Saturday, March 28, 2009

Banks manipulating price of gold

Wow, I knew they did this but I wasn't sure as to exactly how and to what extent. It will require further investigation, but here's an interesting link - http://www.kitco.com/ind/schoon/mar182009.html.

Also:

Friday, March 27, 2009

Wedge strategy

A 'wedge strategy' is a process of incrementalism used to achieve a final goal.

Politicians use wedge strategies all the time - for example, laws restricting internet use to customise people to accept even more restrictive laws.

If this fails they go back to square one and use some crisis to bring in massive reforms - IE 9/11 and the Patriot Act.

Wedge strategies can be charted so long as you reliably speculate as to what the end goals are.

Deadweight loss

Deadweight loss - definition:

In economics, a deadweight loss (also known as excess burden or allocative inefficiency) is a loss of economic efficiency that can occur when equilibrium for a good or service is not Pareto optimal. In other words, either people who would have more marginal benefit than marginal cost are not buying the good or service, or people who would have more marginal cost than marginal benefit are buying the product.

Causes of deadweight loss can include monopoly pricing (see artificial scarcity), externalities, taxes or subsidies (Case and Fair, 1999: 442), and binding price ceilings or floors. The term deadweight loss may also be referred to as the "excess burden of monopoly" or the "excess burden of taxation".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss

My thesis is that deadweight loss is a huge part of GDP, and I will speculate on who is responsible.

First, GDP stands for Gross Domestic Product, but that's just a fancy word for how much money has been spent. GDP measures spending/income. What it doesn't measure is how much of that spending is done on credit. Therefore it doesn't measure how much debt is in the economy. Therefore it's an artificial measure of prosperity and economic growth in this context doesn't mean much.

Second, alot of the spending goes to a deadweight loss. These are the deadweight losses:

*Lawyers - lawyers don't produce anything of real value, yet they make obscene amounts of money.

*Doctors - the ones who write out prescriptions, make diagnoses and recommend treatments. No service of any real value. Again, make obscene amounts of money.

*Bureaucrats - produce no value at all and waste everyone's time. Funded by taxpayers and a legal monopoly, their main function being to administer the bureaucracy. Including police and military, who are the enforcement arm of the bureaucracy.

*Politicians - paid to lie and lie and lie and lie........... etc.

*Bankers - make loans backed by nothing.

*Mega-Corporations - the ones that take control of natural resources and control the prices, influence government to make favourable regulations, globalise their resources to drive out all the local competitors, etc.

Just imagine what the world would be like if these parasites were gotten rid of.



*

Australia 2020 report

http://www.australia2020.gov.au/final_report/index.cfm

I just skimmed through some parts of this report, alot of the policies are similar to the current US administration, like they are being synchronised or something (likely that KRudd and Oba-mush are both working for the same people).

Here are some things I found:

*Home energy audits - so they are going to send goons around to low-income households and threaten them with fines/imprisonment if they go over an energy quota?..

*Carbon central bank - where the taxes from cap and trade will go to no doubt.

*Youth national service - just like Obama's volunteer corps.

Of course, at the end of the day most of it is just propaganda, you have to read between the lines about what are their real intentions are.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Seasteading

The aims of The Seasteading Institute are to create permanent dwellings on the oceans, outside of any national boundaries.

http://seasteading.org/

This is much like other projects that want to create floating cities outside any jurisdictions that will be a haven for 'civil liberties'.

The problem is that only the rich will be able to afford them, at least initially. If the projects are successful then the price might decrease.

Also, there is nothing to stop militaries from any number of countries interfering.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Body 2.0 - Continuous Monitoring Of The Human Body

Written on March 20, 2009 – 2:01 pm by keith kleiner

Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our body’s medical status? Years from now people will look back and find it unbelievable that heart attacks, strokes, hormone imbalances, sugar levels, and hundreds of other bodily vital signs and malfunctions were not being continuously anticipated and monitored by medical implants. We can call this concept body 2.0, or the networked body, and we need it now!

The trio of biomedicine, technology, and wireless communication are in the midst of a merger that will easily bring continuous, 24×7 monitoring of several crucial bodily functions in the years ahead. Unfortunately, as is often the case with medical products, the needed innovations are either already developed or will be soon, but some of the best commercial products won’t make it to the market until years of testing have proven their safety.


In the future your doctor might call you before you have a heart attack, responding to an alarm sent out by monitoring systems in your body that have detected the precursors to a heart attack hours or days ahead of time. With body 2.0, medicine dosages could be tailored precisely to your body chemistry and metabolism. Real-time monitoring of chemical concentrations in your blood could allow for increasing or decreasing dosages accordingly.

The huge amounts of data that would be accumulated from hundreds of thousands of continuously monitored people would be nothing short of a revolution for medical research and analysis. This data could be harvested to understand the minute by minute changes in body chemistry that occur in response to medication, stress, infection, and so on. As an example, the daily fluctuations in hormone levels of hundreds of thousands of individuals could be tracked and charted 24/7 to determine a baseline from which abnormalities and patterns could be extracted. The possibilities are enormous.

Given the advantages, we must wonder why body monitoring is not already more successful and widespread. The answer is that most of the interesting body monitoring we desire requires direct access to the blood stream and other bodily fluids, and this is not an easy problem to overcome.

A straightforward technique is to prick the skin periodically to extract and analyze blood, yet this only works for periodic monitoring. It does not provide continuous access to bodily fluids. Sensors implanted permanently into the blood stream are what is needed, but the difficulty is that moisture, enzymes, and the immune system quickly wreak havoc on mechanical devices and destroy them. Implants also pose several opportunities for life threatening infection to take hold, and this must be addressed.

http://singularityhub.com/2009/03/20/body-20-continuous-monitoring-of-the-human-body/

Monday, March 23, 2009

Living on a boat

For those who want to escape the control grid, living on a boat is one option.

I'm still investigating it, but I found two good websites for further information:

http://livingaboard.com/

http://www.weliveonaboat.com/

Hydroponics

Hydroponics is a way to grow plants without soil. The benefit of using hydroponics is that you can grow fruit and vegetables almost anywhere.

This is great for survival, as it is low cost and you produce your own food - not relying on anybody else. In case in the future there is ever food shortages, or you have no money or you want to escape the control grid.

Hydroponics is definitely worth looking into.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

The paths of god

Cannot control everything. Why?

1. Scarcity and competition.
2. Death.
3. Physical limitations.
4. Opportunity cost.
5. Time limit.
6. Energy limit.
7. Lack of information.

The percentage of control versus randomly determined fate.

The rate of increase/decrease of either as a function of time.

Gold VS Dollar

Friday, March 20, 2009

"8 stages of psychosocial development"

This is a theory developed by Erik Erikson, and here is a link to the summary chart. It's apparently based on the work of famous Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud.

I'm not saying whether I think this theory is true or not. It does give an insight into how some in the human psychology industry conduct analysis through their work. This is apparently taught to students, as the website disclaimer reads:

This web site was created for use by students in PSY 501. The material on these pages is not intended for use by individuals not enrolled in that course.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

The social construction of reality

The Social Construction of Reality (1966) page 1:"...if the reality of everyday life is to be understood, account must be taken of it's intrinsic character before we can proceed with sociological analysis proper. Everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world."

What is social constructionism?
Epistemology (not theory)
Social constructionism stems from epistemological position - not an explanatory theory. It is an approach to psychology (and other bodies of knowledge) which focuses on meaning and power. It focuses on meaning and power because its epistemological position dictates that meaning and power are all that we really can claim to know about. It is called ‘social constructionism’ because it aims to account for the ways in which phenomena are socially constructed. For example, consider the various constructions of ‘war’ which are currently in dispute. We can see that there are multiple ways of constructing what a ‘war’ is and what it would mean, that these are often mutually-exclusive, and that they are developed from various ideological and political interests (i.e. power). For constructionists, all phenomena are like this. (Note that this is different from a ‘social theory’ - it does not say that a behaviour like ‘aggression’ can be explained by social variables; it says that ‘aggression’ itself is a social construct).

http://www.psy.dmu.ac.uk/michael/soc_con_disc.htm

"The matrix is a system Neo.."

Corrupt Banking System - Cartels robbing the public

Part 1 (other parts just follow the links on youtube):

Friday, March 06, 2009

The DSM - Social Control for Dummies

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is published by the American Psychiatric Association and provides diagnostic criteria for mental disorders. It is used in the United States and in varying degrees around the world, by clinicians, researchers, psychiatric drug regulation agencies, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and policy makers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders

Here is a list of all of the disorders in the current edition: http://psychcentral.com/disorders/

In 2012 they are releasing the 5th edition which will modify and expand the list of disorders in the 4th edition.

http://www.psych.org/dsmv.asp

Criticisms of the DSM generally include a number of things:

  • No objective diagnostic test for any of the disorders.
  • Conflicts of interest (mostly from pharmaceutical companies)
  • Contains vague descriptions of symptoms
  • Fails to look at other explanations
  • Previously listed homosexuality as a mental disorder (until it was removed in 1973)

Plus a number of other criticisms - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders#Criticism_2

Sunday, March 01, 2009

Cortisol again (not rainbow trout)

Testosterone, cortisol, dominance, and submission: Biologically prepared motivation, no psychological mechanisms involved

Jack van Honk a1, Dennis J. L. G. Schutter a1, Erno J. Hermans a1 and Peter Putman a1a1 Helmholtz Research Institute, Affective Neuroscience Section, Utrecht University, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands J.vanHonk@fss.uu.nl D.Schutter@fss.uu.nl E.Hermans@fss.uu.nl P.Putman@fss.uu.nl

Abstract
Mazur & Booth's (1998) target article concerns basal and reciprocal relations between testosterone and dominance, and has its roots in Mazur's (1985; 1994) model of primate dominance-submissiveness interactions. Threats are exchanged in these interactions and a psychological stress-manipulation mechanism is suggested to operate, making sure that face-to-face dominance contests are usually resolved without aggression. In this commentary, a recent line of evidence from human research on the relation between testosterone, cortisol, and vigilant (dominant) and avoidant (submissive) responses to threatening “angry” faces is discussed. Findings, to a certain extent, converge with Mazur & Booth's theorizing. However, the strongest relations have been found in subliminal exposure conditions, suggesting that biological instead of psychological mechanisms are involved.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=242569

Reconciliation, dominance and cortisol levels in children and adolescents (7-15-year-old boys)
Author: Butovskaya, Marina L.1
Source: Behaviour, Volume 145, Number 11, 2008 , pp. 1557-1576(20)
Publisher: BRILL

Abstract:The stress reduction hypothesis of reconciliation (Aureli, 1997; Aureli & Smucny, 2000) is tested on hormonal level. This study explores the potential relationships between post-conflict behaviour and cortisol level in boys between 7 and 15 years of age observed in summer camp during their free-time playing. Data on 56 boys are presented. Cortisol levels were measured in the morning (fixed time of the day), about 15 min after the end of conflict (PC) and next day without conflict as a match control (MC). Post-conflict of two types were analyzed: those followed with affiliation between former opponents and without affiliation. Age and dominance status of boys were taken in account in analyses of relationships between cortisol and post-conflict behaviour. The differences of cortisol level according to the occurrence of reconciliation were demonstrated. The stress reduction hypothesis of reconciliation was confirmed at the physiological level in children and adolescents.

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/beh/2008/00000145/00000011/art00004