovation Blues

Social Folders - 0 views

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