I misread this as: "I recovered a lost email from my client’s memory". It made me think of the Black Mirror episode 'Crocodile', and I was quite amazed. Then I saw 'email' client... haha
Really? I am curious to know what observations or evidence you base your arguments/predictions on? Do you believe they have an (even better than 'post-Snowden leaks') search-engine like PRISM, but for private networks all around the world?
Could a user tell it's happening? What signals would indicate this? Is it increased CPU usage disguised as a system process?
And are you talking about mainstream proprietary OS'es like MacOS and Windows? I already know a little about Intel ME and proprietary silicon, but I don't know where to find a proper analysis, or a blog or book that deep dives into the ramificitions of the existense of these backdoors.
It seems to also not be in the mainstream consciousness just how serious it could be?
> If it wasn't useful, people wouldn't be paying for the services it provides, they're all optional.
Honestly, in my opinion this could not be a more misinformed take on the reality of banking. Today there exist no alternatives to commercial money (private bank debt), because our governments' demand taxes in it.
Finance and banking are also different, yet you seem to use the words interchangeably.
Banking = creation of credit.
Finance (today) is about creating overly complex financial products to take part in the game of high volume automated trading, such as with the use of BlackRock's Aladdin - where the same financial products are sold and resold hundreds of times in an hour. Pure speculation/extraction/Rentierism.
As the comment you replied to wrote:
> The first step to fixing this is to give citizens the ability to opt out of private banks and bank directly with the central bank. Private banks should not be the only ones with this privilege.
"The problem is largely in the system of exchange we call “money,” and in the banks that store and distribute it. Rather than allowing the free exchange of labor and materials for production, our system of banking and credit has acted as a tourniquet on production and a parasite draining resources away.
Genuine economic freedom requires that credit flow freely for productive use. But today, a handful of giant banks diverts that flow into an exponentially-growing self-feeding pool of digital profits for themselves. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, much of the global economy has been battling economic downturn, with rampant unemployment, government funding problems, and harsh austerity measures imposed on the people. Meanwhile, the banks that caused this devastation have been bailed out at government expense and continue to thrive at the public trough. All this has caused irate citizens to rise up against the banks, particularly the large international banks. But for better or worse, we cannot do without the functions they perform; and one of these is the creation of “money” in the form of credit when banks make loans.
This advance of bank credit has taken the form of “fractional reserve” lending, which has been heavily criticized. Yet historically, it is this sort of credit created out of nothing on the books of banks that has allowed the wheels of industry to turn. Employers need credit at each stage of production before they have finished products that can be sold on the market, and banks need to be able to create credit as needed to respond to this demand. Without the advance of credit, there will be no products or services to sell; and without products to sell, workers and suppliers cannot get paid.
If banks have an unfair edge in this game, it is because they have managed to get private control of the credit spigots. They use this control not to serve business, industry, and society’s needs but for their private advantage. They can turn credit on and off at will, direct it to their cronies, or use it for their own speculative ventures; and they collect the interest as middlemen. This is not just a modest service fee. Interest has been calculated to compose a third of everything we buy."[1]
The strongest alternative I am seeing emerge at this point is a new distributed peer to peer cryptographically secured accounting framework/pattern called Holochain. It allows us to rapidly prototype, and start using, new types of mutually sovereign asset backed Mutual Credit 'currencies' [2] (wealth-acknowledgement systems), based on productive capacity and measuring this wealth in new ways that isn't possible to integrate with today's money system. This includes the use of reputation currencies (think FairTrade labels, Organic veggie labels etc.). Building on this are projects like http://valueflo.ws.
Thanks largely to the work of Dr. Robert O. Young, the public are becoming more widely aware of the benefits of a high alkaline diet. Most junk foods and heavily processed foods are acidic, causing a stress on the body which increases weight gain and decreases immunity. Ideally, the diet should be made up of at least 70% alkaline foods. A raw food diet high in vegetables easily satisfies this requirement. When our systems are alkalized, we feel calmer, can think more clearly, feel more on top of things, and have a stronger immune system.”
- Kate Magic, Raw Magic (you can find this book on libgen)
There are many calls for public banking by people such as Ellen Brown [1], as well organizations such as the MetaCurrency Project [2] and Positive Money [3].
> The banking industry is the arbiter and credit in our society and decides where money get allocated.
Thanks for your comment. In my experience this is the most misunderstood aspect about money. Your comment explained it really well. I wish this was more widely understood and talked about.
I do not think the original commenter understands the monopolistic as well as parasitical nature of today's money, as they write:
> - Part of it is deciding who to lend money to. Makes sense for the bank to decide this with its own money.
...which is wrong. Banks do not have their 'own money'. They create money out of nothing. They get a license to create debt out of nothing (fiat). Many times today they do not even have to have the fractional reserves for any of it.
If anyone has any doubts please check out Anthropologist David Graeber's book 'Debt: The First 5,000 Years' as well as his explanation of the money system in this article:
"In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it's backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There's really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it. They will never get caught short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans out will just end up back in some bank again. So for the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What's more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity.
What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow. Government spending is the main driver in all this (and the paper does admit, if you read it carefully, that the central bank does fund the government after all). So there's no question of public spending "crowding out" private investment. It's exactly the opposite."[1]
Slow carbs instead fast carbs.
Consume way less sugar.
Eat way more veggies.
Honestly if you can afford it, just start shopping at farmers markets and buy local seasonal veggies.
> Without context, we may not even be talking about the same thing.
I hear you. But maybe this is also because of the brainwashing of the American mind by advertising and corporate-funded biased studies. I've found that in the US it is hard not to buy 'processed food', because nearly everything is processed. I also believe processed foods are why average American life expectancy is so low.
Sure, keep telling yourself this if you want to keep harming yourself and your loved ones.
If you really believe the food industry cares about US citizens instead of profits, I'd recommend avoiding any of the great critical documentaries on the global food industry that have come out recently.
Inverting this: for many years Burger King and other fast food chains poisoned people with non-nutritious food [1][2]. Now they want a pat on the back for making nutritious food for the first time.
"“Consuming these preservatives has been shown to increase our risk of colon cancer and should be limited in our diets,” she said."[3]