Right now I feel an ominous sense of doom. This country is screwed, the world is screwed, we’re in for one hell of a century. Where to begin? Global warming is melting the ice-caps faster than anyone expected. Sea levels are going to rise fast. We’re running out of oil and we don’t have a good alternative to take its place. energy prices are rising and they’re only going to get worse, especially because of new demand from China. America is in an enormous amount of debt and we have no way of paying it off any time soon. The government is slowly but surely eliminating our civil liberties. There is a ton of animosity towards this country all over the world. And we’re in a quagmire in Iraq that wont end for a looong time.

So let’s sum up: loosing the major source of energy, loosing a ton of land on which to live (due to rising sea levels), loosing our rights, loosing our economy, and being engaged in a perpetual war. Yes it’s easy for one to get depressed in the face of all this, I feel like I should encourage people to be optimistic, but right now I don’t feel very optimistic. Then again, the only possible way to get ourselves out of any of these predicaments is to get off our lazy asses and do it ourselves. A good place to start is WeAreGod.org since getting people to stand up and do something is exactly what they’re all about. The world is in a bad place, we must do something about it!

consumerism is the government realizing that they can easily distract people with shiny lights and toys and comfortable things and sugar and fat and creature comforts. they tell us that that’s what freedom is, but really it just distracts us. it distracts us from reflecting on the world, and reflecting on death, and reflecting on life, and the way things are. we spend our time buying things, and creating waste. all the while slowly killing our planet. and we never see it, or we do see it and we don’t care. my only hope is that somehow the drive towards giving us all information and pleasure at a convenience leads to us living in some utopic fairy land. perhaps through technology we will be set free. there’s always two sides to the coin

All of existence is non-simultaneously apprehended interacting processing.

All of existence is infinite regression.

All of existence is.

Infinity.

Therefore…
All of non-existence is not? Or is it?

Is it really the president’s job to do what he thinks is right?
Or is it his job to do what the majority of the country wants him to do?
A president who doesn’t listen because he’s “doing what’s right” is a bad president.

The telecommunications companies want to start giving priority to their traffic and charging users and service providers (like google) access to the higher speed services. Meanwhile other “services,” such as this very blog, will be given lower priority and thus be delivered at a lower speed. This is complete bullshit. The internet is supposed to be a free place that fosters the spread of ideas and innovation. It’s not supposed to be about paying extra so information you want to send actually gets to where it’s going. If they succeed at this they will essentially kill the internet as we know it.

I read a really good and detailed article about this very thing a few weeks ago. It explains that the telcos are trying to change the metaphorical image of the internet from that of a place (I’m on the net, browsing the net, meet you in that chat room etc.) to that of a plumbing system (delivering content through pipes). The latter metaphor allows for them to charge for use of their “pipes.” But the entire point of the internet is that it’s “stupid” in the middle. All the “pipes” and routers and such that deliver the data currently have no idea what it is that they’re routing, they just send it where it needs to go and give no special priority to anything. All the innovation, all the “smartness,” happens on the periphery. The internet itself is just a means of communication between any two computers connected to it. It is dumb, and that allows for fair competition and innovation. Now they want to ruin that, to regulate traffic, to charge tolls, to artificially slow down their competitors traffic. Don’t let them, the internet is the most promising and disruptive force humanity has ever invented and it must be allowed to follow its natural course.