tag > Comment
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Coronavirus: S'pore Government to make its contact-tracing app freely available to developers worldwide (straitstimes)
The Singapore Government will be making the software for its contact-tracing application TraceTogether, which has already been installed by more than 620,000 people, freely available to developers around the world. In a Facebook post on Monday (March 23), Minister-in-charge of the Smart Nation Initiative Vivian Balakrishnan said that the app, developed by the Government Technology Agency (GovTech) and the Ministry of Health, will be open-sourced.
#Comment: Once the biological virus is gone, rest assured that all these highly intrusive surveillance and social engineering tools will stay around and rapidly expand. Cybernetic totalitarianism might be the dominate game globally for years to come. The opportunity for systemic abuse and catastrophic failure is mindbogglingly giant.
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YC graduate Genecis Bioindustries turns food waste into compostable plastics (techcrunch)
#Comment: The biotech industry continues their go-to "we must control and engineer life on all levels, or all die" narrative, under the implicit "Everything is IP & Money" paradigm . It illustrates, that the industry by and large still has not comprehended the power of "scaling out" systems , instead of the legacy "scaling up". In short, greedy control freaks disregarding the flexibility and resilience of natural ecosystems which have been evolutionary fine-tuned for aeons.
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npm is joining GitHub/Microsoft
#Comment: The brute force attacks by the late capitalistic kleptocrats on the free software / open source movement is notably picking up speed. The famous saying "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” comes to mind...
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Low-Cost Breathing Ventilators - by @lowtechmagazine
Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies: The high price of machine ventilators forces many hospitals in the poorest regions of the world to rely on a simple solution known as an Ambu Bag that requires constant manual pressure in order to get oxygen to the lungs.The Umbulizer is a mechanically powered version of the Ambu Bag.
Italian hospital saves Covid-19 patients lives by 3D printing valves for reanimation devices
An Italian hospital ran out of ICU valves. A local biz brought a 3D printer to the hospital, redesigned & produced the valves in a few hours. “At the time of writing, 10 patients are accompanied in breathing by a machine that uses a 3D printed valve.” Apparently the hospitals ICU valve supplier was not happy about this & refused to supply blueprints. (via)
#Comment: This is a nice example that the notion of intellectual property (IP) law is outdated & dangerous. Break all IP needed to save lives should be the directive.
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How’s the economy? Fed increasingly turns to private data (AP)
#Comment: Predictably, computational economics is take centre stage, even in the brain-dead US public discourse. It is a key component towards turnkey "Computational Totalitarianism" - a concept which elites around the global are embracing as a new governance system.
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London’s Trees Are Saving the City Billions (citylab)
#Comment: Why is the "saving money" perspective used so frequently when talking about nature ("nature based services" etc.)? Do these foolish people really not comprehended, that the notion that "Nature = Money" is at the very core of the problem they pretend to address?
#Regenerative #Urban #Infrastructure #Economics #ClimateChange
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Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of U.S. companies (axios)
- Manufacturers in China report operating at 50% capacity with 56% of normal staff.
- More than 44% of respondents said they did not have a plan in place to address supply disruption from China.
- Six in 10 (62%) respondents are experiencing delays in receiving orders from China.
- More than half (53%) are having difficulty getting supply chain information from China.
#Comment: It is high time for the global community to take alternative, resilient bioregional supply chains much more serious. Scale out, not Scale up.
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Study Finds More Younger American Adults are Being Diagnosed With Alzheimer's (ibx.com)
The 5 years between 2013 and 2017 saw a 200% increase in the number of commercially-insured Americans diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or early-onset dementia between the ages of 30 to 64. "While the underlying cause is not clear, advances in technology are certainly allowing for earlier and more definitive diagnosis," says the Blue Cross.
#Comment: Keep on pumping airwaves (WiFi, 5G, etc.) and stomachs (Fastfood, etc.) with more and more toxic junk, it's clearly working wonders for profits of wallstreet & billionaire.
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Bullshit Alert: Citroën rolls out accessible-to-all Ami car that works "just like a smartphone"
#Comment: Electric or Gasoline, Tiny or Big - A car is a car is a car. Compared with public transport (trams etc. which they compete against), the passenger density of a car is horrendous. The incredibly high accident/death ratio of cars won't change due to such new form-factors either (maybe on the contrary), the same is true for traffic congestion. Plus such "cheap tiny throwaway elector cars" will clearly have a substantial environmental impact, just at a different position in the supply chain then gasoline cars. The designers, engineers and managers of such "innovations" clearly suffer from a radical lack of imagination and compassion.
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Almost half of the world’s 513,244 people worth more than $30m live in the US
"Ranks of those worth over $30m swell to 513,000 despite global growth slowdown." #Comment: Land of the free, home of the brave - where human culture mutated into a malignant cancer of epic proportions - metastasizing globally, destroying all nature and sanity in its way.
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If You Like RSS, You'll Love Fraidycat
Fraidycat is a desktop app or browser extension for Firefox or Chrome. I use it to follow people (hundreds) on whatever platform they choose - Twitter, a blog, YouTube or TiddlyWiki. There is no news feed. Rather than showing you a massive inbox of new posts to sort through, you see a list of recently active individuals. No one can noisily take over this page, since every follow has a summary that takes up a mere two lines.
#Comment: I absolutely love this! Fantastic approach to the evolution of RSS and Content Feeds.
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In Coronavirus Fight, China Gives Citizens a Color Code, With Red Flags (NYTimes)
The QR code inside the Alipay app. Green is good, and allows the holder to travel freely. As China encourages people to return to work despite the coronavirus outbreak, it has begun a bold mass experiment in using data to regulate citizens’ lives — by requiring them to use software on their smartphones that dictates whether they should be quarantined or allowed into subways, malls and other public spaces. It also appears to share information with the police, setting a template for new forms of automated social control that could persist long after the epidemic subsides.
#Comment: Rest assured, NSA & co have been implementing similar cybernetic social control systems for quite some time - just with the added "freedom and democracy" PR packaging.
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#Comment: In times of crisis, the true extent of hypocrisy and lunacy in a system becomes evident: Lawrence Gostin, who specializes in global health policy at Georgetown University Law Center, just called the policies of the Chinese government against the coronavirus “astounding, unprecedented, and medieval”. In the meantime, the EU is heavily debating if its worth emulating the Chinese measures, calling them "highly effective" yet simultaneously screaming "but don't forget, china is a evil dictatorship!". All while the coronavirus is rapidly spreading in the EU and US, where the responds of officials and public is progressively looking like a mix of ignorance and incompetence. The "west" has developed a curios mix of extreme arrogance coupled with systemic stupidity, which clearly has to yield catastrophic outcomes sooner or later...
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Conversation with Victor Riparbelli - CEO of Synthesia, a player in the Synthetic Media space
#Comment: Shallow bullshit aiming at gluing people even more to their little glowing rectangles, to further accelerate late capitalist hyper consumerism. See my talk on the topic here.
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US Flu Cases Climb to 15 Million With 54 Pediatric Deaths Recorded in 2019-20 Season
Influenza activity in the United States has once more started to increase after falling during the first 2 weeks of 2020. The latest FluView surveillance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that as of January 18, 2020, there have been 15 million cases of flu, 140,000 hospitalizations, and 8200 deaths in the US this influenza season.
#Comment: For some perspective, the flue has killed 8000+ people in the US this year already, and some 40'000 people die in car crashes every year. Where is the according mass panic?! #Health
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Responding to Covid-19 — A Once-in-a-Century Pandemic? - by Bill Gates
"We also need to invest in disease surveillance, including a case database that is instantly accessible to relevant organizations, and rules requiring countries to share information. [...] In addition, we need to build a system that can develop safe, effective vaccines and antivirals, get them approved, and deliver billions of doses within a few months after the discovery of a fast-moving pathogen. "
#Comment: Cause everybody knows, that listening to a tech-industry intel kleptocrat during a global #Health challenge is is clearly the best course of action. Grand #Comedy Bluescreen Bill!
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#Comment on Headspace founder Andy Puddicombe's "mind full" PR video
"These teachings have come from somewhere else, there are not mine, and all I'm doing is kind of sharing it with you" - Sure Andy, all you are doing is sharing it... while making an obscene amount of money with your company headspace, which successfully packaged the age old practice of meditation as yet another product for bored western consumers during late capitalism. Bravo, it's great comedy for sure! Extra brownie points for the choice of music in your PR videos (cause nothing says "mindfulness" quite like upbeat trendy electronic dance music...) and sneaking in your political opinions about Tibet (of course, "mindfully" presented as objective facts)
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British-based COMPASS Pathways just got a US patent for a psilocybin pill designed to control treatment-resistant depression (alt)
#Comment: A secretive startup, lead by an ex-Goldman Sachs Banker and funded by Peter Thiel, using the extremely broken IP system to patent Psilocybin - a compound that has been known to humanity for millennia. What wonderfully nonsensical late capitalist brain-dead bullshit comedy!
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Former NSA Deputy Director Bill Crowell Joins Advisory Board of AI-Powered Cybersecurity Startup CYR3CON
#Comment: The privatisation and unchecked expansion of the capabilities of NSA & co in full swing. A tiny stepping stone towards shared open source intelligence, used by the general public for global peace making - or just more of the same old late capitalist paranoid bullshit?
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Ted Nelson VS The MIT Media Lab
"From that moment i figured he (Nicholas Negroponte, lab founder) was really a con man [...] The whole point of the Media Lab is "we know something that you don't know!" - to have strange projects no one could understand. [...] Negroponte is a politician, exchanging favours. [..] One day i asked Negroponte for his definition of media and he finally said 'Media is like Air!'. Con men and politicians aren't necessarily held to telling the truth at all." - Ted Nelson
"For over thirty years, the MIT Media Lab has done strange and mysterious things, using hype and hokum to impress the unwary and raise ever more money. Whereas the principles of interaction and media, as far as I'm concerned, are and always have been simple and powerful, with human creativity at the centre. The creative mentality of the film director is exactly what is needed in software - anticipating the user's understandings and expectations, and fulfilling them elegantly." - Ted Nelson
#Comment: It's worth adding that besides the (ongoing) onslaught of "strange projects know one could understand" (aka "Bullshit", as defined by Harry Frankfurt in his essay "On Bullshit" (PDF) ), the Media Lab (and the wider MIT) has been a premier "think tank" for the US military industrial complex. And thus, the media lab has proven the marvellous fact that fictitious techno-utopian bullshit pushed by con man politicians, is highly capable of killing a great many people in the real world.
