tag > Cryptocracy
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How An Economic Hit Man Operates:
- Identify 3rd World Country With Valuable Resources
- Arrange Huge Loan To That Country From The IMF
- Give Bankers Corporations This Loan Money To Build Infrastructure.
- Poor Country Defaults On Loans
- Bankers Claim Valuable Resources
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Poor hospitality: Hotel owners in big cities hit major tipping point - "Hotel closures, layoffs and debt struggles in leading markets signal more bad news to come"
#Comment: The corona world is a giant party for the owner class, and a blood bath for everyone else. It will make the kleptocrats 2008 bank-robbery look like charity in comparison.
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Billionaires' wealth rises to $10.2 trillion amid Covid crisis
#Comment: Predictably the super-rich increased their already perverse fortunes by more than a quarter in 2020. At this point, the global kleptocrat class is truly above and beyond sanity. As their sense of omnipotence keeps growing exponentially, they can't seem to hear the sound of people around the world preparing the guillotines for them. Once the impact of corona fully unfolds (corona is a most convenient shield for the kleptocrats, allowing them to pretend that they did not cause this crisis through the usual means - greed and stupidity - but its all due to a evil virus), the anger in western economies will be uncontrollable, even for a modern cybernetic surveillance police state. A real shame, as a solution without violence is preferable for all.
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Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet (nytimes)
"Nearly half of Google’s search traffic now comes from Apple devices, according to the Justice Department, and the prospect of losing the Apple deal has been described as a “code red” scenario inside the company."
"Apple now receives an estimated $8 billion to $12 billion in annual payments — up from $1 billion a year in 2014 — in exchange for building Google’s search engine into its products. It is probably the single biggest payment that Google makes to anyone and accounts for 14 to 21 percent of Apple’s annual profits."
“If we just sort of merged the two companies, we could just call them AppleGoo,” joked Mr. Schmidt, who was also on Apple’s board of directors. With Google search on the iPhone, he added, “you can actually merge without merging.”
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Digital 'health passport' trials under way to aid reopening of borders (Guardian)
CommonPass aims to create common standard proving a traveller is Covid-free or vaccinated.
Related: Previously, Previously, Previously
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"Esse quam videri" - a Latin phrase meaning "To be, rather than to seem". It and variants have been used as a motto by a number of different groups.
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Amazon's Project Kuiper gets FCC approval; half of its 3,236 satellites to go up by 2026
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has given Amazon unanimous approval to launch and operate a constellation of 3,236 internet-providing satellites as part of its 'Project Kuiper' – a codename that is said to be changed once the project begins commercial operations.
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Elon Musk’s New Baby’s Name Is Actually Less Absurd Than His Anti-Democratic, Quasi-Eugenicist Views (jacobinmag) (archived version)
Elon Musk drew attention recently for announcing the name of his and Grimes's new baby, X Æ A-12. But what’s more disturbing about Musk is the anti-democratic, quasi-eugenicist views that he and other tech elites espouse.
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All Dogs in Shenzhen, China Will Get Microchipped By 2020
In May, China's southern city Shenzhen announced that all dogs must be implanted with a chip, joining the rank of the U.K., Japan, Australia and a growing number of countries to make microchips mandatory for dogs. This week, city regulators began to set up injection stations across their partnering pet clinics, according to social media posts from the Shenzhen Urban Management Bureau. The chip, which is said to last for at least 15 years and comes in the size of a grain of rice, is implanted under the skin of a dog's neck. Each chip, when scanned by authorized personnel, reveals a unique 15-digit number matching the dog's name and breed, as well as its owner's identity and contact information -- which will help reduce strays.
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US Mainstream Media: "Contact tracing is good. Tracing child pornographers is bad." God forbid they ever seriously talk about the rapidly growing use of mass surveillance databases (NSA & friends) for political blackmail, industrial espionage and market front-running - on a global scale.
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The FBI doesn't necessarily have to rely on spy databases or phone records to collect vast amounts of information about suspects — it might just have to ask a travel company for help. Forbes understands the FBI is using info from Sabre, the world's largest travel data holder, to conduct surveillance around the world. Officials have reportedly asked the company to "actively spy" on targets, even while they're in the midst of travelling.
#Comment: While the westerns keep screaming "China bad! China-Tech very bad!" like silly spoiled kids, their own total surveillance apparatus keeps spiralling out of control. Just when they seemingly achieved their age old "full-spectrum dominance" through "total information awareness" vision, "full spectrum insanity" through "total information corruption" are taking down the entire house of cards in record time.
Related: The Known Traveller: Unlocking the potential of digital identity for secure and seamless travel - by World Economics Forum & Accenture
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A Network Theory of Power - by Manuel Castells
Power in the network society is exercised through networks. There are four different forms of power under these social and technological conditions:
1. Networking Power: the power of the actors and organizations included in the networks that constitute the core of the global network society over human collectives and individuals who are not included in these global networks.
2. Network Power: the power resulting from the standards required to coordinate social interaction in the networks. In this case, power is exercised not by exclusion from the networks but by the imposition of the rules of inclusion.
3. Networked Power: the power of social actors over other social actors in the network. The forms and processes of networked power are specific to each network.
4. Network-making Power: the power to program specific networks according to the interests and values of the programmers, and the power to switch different networks following the strategic alliances between the dominant actors of various networks.
Counterpower is exercised in the network society by fighting to change the programs of specific networks and by the effort to disrupt the switches that reflect dominant interests and replace them with alternative switches between networks. Actors are humans, but humans are organized in networks. Human networks act on networks via the programming and switching of organizational networks. In the network society, power and counterpower aim fundamentally at influencing the neural networks in the human mind by using mass communication networks and mass self-communication networks. -
Meta-political speculators - a more accurate label for sophisticated "conspiracy theorists"
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The Heroin trade is colossal: one gram of pure heroin selling at $902 is equivalent to almost a million US dollars a kilo ($902,000) (via)
Since 2001, according to UNODC, the production of opium has increased 50 times, (compared to 185 ton in 2001) reaching 9000 metric tons in 2017. It has almost tripled in relation to its historical levels.
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The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's World Drug Report 2005 estimates the size of the global illicit drug market at US$321.6 billion in 2003 alone. With a world GDP of US$36 trillion in the same year, the illegal drug trade may be estimated as nearly 1% of total global trade. Consumption of illegal drugs is widespread globally.
#Comment: The "Illegal drug trade estimated as nearly 1% of total global trade" is a bad joke - and the real numbers are likely pure dark comedy.
Drug trafficking networks in the world-economy
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Bill Gates finally tells the truth. Animation
