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There’s no way around sounding sexist in this post. There is a clear difference between typical men and women. This is not to say that either is exclusively one way or another, this is a trap we are being pushed into to drive discussions and arguments online and in the media. The brains of women are different from those of men, this is a scientific fact. But they are still so much alike that it is not super easy to detect. The bodies are obviously different after puberty. The mind of course will adapt to the body it is in.

There is a lot to say about the mind, but from my research I concluded that it has to work with what it has, the body it is in, the environment. This determines if it is more or less ambitious. This determines whether it tries things or not. To try to condense it : The neuromodulation associated with holding on to a thing and letting go of it (dominant vs submissive) is regulated based on succes. If you are aggressive and succesfull, you become more aggressive, if you are submissive and succesfull you become more submissive. This dynamic works between all humans, men vs men, women vs women, men vs women etc.

Also this does not mean you become more aggressive if you have success with it, just that you -can- become more aggressive. To explain aggression is taking a step in the dark, into the unkown. If you challenge an opponent or dive into a dangerous situation you do not know the outcome of your action. You simply ignore the risks. Upregulating aggression without experience (so through diet with testosteron for example) leads to unwarranted aggression, because even if you are aggressive you can be prudent. The up and down regulation can lead to high flexible non aggressive behavior, but it can also lead to paralyzed submissiveness (where aggression is so much down regulated you can’t initiate behavior) and depression.

When we are weak and submissive we can always talk. We seek to talk. Talking, making sound, is partially engaging the same instincts as crying. A baby that can’t talk cries. It is drawing attention to yourself, which is unwise in most natural environments. Being in a conversation is being in a safe place, unless of course the conversation indicates its own end or transition into some physical altercation. In short having a converstation is safe, comfortable and in principle submissive. Because many women have been intimidated in life and are relative submissive, a conversation is feminine. The energy of a conversation is completely different from the energy of a fight.

Most behavior does not require talking. Most work in industry is silent. Its not supposed to because talking usually means something needs to change. In the mean time people know their tasks and try to perform them as well as possible. Most information intensive systems where human conversation is important get automated quickly. Still there are many jobs where talking is all important. This is fine as long as one can talk some real action into happening. If I order a pizza its talking people into a deal that results in their action. But if I am protesting the slaughter of Gazan’s nothing happens with my words, they get blown away in the wind.

The point of this post is to argue that the media try to make us think and discuss matters that we have very little power over. This puts us in a submissive attitude. We are often unhappy about something we really have no influence over. This means we are unable to effect real change in our lives. We have the option to work and complain like this, and most other options are blocked off. We are allowed to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, the bridge is only accessible for very predictable and reliable allies of the economistic system. They don’t talk about it, they do what they do without offering it up for discussion.

From the above you could conclude that nearly all topics that are offered up for your consideration via the media are distractions. They both make you not think about what is important, and they put you in a mindset that is submissive. This can reach the point where you become anxious and depressed. Social media basically earn their keep by doing this to you, unless you use them strictly for your own ends, limited to actuall usefull learning and orienting in the world. For that you need to want something, which you don’t if you worry about things you can’t control.

This post is to explain how to use EthereumCertify.com. What is EthereumCertify? Its a very simple way for you to prove your authorship of content. Right now AI is able to fake voice, images, even movie sequences, overlay real time video with alternative faces or environments. This is all very confusing and it makes it harder for real people to communicate real informatin. I anticipated this situation and we can see it gradually get worse, I call it ChAIos, from Chaos but with AI added.

Follow @climatebabes on X.com where you can find the Roboeconomic booklet

There is very little we can do against fake content, and it will only get harder to detect it. However as authors we are always there when it gets created by us, worded, written, put on music whatever. It is only ours and then we share it with the world. If we at that moment determine a marker of truth, a watermark or hash (which is quite a common concept, a random number representing the content), and store it in an unmutable medium (like a blockchain) we will be able to validate the same content later, we can prove it is ours and we can detect if it has been tampered with.

So how does it work? First we generate content. Then we generate a hash of that content. The content must be in some digital form where it can be fed into a hashing algorithm. The hash output is always the same size. An MD5 hash (which is quite old and well known) is enough. If we have the output, for example 4519fe629e4ea09837b33a93c8434535 which is the hash for ‘this text was hashed’. We can store that number on the Ethereum blockchain by adding it as payload to our Ethereum transaction. The transaction can be to one address : 0x2df39FB5c546B961111cB8fd2Bc25144D255EcEE This is my personal wallet.

Then if you have done that anyone can go to an ethereum block chain monitor (like Etherscan) and find the transaction, for example this one. This shows you the transaction has been made, from what address, and the payload (called Input Data under more details, in this case it is empty). You need to be able to send Ether with input data to submit the hash.

Now in the future when the content is published but it is tampered with, you can prove you where the author and what the original content was. To do this you need to point to the original content, provide the hash and show the transaction in which you stored the hash in the blockchain. If the fake author can not generate the same hash from his version this proves it is false, fake or tampered with.

You can also prove your authorship on request by sending a small amount from the same ethereum addres (your private sending address) to the Ethereumcertify address. This proves you own that address, only you can have used it to store the hash in the blockchain. This then counts as a certification of your claim, simply because there is no way a hash can be the same or close to the same unless you had the original content.

We are currently working on an app and other functionality as the current implementation of the idea (which is about 8 years old) is still very basic. But it does not mean it can not be used. It is simply impossible to fake the hash, so even if you have a crude list, a description of the content, a report of how you created it and what it depicts, and you hash that report, you can have prove of authorship and ownership.

The amount you use to post the hash is not important, although if you make it more than $10 it is appreciated, because the money can be pumped into developing this service. The more people use it the better it will get. If you want to buy the domain and idea for further development you can send an email to frits@rincker.nl with a bid above $30 mln.

Am working on my piece called "Economic Signal to Noise" which compares the economic system to a communication network and asks where the noise is and how we can increase the signal to noise ratio (make it work better). Read : https://t.co/3QxwSEN8hI

Comments are welcome..

— Earthshine ™ (Roboeconomist nr. 1) (@climatebabes) September 23, 2023

The expression ‘signal to noise’ comes from the telecom and audio world. In the haydays of electronic transmission it was a battle to make it actually get data across transmission channels, morse code was invented to help in the beginning, and the history of long range communication is the history of how to keep data intact and comprehensible. As you transmit a signal over a line (initally a copper wire for example) the signal slowly gets weaker due to resistance in the wire and gets drowned out by thermal nois and radio signals picked up by the wire. To understand this required an entire field of engineering to evolve.

In the abstract the signal is a perturbation in the medium (so for example the local electron density in copper), and ideally you could easily notice it as it propagates outward. However, other influences also cause perturbations (heat moves electrons around and magnetic fields push them as well). At a certain point its no longer possible to distinguish what is what, and the signal is lost. Its like making waves with your hand in choppy water. You can see the waves you make expand from where your hand moves, but at a certain distance the choppyness of the water ‘swallows’ your signal. The signal to noise ratio talks about how clearly the signal can still detected.

Sender ………………>> signal >>……………. Reciever

You can find S/N ratings in many devices. We want to hear the radio signal clearly, we want to hear the voice on the phone clearly, we want to know our GPS position precisely and we want to identify possible enemies on the radar screen correctly. It is akin to focussing, our brain increases the signal to noise of an outside stimulus by increasing the contrast between what is allowed in and what is filtered out. Principles of how the brain does this have actually been used in electronic signal processing.

There is another aspect about data on a transmission line and that is what it encodes. What is the meaning transmitted. One of the important names in the history of humanity that few people know is that of Claude Shannon. He wrote a small book about information, his information theory, in which he originated the concept of a ‘Bit’ of information. The way he saw information transfer was a process of enabling the reciever to make a choice between different options. A message is transmitted correctly if the receiving end can make the same choice as the orginator intended. The Bit is the smallest amount of ‘discrimination’ that can be transmitted. So if you take all the options you want to transmit (say 5 flavors of icecream) then you need to transmit at least 3 bits of data because you can only count to 5 binarily with 3 bits (and you’d have bits left over!). Of course you’d have a decoding list where each number stands for a flavor.

To make it simple, say if I want you to say ‘Potato’ and I have to signal to you from 400 meter with my hands. If you never seen a potato or said the word potato or connected the two (you call a car a potato) then my position is pretty hopeless. Luckily we can share information beforehand. Now I can give you a little note that says if I hold up my right hand I mean potato, and if I don’t I mean something else. This seems trivial but of course that is sufficient, job done, case closed. This is me transmitting one bit of information, and that bit allows a choice between ‘potato’ and everything else. The only noise possible here would be fog or smoke or night without a moon making it impossible to see my hand.

We are used to transmitting a lot more over one ‘line’, for example the alphabet, audio, although these days much of all transmission is digital. The big advantage of digital transmission is that you can compress data and use compression ‘libaries’. The latter are like notes you send out. So the for example the JPEG image libary is a set of tiles, little pieces of image (like lego), that have a number and can be used to reconstruct an image. You can choose to do it 100% correct (so no loss of any pixel) or less. This is like letting someone rephare your message to make it more compact before it is send. The full sentence starts at ‘sir, could I have a cup of coffe please’, but this can be compressed to ‘Could I have a cup of coffee please’ or ‘could I have coffee please’ or ‘Coffee please’ etc.

Our mind can also compress and decompress data it recieves, because we may think different from what someone verbally offers us. So someone says ‘I need a bike’, you know you have three kinds, so this is not enough information, you say ‘what kind of bike’ (if you want the sender to use your options) or ‘we have three kinds, racing, mountain or electric, what will it be’ (here you send your options so the sender can use them). The person then goes ‘mountain’ and you know how to behave. So there is a direct parallel to every day interactions and data transmission, noise, encoding and decoding.

When we apply the transmission analogy to economics first we have to identify what is what, who is the sender, who the reciever, what is the transmission line, what is the signal. In economics the signal is money, and it is transmitted from account to account. This is the same as light from my hand being traveling from my hand to your eye, or the electricity from a telegraph station being transmitted to another telegraph station.

This does not completely explain tha magical effect of money as it sits in one account or another. A message that is recieved in a telegram office, or the email you read (which outside your field of view has met with all kinds of noise and error correction along the way it travelled) is nothing in itself. It is what it means (where I take meaning to mean ‘effect’). In short the meaning of money is energy, which can be human effort, fossil energy, caloric energy, things that make things move and happen.

This ties into the formula for Wealth, which is Energy x Skills x Materials. It does no feature money, because money is means of exchange, a token for trade. Money does not satisfy a desire in itself. The economic system is meant to use money as a signal, because it wants to distribute effort to where it is needed and most usefull. Still money is a purse signal, so not the energy itself, because even if you send a million to an account whover uses that account has to use the money to buy the energy or harness the effort etc.

Wealth = Energy X Skills X Materials

But in this analogy the signal transmits data, information. What is the information that sending money transmits? It is that of an opportunity. When I transmit money to the butcher as I pay for my meat, I transmit an opportunity for the butcher to apply the energy he can now aquire to getting more meat to process and offer for sale. If I transmit money to my employee I transmit (hopefully) the opportunity for that employee to be my employee for another day, week or month. It is an opportunity because the money can be send on to recieves that do not help the employee do that, or there can be other reasons why this fails.

When there is ‘profit’ to be made in a trade this too is an opportunity. A source of freedom for whoever manages to become the reciever of that money. If there is a prize offered for say a new type of invention “Invent a way to conserve food for longer” then the money gives the inventer freedom in return for the seclusion and isolation he/she had to seek to make the invention. In this sense the ‘conversation’ we have through our economic system is about how to maximize our opportunities.

So what is noise then in our economic system? It seems there is no noise to speak off when you send money from one account to another, or hand it over in cash. What shape does the noise take? The noise can express itself on the network level.

The first source of noise is just reality, life itself, humans and their faults. Even if a butcher gets the right amount of money for his meat, he may fall sick and not be able to buy new meat, or the meat he buys may be rotten or the cooling system he uses fails etc. etcl. When these things happen there can be error correction signals (payment for cooling system repair, medicine, time spend finding better meat) or the reciever, the butcher has to quit and wait for investment or find another opportunity.

But even in itself, the transmission is not cost free, the system is run by banks and banks have an interest in more signals in the system. This in itself is a source of noise. The economy should produce the maximium amount of wealth for the least amount of ‘effort’ or energy, but it tries to send the maximum amount of signal, regardless what it means for effort or wealth. It just finds that humans that send and recieve the signal will not simply send more all the time, they want to see real opportunity as a result. So banks are one to introduce noise in the system.

Another source of noise is the energy or effort supply. If you pay for an employee you are outsourcing a lot of work, the job of keeping one’self available for work, alive preferably. The money that you recieve has to ultimately power the machines and produce what the employee needs. If that process is not efficient or distorted or disturbed, your money signal does not have the desired effect. Economic theory relies on humans to fix such problems, but of course it does not plan to reward them if they work extra hours or travel long distances to earn or eat insufficiently or live in horrible rental homes or out of their car. Economic theory is abstract, its a perfect world scenario. It has a prima donna syndrom as well in that it expects you to say ‘oh god no of course our mistake you are perfect!’

My conclusion is that the way economists and banks try to make the system work is by managing the amount of money in the system with respect to the amount of energy that the money can buy. So if there is less energy for sale (like right now, oil is at $95) it will contract the amount of money so that the price comes down (less demand). On the world market his is an automatic effect, as foreign countries do not have unlimited dollars. Right now, with the $95 brent crude oil price (set by production reductions by Saudi Arabia), many countries will see their systems fail in the weakest spots. That means opportunites are lost, people are not able to do jobs or aquire services, there is not enough signal to go around. Lines remain silent. This can lead to riots because ultimately people are existentially dependent on the signal.

When Russia cut off the gas supply to Europe (it was more complicated but lets say this is what happened) the price of gas went through the roof. Now it is still way to high. Gas companies are thus reducing opportunity in the economy. Not only gas companies but many others have raised their prices. That money goes into reserves that are not used and this leads to a slowdown in activity, in utilization of manpower. The main reason for this clear relationship is the fossil nature of most energy used, as human effort is not a real means of production in most cases (except light construction, manual labour jobs).

Play this on loop 24/7 pic.twitter.com/0gAo3Y8OCp

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) October 19, 2022

At the same time energy companies try to keep renewable energy out of the market and off the grid, they use their money to lobby and of course make sure its all very complex and difficult. This is an example of noise in the system. Nobody that tries to maximize wealth using the system would act this way. The reason this happens is because renewables can be owned by private citizens, local communities, and this means the signals send in the system will be more local. The banks and energy companies both have an interest in keeping it more centralized, that is their way to earn their opportunities.

Yet another source of noise is the offsetting of opportunities in organizations and governments in the sense that the top is given more opportunities if they support actions that lower the opportunities of those they represent or are supposed to manage. A large part of the economic signalling is to make people do things they don’t want to do voluntarily or that is harmfull. The true signal nature of money becomes more clear if we recognize that if a member of parliament or congress has 1000 USD it is different from when a truchdriver recieves it. For the MP it is a good meal in a restaurant but there really was no need, for the lorry driver it can mean a lot of things. So the signal for the MP decodes into different things than the signal to the lorry driver. But of course the MP should be payed by the tax payer only, and to a degree that makes him/her able to function. How come distortion is even possible?

This may be an asside but the economy, and the desire of people to maximize their opportunity and banks to maximize the total signal leads to ‘stratification’ of the market and community. The effect is that if you achieve money which grants you X opportunities, it may be that this puts you in a different market. The market is constantly organized so that to be at level Y you have to have XYZ stuff. These are lifestyles you can afford or not, and through exclusion and rejection people are motivated to strive to be included. You can strive to own a Rolex for $8.000 or $12.000 or $200.000 its up to you. It must be clear that the price at this level has little to do with ‘effort’ or energy that goes into an object or opportunity. Here the human recieving the message is learning there are new things to signal for, new opportunities and there’s a strong psychological manipulation industry dedicated to faking opportunity, to divert the signal to doing the manipulation.

The above introduces serious noise in the system, the opportunities are not created where they are most effective. Diverting signal to recievers that really don’t need more opportunity starves those that need it, and we can see that in the economy when people can’t afford a decent meal while working 3 jobs out of their car. The type of noise this represent is almost like feedback in an amplifier system, because of course those that have recieved overabundant opportunity send some to people that supported the distortion of the system. A bank can bribe a poltician without even sending much, but by just enabling more opportunities, for example a loan that would otherwise not have been given, or stock tips or help to a family member.

I think today the economy, because of the banks and energy companies incenitives to maximize the (or their) signal, is not functioning correctly even if the theory makes sense (which it doesn’t but that’s another story). Governments are trying to fix this, but many are infiltrated by people that are corrupted or that see no harm in serving banks or energy companies. Greed is desirable if you are a bank, it increases the signal, but it also misdirects opportunities to people who don’t need more. Greed causes shortages that then induce need, so even if only a few people hoard money, signal, the rest will now have to be greedy too. This leads to less opportunities for those with less to offer, it makes everything more expensive (so the money or signal people recieve loses meaning).

[older version below]

When we apply signal to noise to economics we find that the theory in principle has flaws, the foremost being that the economy only looks at what exists, in order to trade it for profit. It does not conserve resources or protect what lives or do anything to keep the situation fit for humans. But even if we where to fix that, we have humans testing and checking every economic activity (small shops, industry etc.) for their impact on humans, animals, the planet, we still have challenges.

In the economy the signal is opportunity to profit. Its not so much the profit itself. The signal changes something on the other end of the line. The words in the message change your behavior and anticipation of the future. If I was standing with my hand raised to signal potato to you all day, you only have to look once and you know ‘its potato’. The economy has profitable activities, it will do them until the situation changes, until there is a signal of some kind. You can work a man to death, but if he dies, that’s a clear signal you have to stop and find another man.

Luckily we have a less barbaric method of signalling in our economy, and that is our spending, or where money can be earned. Now if we have for example a farm that has employees, those employees can earn a living. It is the task of the farmer to pay their salaries. For the employees the signal is clear and their behavior is stabile (of course ignoring many possible influences from living a human life). Some signal does not get transmitted though, the farmer will perhaps hide financial problems and use his reserves to cover the cost of his employees, because he knows how hard it is to find them, or how being layed off will impact their lives. This is an exampe of ‘noise’ in the transmission of the signal. It prevents the employees from sensing that they should look elsewhere to secure their lifestyles.

In other places in the economy the noise can take other forms. For example you have a big chemical company that produces toxic chemicals that pollute the public waters (like Chemours in Dordrecht, Holland). Why does that company keep going? It did not recieve much if any signal in its economic ‘transmission lines’ (money flows)? This is indeed unlikely. This is a major problem of the world economy as a whole. The ‘transmission lines’ or money flows of many companies are totally isolated from the public. The public only sees the balance sheet and profit and loss etc. If the company is polluting, maybe some politician should complain and make a law to fight it? But that person has economic dependencies. In principle his economic signal is not directly dependent on the pollution, only on what the public thinks about it. Strangely the economic ‘signalling’ system does not tie into governance in a way that protects the population. This is an example of blocked transmission, no noise needed!

Of course the director of the polluting company can also have a signal with a lot of noise. To stay with the analogy, and moving into the realm of cryptography, the signal can not only be degraded by noise (which you first have to know is happening mind you), it can also be replaced, tampered with, faked, replayed to hid what is going on on the sending end of the line. How does this translated into economics? Well, you have people making a lot of money to keep things as they are. They may be at the head of an organization that has a governance task, but they get the same money no matter what happens. So where is the signal? No signal, no (possible) change. On the other side you can have a bonus system, which is designed to evoke behavior in order to recieve a signal (a bit of reverse psychology). Its a no cure no pay (so cheap) method of paying for what you want. It can however completely drown out the actual (especially human) relevant signal. Many scandals are with companies who’s leaders get bonusses and rewards even though they did an absolute shit job (literally now with the pullution of UK waterways by priviatized water companies)

Economics recognizes that our society is made up of many individuals that all have partial control over our environment, streets, factories, companies. The idea is to make them all cooperate to the benefit of all. The signals send between people and people and organizations etc. all seem to or pretend to serve that purpose. In reality we have some people and organizations that have quite a biased motivation, their economic signal is to extract money and control the amount of money we use to send the signals. These are the financial companies (don’t call them institutions, they are all privately owned!). We all know they are not like normal businesses. They pretend that the only way to transmit economic signals is with their money.

Another group of companies that is not quite fairly operating in our economic signalling system are energy companies, especially those where the energy originates, so oil, gas,coal and even solar and wind energy companies. Its not that they are intrinsically economically bad (of course fossil companies are ultimately devastating to our economies), it is that what they sell is money, which is confusing. You can buy a barrel of oil for $95 at the monent. Say its converted to gasoline, say its 158 liter. That is about 1000 km in a small car. You can drive a lot of Uber passengers over that distance. I guess you’d make at least $1000. This is called profit. How can that be? Because there is no way to turn that $1000 into anything usefull without more oil. I theory you could get 9 other people to drive Ubers and take 10% you’d be golden. But even if you have $100.000 eventually and you could not buy oil, suddenly that money would be worthless (unless you drive a Tesla but then you’d have to consider where the energy came from and at what cost). What this tells you is 1. There are more and less profitable things you can do with energy and 2. That profit is not worth much (zero) if you have no energy. You would have a strong ‘signal’ but it would be meaningless because it can not drive behavior, you need energy to have behavior.

So in the system we have the producers of the signal (Banks) and the behavior (Energy) and noise in the transmission (corruption, hoarding) and blindness of the signal to the plight of humans. You can clearly observe that banks and energy companies introduce noise and sabotage the economic signals to retain their control. This perspective of signal to noise may be helpfull to fix the way the economic system functions. Part of this can be by tuning the signal to reflect relevant factors. Another part can be to introduce signal in order to reflect the needs of our planet and humanity. The biggest challenge in this is to have a stable transmission system to begin with. You can see prices as part of the ‘note’ which explains the options the signal can have. If a car that is damanging to the environment, your health and future is cheaper than one that is not, your behavioral options will be distorted.

There are many ways in which economic signals get muddled, the media plays a role in it too. It is clear humans are not optimizing profit naturally, but lifestyle. The social aspect is way more imporant, and although it is recognized the conflict with the goals of banks is evident. This results in a constant barrage of marketing and lifestyle advertisement that create the wrong signal for humanity and even the individual. Is sitting in front of a laptop at Starbucks the highest attainable goal for a mid 20 woman? Or doing Yoga? While we all are supposed to work as hard as we can? Why do men spend so much on watches, in the hundreds of thousands on some tiny metal object. What does this solve rally? Are Rolexes really a good ‘investment’? How come if companies manage economic signals they are very precise about it, using performance indicators, quantifying everything, while in our lifestyles we are asked to ignore money when we spend it?

My suggestion would be to start looking at the noise and view it as a cost to society. Capitalism is not bad, it is the way to solve challenges as a community (share resources, that is the traditional meaning). Bank dominance and widespread noise (also called ‘hidden cost’) in our economic system is bad, and a true economists would talk about this!

Tesla CEO Elon Musk heeft recent aangekondig dat terugleveren vanuit een Tesla auto (bidirectional charging) in de nabije toekomst mogelijk wordt. Het blijkt dat bij snelladen toch direct met de accu wordt gecommuniceerd (door het laad station) en dat dit het makkelijk maakt om stroom aan de auto te onttrekken, dwz om te ontladen richting het laadstation. Deze optie werd wel eerder voorgesteld maar was toen nog te complex.

Accus/batterijen worden intussen steeds goedkoper en lichter per kWh. Er zijn bedrijven die zeggen dat 950 km (of meer) aan range mogelijk is. Wat zou er voor opslag capaciteit in bv een Cybertruck kunnen als we die met accus zouden beladen? Als je de accu capaciteit van 229 Wh/kg neemt, en je neemt de ‘payload capacity’ van de CT die op 3500 pounds staat, dus 1587,573 kg, dan heb je een laadcapaciteit van ~363 kWh. Dit kan meer zijn, en kan zeker meer worden.

Aangezien een gemiddeld huishouden zeg max 4 kWh per dag gebruikt, in de winter wel meer, zijn met een keer rijden met een ‘geladen’ CT iig 30 huishoudens te bedienen (rekening houdend met kleine verliezen). Dit kan ook bij bv. graafwerkzaamheden van pas komen, aangezien je heel makkelijk batterijen van nieuwe electrische graafmachines kunt vervangen, meenemen om op te laten, terugbrengen. Batterij mobiliteit zal zeker een ding worden. Denk bv. aan een boer met een zonnecentrale die de landbouwwerktuigen van andere boeren oplaadt. Spaart meteen stikstof en een hoop geld voor diesel!

Als het Grid in NL achterloopt omdat Tennet express een ‘markt gedreven’ houding heeft aangenomen (aangezien het geprivatiseerd werd, wat achteraf een puur pro-fossiele berschermings stap was), dan kan het probleem van een onderontwikkeld grid misschien op deze manier worden opgelost. Er zijn enorm veel toepassingen voor stroom op locatie, dus er is ruimte voor innovatie en emissie besparingen. Welke festival organisator wil zijn festival nu niet met een (relatief) schone Cyberbatterij laten draaien?

You are reading this off a computer or mobile screen. You probably spend at least an hour a day staring at screens, if you work then you stare at work, if you are out of work it turns out you also spend a lot of time staring at a screen, not moving, eating, getting unhealthy, but most of all, addicted.

If I check my daily diet of screen it involves these things :

• Browsing Ebay for fun things to have (vintage watches)
• Browsing X, I don’t use Facebook, but same difference
• Browsing Youtube for fun videos, no Tiktok
• Checking out insane designs on Pinterest, a great source for eyecandy
• Playing online chess
• Checking financial markets
• Checking on jobs, freelance
• Writing this blog that nobody reads
• Checking on a dating site
• Checking on [adult content]
• Sending and reading What’s app messages
• Reading some emails
• I don’t game
• Coding, trying new libraries in Python, AI, LLMs

All this takes a loot of time. It can consume a day easily. Only the last item is remotely usefull. I really waste my day by entertaining myself with bulk content (except the chess). Inpersonaly automatically served virtual reality, imagery that satisfies my brain. I am an internet addict.

Lets call screen addiction “ScreenCapture“

The addiction is evident if the behavior to use internet is so automatic it happens. Then there’s this ‘just one more’ behavior, it locks me into my habit because it isolates me from the world.

I do get out to cycle and play basket ball, practice guitar. The basketbal is probably the most different from watching a screen. But I talk to nobody, I only chat online, make telephone calls to arrange things perhaps, I don’t talk when I buy stuff. I am screen captured. I am addicted. I need a garden or some workshop to build stuff.

I think I need to make options for what I do online, so that it is one of these things :

• Learn something relevant for my base knowledge (AI ML Coding)
• Chat with real people
• Organize real experiences
• Write in depth content for my own pleasure

Other than that my life will have to become more real. I don’t work, because I don’t believe any job today is good for the future of mankind. Even ‘green jobs’ are bad. I can’t understand how people waste their lives in harmfull jobs.

What is the best way to free more people from their screen? How are you faring in terms of percentage of time spend looking at a screen?

The long term damage of CO2 emissions is not well understood. Some say that even with lower CO2 the warmed oceans will keep the atmosphere warm for a long time, with the serious weather patterns we see today. The media wants people to think about the absolute short term, like a casino without clocks. “Why should I pay for xyz” because the banks have corrupted the entire society, you can’t survive without money or you have to be a recluse in Arizona. Banks own everything, the economy is a bank run system, and this system has no moral center, it merely uses politics to seek the limit of what people will tolerate.

So what now? The end of humanity? Not likely, we can build habitats and have solar and of course wind, live underground. Even if the oceans start belching H2S (swamp gas) which is toxic and corrosive, we can find technical solutions to deal with it. Not all of Earth died out during past climate cataclysms (The so called Great Dying was a warming event and the biggest extinction until now). After that disaster which saw a 12 degree temperature rise, animals from before, even oxygen breathing, and plants where left. Our ancestors survived that million year dead silence on Earth (the Dinosaurs came and went, our ancestors where small rodents then).

We need to take a different attitude vis a vis human survival, and we need a long term project, because it is going to take many centuries to fix this problem, to get back to a more temperate Earth. We live in a world economy now but soon it will be fragmented. Chaos will happen in many places. Indonesia saw 70% of its rice harvest fail, other countries already shut down all exports. People will starve and the people who won’t will be kept happy and distracted. This managed world where everyone stares at a screen or is a corporate drone or tows the economic line will simply desintegrate. Either that or it will (which I hope) be replaced by the Roboeconomy, one powered by renewables, wind, solar, batteries, EVS, in short what bank run USA politics is fighting, even the democrats!

If ancient egyptians had found oil and build the internal combustion engine we'd be royally screwed by now, luckily they worshipped the sun!

— Earthshine ™ (Roboeconomist nr. 1) (@climatebabes) October 23, 2012

We need a group of people that is working on something else, on real solutions, but with a long term perspective, and not a decade or some ‘economistic’ time frame but simply the aim to neutralize climate change by the year 3000. The tweet above send by me got 4 views, but its true, I calculated the oxygen would have run too low by now if the Egyptians had started to burn oil and continued to this day. But we can still see a lot of the egyptian archtecture, we have perfectly preserved artifacts that are 4000 years out. Doors, mechanisms. It is not strange to have a 1000 year plan (977 to be precise).

If you are project 3000 you try to help to halt CO2 emissons in any way, of course, but you also think about what structures we need, large scale, and thinking not in terms of money but in terms of effectiveness. Enormous catherdrals where build over centuries, not even usefull, but just to prove a point of the greatness of mankind. There was a design, a plan an objective and all the people involved contributed their lives and resources to it. We have it a loot easier. Solar energy is not difficult to harvest at all. We have electornics, robots, machines, chemistry. We only need to ensure it is applied to the problem.

What is needed is an organization who’s members are not trying to be rich and have nice offices, like you see with a lot of climate activists turned book writers, gala attendants not achieving much at all. We need people with an engineering mind, that can see how to make things right, that can overcome difficulies and who form an international network from which true carbon capture and eco restauration initiatives can come, and which does not seek public attention, does not advertise their success because it does not want to be know and be disturbed at first.

Eventually there will have to remain people that believe in our planet, in what it is now, and which will try to seek back the way to this paradise we are losing. Sounds a lot like many religions but of course some people in our history have had a fantastic life, just living wherever they where, having no more complex activity than shooting a deer or teaching at a school or being a farmer. It makes a lot of sense to create a priesthood, of people in the know that manage installations and keep those that have not had proper education out. This sounds science fiction, but what will the state of humanity be if the oil spigot closes and there’s no energy to maintain order and run the services that are the foundation of our economistic society ?

If people are really serious about climate action they should stop working for the system that causes it, but also start to prepare for the difficult road ahead. We need places that will be safe, where food will grow, water will be and the heat can’t kill. Its not in a major city or in a plain where everyone can come visit. Its not as part of an economy where ever item you make has to be sold, every ton of produce has to be consumed. Especially when you want to capture carbon you are generating a valuable resource.

Religious texts speak of a battle against dark angels, darkness being evil, the underworld full of fire and brimstone, sulfurous smoke from the land of the dead. We took the oil from under the Earth and it turned our planet in to hell (the effects are delayed, but this year was a good preview). We brought hell to the surface, and we need to put it back under the ground.

Project 3000 is a rather uninspiring name for the common goal of whomever is on board with this. It is our task to select those that are capable, to ensure continuity and to actually build carbon capture and eco restoration installations on a large scale outside the grasp of the economistic idiots that ruined our planet’s climate. I know its ambitions, waay to long term and crazy, but this is what we need. How are we going to keep it up for 977 years, which will be gone in a blip, just like the last century. Join this project. Spread the word.

Our mind has a task, which is to keep us alive and not make mistakes that might kill us. This task is made difficult because of changing circumstances and our changing health and needs for food, shelter, intimacy, excitement. The society most of us (that read this anyhow) live in however is based on a model where needs are expected to be met by someone as long as there is profit in it. This means other people will start to mess with your life as soon as you express a need, or show behavior you have a need. Also before you have a need, some may want to induce a need in you (advertisement) or profit soley off your looking for a solution for your need (spiritual searchers), and of course some will try to help you while knowing there is no solution to your need (mid life crisis behavior).

In this reality, where we are basically fish in a bowl, where we give off many signals about our mental and physical state all the time, we are very likely to get stuck in some kind of exploitation trajectory or another. So as soon as you search ‘Guitar solo Pink Floyd’ you fall into a category ready to expend money on a whole lot of stuff you don’t need related to guitars, Pink Floyd etc. Pop culture was really monoculture, only limited in complexity to what radio and TV at the time could promote. You can be an outlier and like Bad Brains or Frank Zappa, but then again you are quite easy to characterize.

The more you show yourself the easier it is to be characterized and economically targeted

To be correct we should perhaps investigate the need to be unique for a moment. Why do we feel this need? It is one of the basic needs of a child, to develop into a sane person a child must have some sense of individuality. There are three other factors, won’t go into them here, but of course how can you even identify yourself if you have no unique trait? But on the other hand, why would you want to be unique? I guess I have to continue this line of questioning some other time.

This post is about getting stuck. The short of it is that the economy and profit seeking people want you to get stuck. Stuck in front of your TV preferably, so you can be programmed to take initiative in aquiring goods and services that the economy offers. Stuck online so you can also be enticed by advertisements to move and behave in certain ways you may or may not enjoy (nobody cares really, its all about profits).

On top of that your mind wants to get stuck, it is looking for habits that do not need to change, that satisfy you. I always think of the mind as a gardener, and your essence being a tiny plant that needs to be tended to by the mind. The mind runs around and thinks this and that, and what it thinks doesn’t matter at all as long as the plant is happy.This is why there are so many ways to live happy lives, even as a murderous tyrant you can be pretty happy. Its all good as long as the basic needs are met.

The problem with getting stuck really is the economy, the banks that force us all to seek profit and income. That has to come from someone else, and so we basically work to take money from each other all the time. The people that are stuck are easiest to get money from, and then I mean stuck in a way that is not super profitable. Incidently it is true, people can get stuck in a profitable life. But you can’t really call that stuck. Their minds can also close down all sources of change. Still they will get assurances and confirmation that they should be happy, which doesn’t happen to people getting stuck in lives that suck.

But again the problem is that if you get stuck in our modern economy you are destined to lose all your money and hence all your options to ever get unstuck. It is like quicksand or losing your mobility, and you are aging as well. The economy is waiting for you to become more needy and has an army of solutions for you that may or may not help you live a happy life stuck where you are (getting unstuck is not profitable!). You are a sitting duck being stuck in a life that may suck.

So how to get unstuck. What if you are on a raft in a river that will ultimately dump you into the ocean to become fish food. Going with the flow is a mantra that was designed to tell you ‘get stuck’. If getting stuck is so inevitale, when is it finally ok to get stuck? We all get stuck in the end anyhow, in a coffin or urn. First the question of uniqueness should be addressed, why should we really be unique? I would say we should be ouselves, not have someone define us.

The problem with people defining us is that its a form of bullying that makes many of us conform to the definition. allowing someone to define you is already a submissive interaction. ‘You’re my son’ is fine, but ‘You’re a communist’ is not. ‘Your a tapehead’ is not. There is a subtle difference between you wanting to identify with a group because its fun and it increases social coherence and someone else wanting to define you in order to decide how to get to your money or how to exclude you from resources (the inverse strategy of profit seeking).

Best strategy : Don’t define yourself. Don’t give others a means to simplify you. Be your name to them. Of course you can’t prevent others to define you, and there’s a seemingly artificial trend of making ‘self identification’ an issue to argue about. That is not going to get you unstuck.

Once you are over what you are, you can start to dream on your own, what do you love? What world do you want to see? What if there was nobody else (besides people you want to exist) what would you strive for. We forget that to achieve a goal requires to have a goal. Also research found that distracting oneself from thinking about one’s goals is the main reason they are not achieved.

Our economy wants to put you into a consumer segment and works really hard to get you into one of the funnels. ‘audiophile’ ‘gear head’ ‘trekkie’ ‘watch collector’. There are distractions everywhere, all the time, they intrude into your life to take hold of your thoughts and insult your soul into submission. “You don’t have a life until you are on this ski slope!” “You don’t have a life until you are dining with this lady!”. Well only if you have not worked hard enough to satisfy your soul yourself. That is what this is all about. About serving and freeing your soul.

A simple rule may help : If your behavior does not allow you to change your behavior you will become more stuck. If your behavior allows you to change your behavior you will become less stuck.

So if you are sedentary and lazy, you will become more stuck, because you will find physically moving around increasingly arduous and will not do it.

If you don’t read about other thoughts than yours you will get stuck and you will not have the thoughts needed to get unstuck or change your behavior. Your soul will be waiting for something to happen but you won’t understand it or listen to it, because it doesn’t have the words to tell you want it wants. Express your goals.

If you don’t explore you will miss out on changes that may help you become happier, you may live in an artificial bubble with repetitive events you have become accustomed to, like there are so many bubbles in media land, the people that sit watching presenters talk about whatever happens in a very posh voice. You parrot what is said to not draw attention and present a posh image too and then go on being stuck.

Some people just want to be reassured they have a decent life

If you want to get unstuck you have to somehow grab the banks of the river you are floating along. Something that is real and harsh and not in your bubble. A real other person or a real event you become part of. I don’t mean the bubble events designed to reinforce your bubble existence. If you are leftist go to a right wing gathering, if you are right wing you probably aren’t reading this. Go see things for yourself. Or apply your skills in new situations. Of course its natural and valid to strive for your personal goals. Then the purpose of getting unstuck is to once again make steps on the road to achieve them. Consider who you want to bring along, what you need to bring along. Stuff can get you seriously stuck. But maybe you find some item very inspiring if it reminds you of your goals.

It is good to find others that want to get unstuck, that have a similar dream or ambition and to be ware of profit seekers who really don’t have your interest at heart. Make priority lists, short ones, so you get unstuck from habits that really don’t move you forward. A rule “don’t sit still” or “require real world effects from time spend” filters out a lot of time wasted. Using the SMART criteria ( specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) are a tried and tested way to become more effective and efficient, just don’t use it to become the perfect econobot.

Being unhappy about your situation is not a good way to get unstuck. This is why we are presented with so many problems. They are a way to keep us in our seat and demotivated. It is hard for your mind to know what is you and what is the outside world. Because of this criminals can get away with murder as long as the can make you believe ‘we’ did it or it is ‘our’ problem. Be precise about what you are responsible for.

Blaming things for your fate is not thinking about how to improve it. Don’t.

Our mind really wants to accept responsibility for everything that happens (like children that always feel responsible for the arguments of their parents). Again, the key to achieving a goal is to think about it, to focus on it. You can’t focus on any personal goal if you are dealing with whatever happens or what you think sucks about your life. So make thinking about your goals something you want to do. This may require some mood improvement, because you may be reminded of things you have zero interest in by a feeling you seem to be stuck with. This is the biggest illusion, because you choose how you feel about things, not your body. If your feeling is terrible, simply do whatever you think is right for you anyway, even with a horrible feeling in your stomach. There is no resistance to your actions if it is only your mind that has to decide to take them, although it might seem like you are about to move a mountain. Your body and mind can create that illusion that keep you lazy on the couch while your life and dreams slip away. Don’t expect miracles, but be confident if you are doing even a simple thing that means you are no longer stuck that it is doable and you can do it.

I hope this helps.

All around the world people stuck in cities and livestyles are trying their hardest to ignore climate change. It gets hotter and hotter, things start to burn, the beach is unbearably hot. Wet bulb temperatures show being outside has become lethal and field workers die from heat exhaustion every day, the economy has to move forward, cashflow has to be maximized, banks have to be served (and customers of course whatever)

But if the choice is sweltering heat, possible heat death, no future and no improvement or concerted action (like increasing albedo!). If the only option is to stay on the plane as it barrels towards the ground, because the sales of the in flight snacks is making the stewardesses rich, this is a macabre and fatalistic fate. It is really because so few actually pay attention that they are not scared, angry or done with all the problems they face in life and simply quit. In short order in society is fragile and gets more fagile as we see more evidence of unaviodable suffering.

At some point the return on creating a perspective, that is a real one, not the greenwashing ‘if you separate your trash you’ll be fine’ type of perspective, will become positive. The economy in its cruel persistence can not continue to strangle the life out of our planet if we become aware of our impending doom, our actual fate, and how little we will get from those same institutions that now claim they are the cornerstones of civilization. It is all a bunch of lies.

The best informed, richest and most mercilessly destructive institutes, our Wall Street banks, our financers of clearcutting, eradicating, polluting and depleting, will have to define their path to some semblance of normalcy, no matter how it is achieved. If they don’t people will drop everything. Even if the world economy is crashed to lock people into their homes and a new virus is released (on top of the other suffering) people will simply start doing whatever the fuck they want.

Governments that now still hop and jump like Przewalski horses for the promise of a nice life and cushy future will lose fate in it, and the magic will stop working. Better a government that gets wise now, that wakes up now, of people that do not buy the nonsense, that can think standing on their own two feet that people dropping dead from the heat is not part of that ‘shining city upon the hill’, we must leave OZ and look behind the curtain, not be infantile but mature and willing to survive, to dare to want to survive, it sounds idiotic. Soon even the most horrible contributers to the climate calamity has to come up with a plan, a path, or people will walk away.