Social Media, Activism, and Justice - Our Greatest Achievement

Social media has altered the face of the global society in so many profound ways, yet I still hear and see people saying negative things about it. Not to say there are no flaws in this form of communication, but whenever I rarely hear or see a valid flaw being mentioned.

So what good is sharing cat photos, posting what you are eating, or just saying hi? A lot more than one may think. Any successful business person will tell you that it is not what you know, but who you know, that determines your success. What you know only determines how much you can potentially contribute to your species and society.

While I was growing up we were constantly reminded of this, one teacher I had even explained that one should learn for the sake of learning, but socialize with the goal of succeeding. I only recently discovered that this was the key to being influential.

The big problem was, when I was in high school, we had no way to connect outside of our neighborhood, and thus became victims of circumstance. Needless to say, I was never very successful.

Today we have an excess of contacts now, people from across the globe and in different societies connecting in ways we never dreamed possible in the past. I have also admitted we have a problem of information overload many times, the next generations are becoming far more capable of adapting to this though.

The benefits really do outweigh the flaws, and a few select people cannot stand the benefits. The largest group are religious leaders, who only stay wealthy when people are ignorant. These religious leaders are even willing to make, and maintain, hundreds of fake follower accounts to spread misinformation. With how much followers pay these con men for working only one day a year, they have plenty of time.

Many in the governments do not like this connection to information either, now everyone in the USA knows the USA is not the best country, and many of the troglodytes in  power were only able to keep power so long as we didn't know any better. So they do everything they can to undermine the flow of information, even restricting those who have access to the internet.

The mainstream media and many outdated corporations are also against this freedom of information, competition they can't compete against. These dinosaurs are dying fast though, and soon they shall be extinct.

So why all the hatred for social media specifically? Activism. Yes, activism has become stronger by social media, and the proof is in the pudding, as they say.

Since activists started utilizing social media, our societies are changing for the better at an unfathomable of rate. Sane environmentalism has cleaned up much of the environment, from better innovations because of more minds working on problems, to demonstrating what information is bad. Even China is now seeing the need to change their ways, and that was a huge stumbling block for a long time.

People wrongly prosecuted or persecuted are getting aid that they need to fight back, like an atheist wrongly placed into a psychiatric hospital for being an atheist or the transgendered teen wrongfully imprisoned. These are but two of the successes I have seen in the last three months, yes, in less than three months we saw justice for these two when in the past it would take years.

The trick of it is to hit corporations and leaders where it hurts, their pocket books. Someone recently asked what good petitions are, they were trying to justify their own bloodlust and desire for war, but the answer is simple, political activism creates lasting effects while violence merely perpetuates violence.

Sea World is one of the recent targets of social media, and the results are encouraging. People are telling companies that support the business of nonhuman species being used for entertainment that their customers won't use their products or services if they do not stop. Many major corporations are pulling support for Sea World now.

With social media we are enacting long term changes without violence or destruction of the very things we want to protect. This is the greatest achievement of humanity to date, organizing our information and choosing our leaders instead of blindly following those we have been told to follow. We get information that would otherwise be hidden from us, from science to business records.

So the next time you hear or see anyone claiming social media is a bad thing, ask them what they have to hide.

Money, Gold, Paper - What is money?

The funny thing is that this is more well known today than prior to the internet, though not because of the internet. When banks started pushing for purely electronic funds people started thinking about this very question a lot, and eventually figured it out.

But there are still many who make the common mistaken assertions, like saying we should return to barter and trade or abolish money completely. The thing is, money is barter and trade, always has been, always will be.

Think of it like this, a dollar is a mark that represents the value of what you have created and traded to someone else, but you don't want what they have to offer so you take that marker to a different person and then trade it for what they have. In essence it's a miniature loan between several parties.

So to keep this up, the original method was to use gold as the marker, a valuable metal that was rare and otherwise useless at the time. That was when this marker system started, but at that time it was primitive and rather unsteady, that gold may be of great value in a place with no mining operations, but in a mining town everyone had a lot of it, making its' inherent value less that standard.

So then banks collected all the gold and printed paper markers to represent this gold they now controlled. Well, not really controlled, governments still had more say in the matter than the banks, they were paid to maintain the value estimates and manage the marker system.

But then something amazing happened, which upset our original system completely, we found a use for gold, other than as jewelry or status symbols. Technology makes use of this once rare metal so much that the value of gold sky rocketed again, but for it to be valuable it had to be used. This meant it could no longer represent the marker value.

That was when people got confused, the banks and governments had to admit the entire system was nothing more than an arbitrary one, where value was just estimated based on supply and demand. This caused businesses to begin adjusting the prices of their products based on what they thought people would be willing to pay, instead of how much there was of it.

So without the wool over our eyes we all learned one hard fact, money is only worth what we say it is, it's arbitrary and has always been so. The latest generation is exposed to this early on, but some of the older generations are still in shock about this realization. Don't be too harsh on them or it, we had been made to believe money was more than arbitrary for a very long time, as a method of keeping us from asking other, more difficult, questions.

So the next time you get your paycheck, just think of it as equal to the amount of work you did for other people, not your value as a person. It represents what people think your work's value is, for which you can then give to someone else to match what you think their work is worth. Yes, it's all arbitrary, and that's why electronic funds are no different than paper funds.

Actually, electronic funds are superior, they can be adjusted based on their increase in value, while the paper one will only depreciate.

Obamacare - Total Deception

Let's take a quick look at what one of the nearly forgotten policies enacted recently has actually done for the people, specifically, for the patient in need. When the policy was proposed, originally, I knew there was something off about it, there was too much press and too many conflicting explanations from both sides of the political fence. So what I did was read the thing.

Even after modifications made, the law itself is nothing more than a ploy to give insurance companies a free meal ticket. Sure, it stipulates they cannot discriminate for any reason, but if everyone has to buy the insurance they will still accumulate massive compulsory profits. Originally that was all that bothered me, and it's a pretty huge problem. That was before I had to deal with the medical industry at length, which resulted in me doing a bit more work on the issue.

I did one thing that patients are not suppose to do, I looked at my hospital bill. The prices for some things were clearly inflated for no reason. I detailed much of that in previous posts so I won't get into the specifics of what I saw. This was before the law was enacted, this is what the taxpayers had to pay because the doctors won't give me the one surgery I need to get back to work.

Then it hit me, if everyone has to pay into insurance, then no one will have any control of the actual costs of medical care ... except the doctors. Suddenly this house of cards had a basement, a dark and frightening one. The notion that a patient needs insurance to pay for something as simple as an exam is, on it's own, ridiculous. It would be like saying you couldn't buy a loaf of bread, instead you gave your money to this other guy and he bought it for you, but the grocery he went to would decide what bread you got, how old it was, and how much it cost.

That is what insurance really is, it's a middle man that can hide the actual costs from the person who is suppose to benefit from what the actual provider gets to decide is right. All rights to your healthcare, all choices, all your freedom is gone in this scenario. Other countries implemented national health care, and it works. It works because the patient still has control of their healthcare. What we have in the USofA is nothing short of a scam.

Of course both doctors and insurance providers would be on board, and they all were. The amount of profit that doctors and insurance providers get in this bargain is outrageous, especially considering how poorly cared for our patients in the USA already are. We spend more money on healthcare, yet have one of the lowest health ratings in the world, and it has nothing to do with our diets. It has everything to do with our complacency, accepting something that is presented to us on a silver platter, even if it's stale and moldy.

Climate Change - A Debate That Misses The Point

I have heard the argument from both sides, I have also looked into the information as much as I can stand, climatology is a really boring subject to me. But so far only the real scientists have said anything that makes any real sense based on everything I have come to understand.

But what do the scientists say? They admit to not knowing the answer, of course, that's the most common answer you will get from a good scientist. When confronted by both sides of this particular debate, climatologists have given one consistent answer: let us finish the work before you do change anything.

Which is actually the best advice in almost any aspect of your life. You need all the facts about something before you can make an informed decision, even with all the facts you can still make the wrong decision but the facts decrease the chances of that decision causing more harm. So why the push from both sides for different actions? Well, money. Specifically people who want to dip their hands into your taxes and take however much they can grab.

If you know me, you know I love capitalism, but admit we do need social programs to keep society moving forward. So why should I care about companies trying to turn a profit? It's not the profit, it's how. Predatory policies that force you to purchase from specific companies is not capitalism, that is closer to communism. This is exactly what the lobbyists are supporting, attempting to make one company's products look like the best idea then outlaw all the competition.

This holds true for both sides though. The telltale sign is the lobbying itself, the quick soundbites that attempt to paint the opposition in a more horrible light without presenting any solid facts on the issue. So yes, again it's how our government works that is the real problem. The facts in this particular case are still showing no causal links, none, that can shed light on the matter.

Yes, we know that carbon can create a greenhouse effect, but life is made of carbon as well. Methane can also create a greenhouse effect, but this is a byproduct of life. As temperatures rise, many such gases also increase as a result of the rise in temperature, making it difficult to draw any solid causal links, you can't tell which is the horse, and which is the cart. This is just the beginning of the problems with both sides of the debate.

Trends, this is statistical information, are not set in stone, they are predictions, and rarely hold true. At best, a trend is used as a starting point for other predictions based on the numerical values of similar circumstances. This does not make their results fact, ever, at all, in any way. They are educated guesses at best. The entire debate started when these trends did not match the reality, which any scientist will tell you is pretty much expected to happen.

That basically means that the side screaming doom and gloom have based everything on something that was expected to be incorrect by the very people who actually do the scientific research. This is where it gets really messy though, because those opposing these people are just as wrong, and just as dangerous. If we act now, without knowing all the facts, we could actually cause a bigger problem, even cause our own extinction. So premature action can destroy us, that's one part missed often.

But action in the reverse is just as bad. For decades we have been working to keep our air clean, and sanely reducing our waste. As a species we have been looking into new technologies and possibilities, knowing our population will, inherently, produce waste we needed to balance our waste so that it would match that of a much smaller, more realistic, population than we actually have. Countermanding all that work would return us to the Dark Age level of sanitation and cleanliness, but on a more massive scale that would destroy us.

So what is the best solution? Business as usual. Neither side need be listened too, both are wrong, both are extremists crying for attention, an advantage for their pet products, and often just because their lives are so boring they have nothing better to do. Yes, companies across the globe have always been looking for better ways to do things, sometimes it's because they think it's what's right, other times because the right thing does improve the bottom line, but rarely do they do the right thing because the government told them to do it.

So yes, keep working toward a better future, but the direction we have been moving is the best for everyone still, we have no facts stating otherwise. Next time someone shows you one of those charts, on either side, ask them a very basic question: Are you a climatologist? If the answer is "no," then tell them their information is invalid.