Virgin Primitivist vs. Chad Transhumanist, by Anatoly …

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Transhumanism is not entirely the same thing as adopting other technologies. We are biological beings, and our personalities, decisions, what we are, is totally dependent on us staying biological. A simple example is hormone levels in your blood.

For example if you feel you won an argument online, your serum testosterone level will go up. You will instinctively know that any success, however meager it is (and winning an online argument is, well, not the greatest of successes), will lead to such an increase. On the other hand, losing an argument (or any other kind of failure, however small) will lead to a decrease in your T-levels.

This will actually motivate you to try your best to strive to achieve success and avoid failures. (However small.) By the way, this wont work on females so much: this is one of the reasons males behavior is so different from females.

Now if you upload yourself to a computer right after death (or if half your brain is already a computer before death), you wont have any hormones any more affecting your decisions. This will outright change your personality. Even if hormones could (and would) be totally simulated, you (or at least some of the people uploading themselves) will eventually change yourself in some ways. For example even biologically we use drugs which change our behavior. Why wont we use something (enhancements etc.) which change our behavior once were effectively computer programs? These computer programs will then further change themselves. Then the already changed programs will decide to change themselves even further. At one point it wont resemble the original biological being at all even assuming the simulation and upload were both perfect to begin with, which is a question. (And even assuming the uploaded program will be you in a philosophical sense my instinct says it would only be a copy and not me myself.)

Now you are quite correct probably that those super-enhanced computer software things could easily turn out to be much more efficient at conquering and ruling the world than biological humans. The question is, in what sense could those transhuman beings be considered humans at all? My suggestion is they wont be humans at all. Not only that: they wont have anything in common with biological humans, or any biological beings at all. Please remember that we have a lot in common with apes, so the statement well, the change from human to transhuman will just be the same as ape to human is definitely false.

In other words, transhumans (especially the versions uploaded to a computer to there live forever) will essentially be cyborgs or T-800s or AIs which will be stronger and smarter than us. Endorsing it as well, theyre more efficient is stupid: the same stupid as inviting extraterrestrials to the Earth with the slogan theyre better, so they deserve Earth more than us. We dont know what theyll be up to, but they will have the ability to destroy us, and its foolish to expect these things to be benevolent. Over time, they (some of them, at any rate and probably those will be the strongest and smartest ones) could change beyond anything we can imagine, and might decide to get rid of us.

Why is this in our interest to encourage this? AIs (if possible to create them) might eventually destroy us anyway, why hasten the process?

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Virgin Primitivist vs. Chad Transhumanist, by Anatoly ...

Moore Nanotechnology Systems: Ultra-Precision Machining Systems

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Moore Nanotechnology Systems, LLC (Nanotech) is dedicated to the development of ultra-precision machining systems and their successful utilization through the formation of lifelong customer partnerships. Total customer satisfaction of our products and services has always been, and will continue to be, our highest priority as we support our customers expansion into new markets through the design and development of new products, complimentary machine accessories, and enhancements to our existing products.

Our ultra-precision machine systems support single point diamond turning, deterministic micro-grinding, precision micro-milling, and glass press molding for the production of advanced optics including diamond turning sphere, asphere, freeform, conformal, lens array, and plano surfaces. We offer a diverse line of options and accessories to customize our machining platforms to suit our customers specific applications. From our state-of-the-art NFTS-6000 Fast Tool Servo systemto the industry's first touch swipe gesture interactive Windows based HMI, Nanotech builds to a higher standard of quality and reliability.

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Established in 1997, our abbreviated name Nanotech was from the beginning not only our registered trademark, but also a symbol of our commitment to developing highly advanced equipment and manufacturing processes capable of achieving nanometer level surface accuracies on advanced optical components. Our ultra-precision machining systems support many industries including consumer electronics, defense, aerospace, lighting, medical, automotive, and ophthalmic. Our world-class team of specialists has dedicated their careers to this technology, and their vision has made Nanotech the fastest growing company in this field.

For additional information visit our Machines Page. You can also E-mail Us or call603-352-3030 to discuss your specific requirements.

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Beginning in2010, Business NH Magazine has each and every year ranked Moore Nanotechnology Systems as one of the top 100 private companies in the State of NH.

In addition, Moore Nanotechnology Systems, LLC was selected as 2008 Company of the Year by the State of New Hampshire Department of Economic Development

Dec. 3, 2008 Moore Nanotechnology Systems was lauded by Department of Resources and Economic Development Commissioner George Bald for its innovative spirit which have made it the fastest growing company in the precision machining field. read more >

Our 250UPLv2, 450UPLv2, 650FGv2 & 100UPGv1systems form a versatile family ofUltra Precision machinesfeaturingall the below major value added benefits and features:

NanoSMART Touch / Swipe Interactive HMI. We own the source code on our unique and powerful HMIfeaturing 22" wide customizable screens and numerous advanced capabilities tosimplify operator setups. Don't settle forold stylecontrollers with justone user screen regardless of the application or individual.Quickly and easily create customscreen layoutsdisplaying only the data youneed for maximum user efficiency. Watch NanoSMART Video.

Porous Graphite Work Spindle. Only Nanotech's systems have an impact resistant porous graphite air bearing work spindle. Benefits of porous graphite include high robustness, smooth engineered air flow rates, proven durability in numerous industrial applications and a natural lubricity which adds an extra layer of protection.This spindle has been tested at 1000rpmwith total air cutoff resulting in no damage. Do not try this with any other air bearing spindle! Watch Spindle Robustness Test Video.

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Contact us for complete detailed discussions regarding these exclusive features as well as other performance based engineered benefits.

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Moore Nanotechnology Systems: Ultra-Precision Machining Systems

7 Ways Blockchain Will Enable Entrepreneurs in 2018 | Inc.com

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You'd be forgiven if you mistakenly linked blockchain technology with bitcoin. While blockchain has many uses outside the domain of cryptocurrencies, the name first appeared in the media associated with bitcoin, and many people linked the technology to the emerging currency. If you have been keeping an eye on the latest news in technology and finance over the past few months, however, then you'll know the potential that blockchain and cryptocurrencies will likely have on the rest of society.

A few months ago, I attended SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect in Las Vegas. I spoke with keynote speakerPenny Stoker, who said, "Blockchain is essentially a technology that validates transactions." That stuck with me, as suddenly I saw all sorts of new and interesting applications of what blockchain could do for entrepreneurs.

At a high level, courtesy of IBM, blockchain is defined as "shared, immutable ledger for recording a history of transactions." Even more abstracted, it is a secure, peer-to-peer platform for verifying digital events. Effectively, industries can leverage technology core to blockchain to store and manage information, access, and trust across a wide network. And rather than having a single player control the "keys," blockchain is decentralized, meaning no one individual can manipulate or override the data. This is especially important to sectors like finance and government, which are prone to fraud and system abuse.

Perhaps the most exciting piece of the blockchain puzzle is how the technology can enable a whole new wave of entrepreneurs (engineers, designers, etc.) to build more quickly, more efficiently, and much bigger than ever before. The massive opportunity in blockchain is unique to our time, and surely in the next five yearswe will see a number of critical innovations come from it. So here are some ideas to get you thinking about blockchain's impact in 2018.

In speaking with Penny Stoker, we began to extrapolate how blockchain might verify trust when it comes to the HR industry. In the same way that Twitter adds the blue check mark to verify accounts, a company like LinkedIn could leverage blockchain to verify employment. Instead of having the HR department from every company call previous employers to verify the candidate's employment history, blockchain could be used to verify mundane (but important) things like employment start and end dates, title, and job responsibilities.

This simple technological change would save countless hours and a significant investment in resources just to prove that what a candidate claimed on their rsum (or LinkedIn profile) is, in fact, true.

As a side note, if you're as upset as I am about the Equifax breach, this same thinking could easily be applied to banking and credit checks. Why pay a company like Equifax to handle easily hacked, highly sensitive, and personally identifiable data when you could use blockchain to privately and securely verify every step in your credit history?

I had another great conversation with Tom Golway, chief technologist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, who is working on several applications of blockchain for business. He explained that blockchain is the proverbial missing link that would empower legal agreements to operate at a fully automated level. That is, because blockchain is essentially a "smart contract,"businesses would be able to complete the entire process of orchestrating their legal agreements without today's human intervention that slows the process down.

How many times do businesses agree on terms only to have contracts sitting in someone's email inbox waiting for a signature--digital or "sign, scan, and email back?" Blockchain will likely remove this delay from businesses that have well defined their terms and clients who wish to engage without the traditional delays of waiting for additional approvals and signatures.

Another powerful pioneer in blockchain is Alicia Tillman, chief marketing officer at SAP. She sees all kinds of possibilities and applications of blockchain when it comes to a company's supply chain. Businesses know who they are buying from directly, but often do not know who their vendor's suppliers are. Blockchain could help businesses instantly understand recall implications. Or when a component fails, using blockchain you would immediately be able to see who the original supplier was and within minutes identify every suspect product or part that could be impacted.

Blockchain also helps in verifying things like ethical sourcing, avoiding counterfeit parts, and ensuring against child labor practices. Bringing verified transparency into the supply chain will expose many of the uncertainties that have haunted businesses since the inception of global sourcing. It will also empower businesses to verify that their sourcing requirements are being met by their suppliers.

A massive barrier to entry for entrepreneurs with ideas is raising capital to finance their projects. And, in many places in the world outside the United States, entrepreneurs do not have access to the modern financing and fundraising instruments that could help them efficiently and affordably raise funding for their companies.

Many of the mechanisms for lending, found in most parts of the world, are suboptimal for small, growing businesses. The costs associated with traditional loans are hidden in incremental fees and minimum deposit restrictions. All this does is add to the challenge of starting a business, which is already very difficult.

Blockchain will make it so any entrepreneur from any location in the world can, at a minimum, gain access to capital. While not all ideas are created equal and deserving of funding,at least all makers will have the opportunity to fundraise for their idea, given that digital currencies, like bitcoin, operate independent of geographic location. In other words, everyone is able to accept and send cryptocurrencies without hidden international fees and exchanges.

Startups are about moving quickly and solving problems as fast as possible. One of the biggest points of friction in building a company is having to allocate expensive time and resources in the fundraising process. While raising money at the right time and from the right peopleis extremely important and critical to your roadmap, it does take tons of time away from your core business. In fact, raising money from the traditional route of venture capitalists can take months of meetings, travel, and email back and forth before anything is finalized. Entrepreneurs are in the business of moving quickly, not spending time fundraising.

Using a blockchain, a self-verifying system, venture firms can transfer funding in as little as five minutesafter making their investment decision. This will speed up the entire process of raising funding and reduce the amount of friction in the fundraising funnel.

For years, entrepreneurs have been approaching problems the same way:banking on their toolkit of "centralized models" of management. Blockchain introduces a completely new way to control access and information, which can, in turn, open a whole array of new opportunity.

ShipChain, a blockchain-based platform, leverages this distributed mindset to optimize the freight, logistics, and shipping industry. They use Ethereum smart contracts to eradicate the need for expensive freight brokers. Instead, their technology automatically tracks and verifies each stage of the complex shipping and logistics process, essentially acting as a digital broker for carriers around the globe.

What is unique about their solution is that it would not have been possible without blockchain. Rather than having a centralized agent controlling the system, they are putting "trust management" in the power of the distributed ledger. This approach brings a level of transparency and accountability that this industry has never before seen.

By now, you get the idea, so let's explore some "out there" ideas to get your creative juices flowing. For a moment, consider the implication of Tinder, the dating app, if it applied blockchain to a person's dating history--essentially giving a transparent ledger of someone's dating profile.

Consider the ramifications if every financial contribution made to a politician was blockchain verified. Knowing where the dollars were coming from to help a politician get elected would bring a new level of transparency to lobbying efforts.

With these things in mind, where else in your business could transparency and accountability be helpful? These are the areas for opportunity that are worthy of additional exploration. If it's frustrating to you, chances are others would love a solution to the same problem, and this could be a competitive advantage for your company.

A core component of developing with blockchain is its transparent and accountable nature. All transactions that occur on the public ledger are secured and encrypted so no one player can manipulate the system. Entrepreneurs are often sitting in the dark when it comes to understanding and keeping up with industry transactions, but with blockchains in place, all of the information can be verified and trusted.

As we look to validate transactions using smart contracts, we're going to see why the power of blockchain technology is so much more than its current association with cryptocurrencies. In the meantime, the speculative investor in you might also be interested in "The Top 10 Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) to Watch in 2018."

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7 Ways Blockchain Will Enable Entrepreneurs in 2018 | Inc.com

Blockchain: The Complete Guide | WIRED

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Depending on who you ask, blockchains are either the most important technological innovation since the internet or a solution looking for a problem.

The original blockchain is the decentralized ledger behind the digital currency bitcoin. The ledger consists of linked batches of transactions known as blocks (hence the term blockchain), and an identical copy is stored on each of the roughly 200,000 computers that make up the bitcoin network. Each change to the ledger is cryptographically signed to prove that the person transferring virtual coins is the actual owner of those coins. But no one can spend their coins twice, because once a transaction is recorded in the ledger, every node in the network will know about it.

DigiCash was founded by David Chaum to create a digital-currency system that enabled users to make untraceable, anonymous transactions. It was perhaps too early for its time. It went bankrupt in 1998, just as ecommerce was finally taking off.

E-gold was a digital currency backed by real gold. The company was plagued by legal troubles, and its founder Douglas Jackson eventually pled guilty to operating an illegal money-transfer service and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Cryptographers Wei Dai (B-money) and Nick Szabo (Bit-gold) each proposed separate but similar decentralized currency systems with a limited supply of digital money issued to people who devoted computing resources.

Now a cryptocurrency, Ripple started out as a system for exchanging digital IOUs between trusted parties.

RPOW was a prototype of a system for issuing tokens that could be traded with others in exchange for computing intensive work. It was inspired in part by Bit-gold and created by bitcoin's second user, Hal Finney.

The idea is to both keep track of how each unit of the virtual currency is spent and prevent unauthorized changes to the ledger. The upshot: No bitcoin user has to trust anyone else, because no one can cheat the system.

Other digital currencies have imitated this basic idea, often trying to solve perceived problems with bitcoin by building new cryptocurrencies on new blockchains. But advocates have seized on the idea of a decentralized, cryptographically secure database for uses beyond currency. Its biggest boosters believe blockchains can not only replace central banks but usher in a new era of online services outside the control of internet giants like Facebook and Google. These new-age apps would be impossible to censor, advocates say, and would be more answerable to users.

Several companies are already taking advantage of the Ethereum platform, initially built for a virtual currency. The startup Storj offers a file-storage service, banking on the idea that distributing files across a decentralized network is safer than putting all your files in one cabinet.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that bitcoin was originally best known for enabling illicit drug sales over the internet, blockchains are finding acceptance in some of the world's largest companies. Some big financial services companies, including JP Morgan and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, are experimenting with blockchains and blockchain-like technologies to improve the efficiency of trading stocks and other assets. Traders buy and sell stocks rapidly, but the behind-the-scenes process of transferring ownership of those assets can take days. Some technologists believe blockchains could help with that.

There are also potential applications for blockchains in the seemingly boring world of corporate compliance. After all, storing records in an immutable ledger is a pretty good way to assure auditors that those records haven't been tampered with.

It's too early to say which experiments will work out or whether the results of successful experiments will resemble the bitcoin blockchain. But the idea of creating tamper-proof databases has captured the attention of everyone from anarchist techies to staid bankers.

The original bitcoin software was released to the public in January 2009. It was open source software, meaning anyone could examine the code and reuse it. And many have. At first, blockchain enthusiasts sought to simply improve on bitcoin. Litecoin, another virtual currency based on the bitcoin software, seeks to offer faster transactions.

One of the first projects to repurpose the bitcoin code to use it for more than currency was Namecoin, a system for registering ".bit" domain names. The traditional domain-name management systemthe one that helps your computer find our website when you type wired.comdepends on a central database, essentially an address book for the internet. Internet-freedom activists have long worried that this traditional approach makes censorship too easy, because governments can seize a domain name by forcing the company responsible for registering it to change the central database. The US government has done this several times to shut sites accused of violating gambling or intellectual-property laws.

Namecoin tries to solve this problem by storing .bit domain registrations in a blockchain, which theoretically makes it impossible for anyone without the encryption key to change the registration information. To seize a .bit domain name, a government would have to find the person responsible for the site and force them to hand over the key.

Ethereum and other blockchain-based projects have raised funds through a controversial practice called an "initial coin offering," or ICO: The creators of new digital currencies sell a certain amount of the currency, usually before theyve finished the software and technology that underpins it. The idea is that investors can get in early while giving developers the funds to finish the tech.The catch is that these offerings have traditionally operated outside the regulatory framework meant to protect investors, although thats starting to change as more governments examine the practice.

Bitcoins software wasnt designed to handle other types of applications. In 2013, a startup called Ethereum published a paper outlining an idea that promised to make it easier for coders to create their own blockchain-based software without having to start from scratch, without relying on the original bitcoin software. In 2015 the company released its platform for building smart contracts, software applications that can enforce an agreement without human intervention. For example, you could create a smart contract to bet on tomorrows weather. You and your gambling partner would upload the contract to the Ethereum network and then send a little digital currency, which the software would essentially hold in escrow. The next day, the software would check the weather and then send the winner their earnings. At least two major "prediction markets" have been built on the platform, enabling people to bet on more interesting outcomes, such as which political party will win an election.

So long as the software is written correctly, there's no need to trust anyone in these transactions. But that turns out to be a big catch. In 2016 a hacker made off with about $50 million worth of Ethereum's custom currency intended for a democratized investment scheme where investors would pool their money and vote on how to invest it. A coding error allowed a still unknown person to make off with the virtual cash. Lesson: It's hard to remove humans from transactions, with or without a blockchain.

Even as cryptography geeks plotted to use blockchains to topple, or at least bypass, big banks, the financial sector began its own experiments with blockchains. In 2015, some of the largest financial institutions in the world, including JP Morgan, the Bank of England, and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), announced that they would collaborate on open source blockchain software under the name Hyperledger. Several pieces of software have been released under the Hyperledger umbrella, including Sawtooth, created by Intel for building custom blockchains.

The industry is already experimenting with using blockchains to make security trades more efficient. Nasdaq OMX, the company behind the Nasdaq stock exchange, began allowing private companies to use blockchains to manage shares in 2015, starting with a company called Chain. Similarly, the Australian Securities Exchange announced a deal to use blockchain technology from a Goldman Sachs-backed startup called Digital Asset Holdings to power the post-trade processes of Australias equity market.

Despite the blockchain hypeand many experimentstheres still no "killer app" for the technology beyond currency speculation. And while auditors might like the idea of immutable records, as a society we don't always want records to be permanent.

Blockchain proponents admit that it could take a while for the technology to catch on. After all, the internet's foundational technologies were created in the 1960s, but it took decades for the internet to become ubiquitous.

That said, the idea could eventually show up in lots of places. For example, your digital identity could be tied to a token on a blockchain. You could then use that token to log in to apps, open bank accounts, apply for jobs, or prove that your emails or social-media messages are really from you. Future social networks might be built on connected smart contracts that show your posts only to certain people or enable people who create popular content to be paid in cryptocurrencies. Perhaps the most radical idea is using blockchains to handle voting. The team behind the open source project Soverign built a platform that organizations, companies, and even governments can already use to gather votes on a blockchain.

Advocates believe blockchains can help automate many tasks now handled by lawyers or other professionals. For example, your will might be stored in a blockchain. Or perhaps your will could be a smart contract that will automatically dole out your money to your heirs. Or maybe blockchains will replace notaries.

It's also entirely possible that blockchains will evolve into something completely different. Many of the financial industry's experiments involve "private" blockchains that run on servers within a single company and selected partners. In contrast, anyone can run bitcoin or Ethereum software on their computer and view all of the transactions recorded on the networks respective blockchains. But big companies prefer to keep their data in the hands of a few employees, partners, and perhaps regulators.

Bitcoin proved that its possible to build an online service that operates outside the control of any one company or organization. The task for blockchain advocates now is proving that thats actually a good thing.

This guide was last updated on January 31, 2018.

Enjoyed this deep -dive? Check out more WIRED Guides.

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Blockchain: The Complete Guide | WIRED

What Is Blockchain Technology? – cbinsights.com

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Few people understand what it is, but Wall Street banks, IT organizations, and consultants are buzzing about blockchain technology. It's hard to remove blockchain from Bitcoin, so we'll start with Bitcoin as we work tounderstandthis technology's potential.

Bitcoin. Blockchain. Cryptocurrencies. Initial coin offerings.

Everyones talking about them, but what do these terms really mean?

As of this writing in mid-November 2017, the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies hovers around $220B (with a single bitcoin trading for upwards of $8,000). Initial coin offerings (ICOs) have exploded in popularity, closing on $3B+ in funding in 2017 alone. Huge corporations like Walmart and Pfizer have completed successful blockchain pilots.

This explainer will offer simple definitions and analogies for blockchain technology. It will also define Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain broadly, and initial coin offerings, and highlight promising use cases for the technology. (For a deep dive into how Ethereum works, you can read our What Is Ethereum explainer.)

Lastly, this report will make clear the distinctions between distributed ledger technology and blockchain, and highlight where these technologies have an application and where they do not.

The 2008 financial crisis caused a lot of people to lose trust in banks as trusted third parties. Many questioned whether banks were the best guardians of the global financial system. Bad investment decisions by major banks had proved catastrophic, with rippling consequences.

Bitcoin also proposed in 2008 presented something of an alternative.

According to its whitepaper, Bitcoin was a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. It would allow for online payments [to move] from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

In other words, Bitcoin made digital transactions possible without a trusted intermediary. The technology allowed this to happen at scale, globally, with cryptography doing what institutions like commercial banks, financial regulators, and central banks used to do: verify the legitimacy of transactions and safeguard the integrity of the underlying asset.

Bitcoin is a decentralized, public ledger. There is no trusted third party controlling the ledger.Anyone with bitcoin can participate in the network, send and receive bitcoin, and even hold a copy of this ledger if they want to. In that sense, the ledger is trustless and transparent.

The Bitcoin ledger tracks a single asset: bitcoin (Note: Bitcoin capitalized refers to the Bitcoin ledger, or protocol, while bitcoin in lowercase refers to the currency or a unit of account on the Bitcoin ledger).

The ledger has rules encoded into it, one of which states that there will only ever be 21M bitcoin produced. Because of this cap on the number of bitcoins in circulation, which will eventually be reached, bitcoin is inherently resistant to inflation. That means that more bitcoin cant be printed at a whim and reduce the overall value of the currency.

All participants must agree to the ledgers rules in order to use it.

Bitcoin is politically decentralized no single entity runs bitcoin but centralized from a data standpoint all participants (nodes) agree on the state of the ledger and its rules.

A bitcoin or a transaction cant be changed, erased, copied, or forged everybody would know.

Thats it, and its a big deal.

To understand better how this peer-to-peer electronic cash system allows for online payments to move from one party to another without going through a financial institution, lets use a simple example.

Heres a scenario: Alice hands Bob a physical arcade token. Bob now has one token, and Alice has zero. The transaction is complete. Alice and Bob do not need an intermediary to verify the transaction. Alice cant give Charlie the same token, because she no longer has the token to give she gave it to Bob.

But what if the same transaction were digital? Alice sends Bob a digital arcade token via email, for example. Bob should have the digital token, and Alice should not.

Right?

Not so fast. What if Alice made copies or forgeries of the digital token? What if Alice put the same digital token online for all to download? After all, a digital token is a string of ones and zeros.

If Alice and Bob own the same string of ones and zeros, who is the true owner of the digital token?If digital assets can be reproduced so easily, what stops Alice from trying to spend the same digital asset twice by also sending it to Charlie?

How can Alice and Bob establish unique ownership over the digital token?

One answer: use a database a ledger. This ledger will track a single asset: digital arcade tokens. When Alice gives Bob the digital token, the ledger records the transaction. Bob has the token, and Alice does not.

A trusted third party, an intermediary lets call him Dave will hold the ledger and make sure that its up-to-date. Alice cant hold the ledger because she might erase the transaction and say that she still owns the digital token, although she gave it to Bob. It also cant be Bob, because he could alter the transaction and lie to say that Alice gave him two tokens, doubling his arcade time.

By default, Dave who is not involved in the transaction at all, will have to control the ledger. Dave is trusted.

Thissituation is fine, until its not.

What if Dave decides to charge a fee that neither Alice or Bob want to pay? Or, what if Alice bribes Dave to erase her transaction? Maybe Dave wants the digital token for himself, and adds a false transaction to the ledger in order to embezzle it, saying that Bob gave him the token?

In other words what happens when Alice and Bob cannot trust the trusted third party?

Think back to the first physical transaction between Alice and Bob. Is there a way to make digital transactions look more like that?

Heres a thought: Alice and Bob could distribute the ledger to all their trusted friends, not just Dave, and decentralize trust. Because the ledger is digital, all copies of the ledger could sync together. If a simple majority of participants agree that the transaction is valid (e.g. confirm that Alice actually owns the token she wants to send), it gets added to the ledger.

When a lot of people have a copy of the same ledger, it becomes more difficult to cheat. If Alice or Bob wanted to falsify a transaction, they would have to compromise the majority of participants, which is much harder than compromising a single participant.

Alice cant claim that she never sent a digital token to Bob her ledger would not agree with everyone elses. Bob couldnt claim that Alice gave him two tokens his ledger would be out of sync. And even if Alice bribes Dave to change his copy of the ledger, Dave only holds a single copy of the ledger; the majority opinion would show the digital token was sent.

In sum, this distributed ledger works because everyone is holding a copy of the same digital ledger. The more trusted people that hold the ledger, the stronger it becomes.

Such a ledger allows Alice to send a digital token to Bob without going through Dave. In a sense she is transforming her digital transaction into something that looks more like a physical one in the real world, where ownership and scarcity of an asset is tangible and obvious.

You may have noticed a key difference between the above example and Bitcoin. Specifically, Alices and Bobs ledger only allows trusted friends to participate. In contrast, Bitcoin is entirely public, and anyone can participate.

How can we get all these untrusted nodes to agree on the state of the ledger? How can we avoid bad actors corrupting the ledger?

Lets think about this for a moment. A public ledger would allow for many more participants. The more participants, the stronger the ledger becomes. Right?

As you may have guessed, its not that simple.

Because Bitcoin expands beyond trusted participants and gives anyone access, it runs a higher risk of bad actors and false transactions.

Sure, we also ran a risk of bad actors when it came toAlices and Bobs trusted friends:Dave mightturn untrustworthy. However, Bitcoin is free and open to anyone, trusted or not, like a Google document that anyone can read and write to.

How can we get all these untrusted nodes to agree on the state of the ledger? How can we avoid bad actors corrupting the ledger?

Bitcoin offers a solution: reward good actors and scare off bad ones, a classic carrot and stick act.

In simple terms, certain Bitcoin participants are incentivized to do the dirty work and maintain the network.These participants called miners bundle transactions into a block, add this newest block to the chain of prior blocks (hence: blockchain is used to describe Bitcoins unique database structure),and devote immense computational power to the network in the process. For doing this work, these miners are rewarded with bitcoin.With a single bitcoin priced at upwards of $8,000, this is a very strong incentive.

When miners devote computational power, they also use a tremendous amount of electricity. So much electricity, in fact, that arecent estimate put the Bitcoin blockchains total daily energy consumption at greater thanEcuadors, a country of 17M people.

This scares away hackers and bad actors because hacking Bitcoin to get everyones coins would cost a tremendous amount of computing power, electricity, and money.Further, if the Bitcoin community became aware of the hack, it would likely cause the price of bitcoin to drop steeply. This makes such an attack economically self-defeating.

In technical terms, this mining process creates Bitcoins consensus mechanism, called Proof of Work.

This clever game-theoretic model creates a ledger that everyone trusts, but nobody controls.

OK, lets connect all the dots:

Since Bitcoin launched in 2008, thousands of other cryptocurrencies and altcoins (alternative coins) have emerged.

Because Bitcoins code is open-source, anyone can use Bitcoins code to create an altcoin. Many of them seek to improve on Bitcoin or expand its capabilities. Remember Bitcoins rules: it caps the number of bitcoin at 21M and uses the Proof of Work system to secure the network. Other cryptocurrencies use different rules and engage with other economic models.

Hard to say. Its true that the value of one bitcoin has gone from around $300 in 2015 to above $8,000 in recent weeks. If you had invested $100 in bitcoin in 2011 that bitcoin would be worth over $2.5M today.

As discussed, Bitcoins blockchain allows for the creation of a unique and scarce digital asset where everyone knowsthe history ofeach bitcoin. A single bitcoin is not just a string of ones and zeros, but the first successful (at least so far) censor-proof, portable, easily transactable, durable, and secure digital asset.

Bitcoins value is subject to the same supply-and-demand mechanics found in any marketplace. If investors find the above characteristics valuable and demand for bitcoin grows, bitcoins price rises and vice versa.

Bitcoins supply is limited to 21M coins (although only about 17M have been mined so far). You can do the math, but as of this writing investors value bitcoin at upwards of $120B in aggregate.

To give a sense of how the market values other cryptocurrencies, heres some market information about some of the top ones:

Theres lots more to Bitcoin that were not going to get into. Hashes, public-private key encryption, segregated witness, sidechains, forks, and block size, among other elements, fall outside of the scope of this piece.

So far, weve discussed two types of ledgers.

The first, Alices and Bobs distributed ledger for digital arcade tokens,is private.

The second, Bitcoins decentralized ledger for bitcoin,is public. Anyonecan participate. To ensure its public, decentralized ledger remains secure, Bitcoin uses a blockchain.

If we were to define blockchain as a technology separate from Bitcoin, it might look something like this:

Blockchain technology offers a way for untrusted parties to reach agreement (consensus) on a common digital history. A common digital history is importantbecause digital assets and transactions are in theory easily faked and/or duplicated. Blockchain technology solves this problem without using a trusted intermediary.

The short answer: in unique instances.

Specifically, a blockchain is needed for Bitcoin because:

Effectively, Bitcoin uses a blockchain to decentralize payments. Where else could we use this unique database architecture to get rid of the middleman? Are there other things that could bedecentralized?

Lets take this step-by-step. Whats another scenario where everyone needs a record of ownership, and where a trusted third party isnt preferred?

A couple of immediate use cases come to mind.

Land title is one. It could be quite useful for everyone to have access to a decentralized source of record saying who owns a given parcel of land. Considering that coups and wars often redistribute land unfairly and/or incorrectly, this could not only prove useful, but also have humanitarian implications. Once a land distribution is agreed upon, it can be recorded in a distributed ledger and no longer be subject to ongoing debate. A number of companies are working on this, including velox.RE.

In the same vein, a blockchain could be used to establish ownership over any number of physical assets cars, art, musical instruments, and so on. Lets think about why this makes sense.

A paper record of title is prone to forgery and/or physical degradation. Centralized databases are prone to hacking, human error, and/or tampering. A blockchain means there is no single entity controlling the ledger. Therefore, recording physical assets on a blockchain is a prime example of where the technology might come in handy to track ownership with a tamper-proof, neutral, and resilient system.

Identity might also be low-hanging fruit. The recent Equifax hack exposed the social security numbers of 143M Americans. Social security numbers were never meant to be used for identification; notice how this old social security card proudly states not for identification.

Blockchain technology might present a better means of establishing identity. Instead of a state or government issuing it, identity could be verified on an open, global blockchain controlled by nobody and trusted by everybody. Thus, users could control their own identity. A number of companies are working in this arena, including ID2020 and Civic.

The applications for blockchain technology extend well beyond these two examples.

Lets back up for a moment.

We mentioned that Alices and Bobs private implementation where everyone knows and trusts everyone involved doesnt need a blockchain (or miners to verify and append transactions to the cryptographically-protected blockchain).

Without blockchains verification step, were left with a distributed ledger, basically a decentralized spreadsheet that is only accessible to a select groupof trusted parties. Because this ledger is private, it doesnt need the same security measures as Bitcoin.

Its important to make this distinction.

The hype around Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies has contributed to renewed interest in distributed ledger technology. This is the idea of distributing a database among participants to ensure a commonrecord of truth. Bitcoin uses distributed ledger technology and adds a consensus layer on top the blockchain.

Because Alices and Bobs participants are trusted and their ledger is private, Bitcoins blockchain isnt needed. In fact, a blockchain might prove unwieldy, slow, and overly complex for Alices and Bobs ledger, for reasons which well address below. Instead, a trusted third party could be used to lightly administer a distributed ledger.

Bitcoin and Ethereum (which well dive into below) are considered public, permissionless blockchains. This means anyone can access them.

On the other hand, if all parties are known and trusted, distributed ledger technology could provide sufficient security.One example ofdistributed ledger technologyis R3s Corda, which is working with major financial services organizations to improve banking processes.

Whiledistributed ledger technology and blockchain technology each have their own pros and cons, the important thing to remember here is that blockchain is not a cure-all. For Bitcoin, a public, permissionless blockchain is the only possible solution. In many other instances, a blockchain would be a terrible idea.

Blockchains are really good at a couple of things and absolutely awful at others.

Weve addressed the distributed ledger versus blockchain debate above. Another major issue is scaling blockchains.

For a blockchain to work, lots of participants need to hold up-to-date copies. This means that the same database is held by thousands of nodes. This is fairly inefficient.

If we were to look at how technology has developed over the past fifteen years, blockchain runs counter to the logic behind cloud computing. Cloud computing trends toward a single database that multiple nodes can access. These nodes dont have to hold their own private copy of this database.

Further, nodes holding copies of the blockchain receive constant updates. These nodes are distributed around the world. Because of this, blockchains have high latency (latency is the amount of time it takes for data to move through the network). As a result, blockchains face scaling issues. Bitcoin can process about 3-4 transactions per second. Ethereum maxes out at about 20 transactions per second. Visa can process over 1,500 transactions per second.

Scaling is just one of the issues facing blockchain technology, but its an important one.

We asked earlier what other applications could be built with blockchain technology.

Recall that Bitcoin is, effectively, a decentralized application for payments. Ethereum adds another layer by allowing users to put code on its blockchain that executes automatically. This code is called a smart contract. In this way, Ethereum hopes to create a decentralized computing platform a global supercomputer.

To illustrate a smart contract, lets say Alice and Bob enter into a bet.

Alice thinks that the temperature tomorrow morning will reach 70 degrees. Bob thinks that it will stay lower. They wager 10 bitcoin on the outcome. If Alice and Bob dont trust each other, they will have to use a trusted third party as an escrow agent. In other words, they will each have to give the agent that amount of bitcoin, and the agent will distribute the winnings and the amount staked to the winner.

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Ascension Catholic Church Boca Raton, FL

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Welcome to our faith community, loving and serving God and neighbor in Boca Raton, Florida. In the conviction that the church cannot grow without the active participation of its members, all age groups at Ascension parish are invited to take part in our parish life. Our website provides information on the variety of ways our parishioners serve others, study our Catholic faith and build a stronger faith community. We look forward to seeing you at our weekend liturgies. Our greeters wearing their brightgreenAscend @ Ascensionshirts will be on hand to welcome you!

Love God, Love Others, Make Disciples

The weekend homilies from our parish priests and deacons are available for you to listen to and reflect on. Just click on the link on the left to view a list of audio selections from previous weekend Masses.

Daily Reflection (2-5-18):HOLY SPIRIT, PREPARE MY HEART FOR LENT He saved us through the bath of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit Whom He lavished on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior. [TITUS 3:5-6] Human beings were created when God breathed His Spirit into Adam. We were renewed when Jesus breathed His Spirit into His disciples. This breath is renewed in each of our hearts when we turn to the Lord and reject what keeps us from Him. With only a few days before we enter Lent, we turn to the Holy Spirit to prepare us for a time of sacrifice and self-examination. Breathe Your Spirit into my heart Lord, that I will draw closer to You and share Your Way with others. Prepare my heart Holy Spirit.

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Nsa in Memphis, TN with Reviews – YP.com

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When I went to pay to get my car back, I saw that they had taken my wheel off of my car. They said that it "fell off" however, the lugs were missing, which means that it was purposely taken off. The woman in the office was extremely rude and rushed me. She had major attitude and tried to get me to sign a paper without giving me a chance to read it first. I paid to have it towed to an auto shop, but the woman wouldn't dispatch a tow truck for me. I had to wait 15 minutes and ask again for her to do so, but again she had major attitude. Also, they messed with my passenger hub bearing. Thanks to Bartlett Towing I now have a broken axle, roter, and strut. I also have slight frame damage, which they are denying having anything to do with. Also, I am sure they tried to file for a Lost Title paper on my car. DO NOT use Bartlett Towing, unless you are willing to have your car stripped and deal with extremely low non-existent professionalism.

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NASASpaceFlight.com Forum – Index

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The home of L2 Space Shuttle Content and all Current Vehicle documentation etc. Everything that is not already in a specific L2 home.

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L2 Specific ISS Section, full of unreleased presentations, videos, photos, status updates more.

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L2 Section for Commercial Crew Vehicles from Atlas V HR to Dream Chaser and Starliner etc.

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L2 Section coverage SLS and HLV (Ares V onwards) presentations, videos, updates - through to the ongoing Exploration Roadmap construction - all exclusive.

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Unreleased presentations and videos from the first days of Cape Canaveral, through to Saturn/Apollo and the early days of the shuttle program.

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L2 section containing amazing unreleased videos, from riding on the flight decks of orbiters through re-entry, to launch and mission videos, to technical evaluation videos. L2 membership gains access to all L2 sections.

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Singularitarianism? – Pharyngula

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Ray Kurzweil is a genius. One of the greatest hucksters of the age. Thats the only way I can explain how his nonsense gets so much press and has such a following. Now he has the cover of Time magazine, and an article called 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal. It certainly couldnt be taken seriously anywhere else; once again, Kurzweil wiggles his fingers and mumbles a few catchphrases and upchucks a remarkable prediction, that in 35 years (a number dredged out of his compendium of biased estimates), Man (one, a few, many? How? He doesnt know) will finally achieve immortality (seems to me youd need to wait a few years beyond that goal to know if it was true). Now weve even got a name for the Kurzweil delusion: Singularitarianism.

Theres room inside Singularitarianism for considerable diversity of opinion about what the Singularity means and when and how it will or wont happen. But Singularitarians share a worldview. They think in terms of deep time, they believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe youre walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial-intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything. They have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizens distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality. When you enter their mind-space you pass through an extreme gradient in worldview, a hard ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of humanity. Expect turbulence.

Wow. Sounds just like the Raelians, or Hercolubians, or Scientologists, or any of the modern New Age pseudosciences that appropriate a bit of jargon and blow it up into a huge mythology. Nice hyperbole there, though. Too bad the whole movement is empty of evidence.

One of the things I do really despise about the Kurzweil approach is their dishonest management of critics, and Kurzweil is the master. He loves to tell everyone whats wrong with his critics, but he doesnt actually address the criticisms.

Take the question of whether computers can replicate the biochemical complexity of an organic brain. Kurzweil yields no ground there whatsoever. He does not see any fundamental difference between flesh and silicon that would prevent the latter from thinking. He defies biologists to come up with a neurological mechanism that could not be modeled or at least matched in power and flexibility by software running on a computer. He refuses to fall on his knees before the mystery of the human brain. Generally speaking, he says, the core of a disagreement Ill have with a critic is, theyll say, Oh, Kurzweil is underestimating the complexity of reverse-engineering of the human brain or the complexity of biology. But I dont believe Im underestimating the challenge. I think theyre underestimating the power of exponential growth.

This is wrong. For instance, I think reverse-engineering the general principles of a human brain might well be doable in a few or several decades, and I do suspect that well be able to do things in ten years, 20 years, a century that I cant even imagine. I dont find Kurzweil silly because Im blind to the power of exponential growth, but because:

Kurzweil hasnt demonstrated that there is exponential growth at play here. Ive read his absurd book, and his data is phony and fudged to fit his conclusion. He cheerfully makes stuff up or drops data that goes against his desires to invent these ridiculous charts.

Im not claiming he underestimates the complexity of the brain, Im saying he doesnt understand biology, period. Handwaving is not enough if hes going to make fairly specific claims of immortality in 35 years, there had better be some understanding of the path that will be taken.

There is a vast difference between grasping a principle and implementing the specifics. If we understand how the brain works, if we can create a computer simulation that replicates and improves upon the function of our brain, that does not in any way imply that my identity and experiences can be translated into the digital realm. Again, Kurzweil doesnt have even a hint of a path that can be taken to do that, so he has no basis for making the prediction.

Smooth curves that climb upward into infinity can exist in mathematics (although Kurzweils predictions dont live in state of rigor that would justify calling them mathematical), but they dont work in the real world. There are limits. Weve been building better and more powerful power plants for aircraft for a century, but they havent gotten to a size and efficiency to allow me to fly off with a personal jetpack. I have no reason to expect that they will, either.

While I dont doubt that science will advance rapidly, I also expect that the directions it takes will be unpredictable. Kurzweil confuses engineering, where you build something to fit a predetermined set of specifications, with science, in which you follow the evidence wherever it leads. Look at the so-called war on cancer: it isnt won, no one expects that it will be, but what it has accomplished is to provide limited success in improving health and quality of life, extending survival times, and developing new tools for earlier diagnosis thats reality, and understanding reality is achieved incrementally, not by sudden surges in technology independent of human effort. It also generates unexpected spinoffs in deeper knowledge about cell cycles, signaling, gene regulation, etc. The problems get more interesting and diverse, and its awfully silly of one non-biologist in 2011 to try to predict what surprises will pop out.

Kurzweil is a typical technocrat with limited breadth of knowledge. Imagine what happens IF we actually converge on some kind of immortality. Who gets it? If its restricted, what makes Kurzweil think he, and not Senator Dumbbum who controls federal spending on health, or Tycoon Greedo the trillionaire, gets it? How would the world react if such a capability were available, and they (or their dying mother, or their sick child) dont have access? What if its cheap and easy, and everyone gets it? Kurzweil is talking about a technology that would almost certainly destroy every human society on the planet, and he treats it as blithely as the prospect of getting new options for his cell phone. In case he hadnt noticed, human sociology and politics shows no sign of being on an exponential trend towards greater wisdom. Yeah, expect turbulence.

Hes guilty of a very weird form of reductionism that considers a human life can be reduced to patterns in a computer. I have no stock in spiritualism or dualism, but we are very much a product of our crude and messy biology we percieve the world through imprecise chemical reactions, our brains send signals by shuffling ions in salt water, our attitudes and reactions are shaped by chemicals secreted by glands in our guts. Replicating the lightning while ignoring the clouds and rain and pressure changes will not give you a copy of the storm. It will give you something different, which would be interesting still, but its not the same.

Kurzweil shows other signs of kookery. Two hundred pills a day? Weekly intravenous transfusions? Drinking alkalized water because hes afraid of acidosis? The man is an intelligent engineer, but hes also an obsessive crackpot.

Oh, well. Ill make my own predictions. Magazines will continue to praise Kurzweils techno-religion in sporadic bursts, and followers will continue to gullibly accept what he says because it is what they wish would happen. Kurzweil will die while brain-uploading and immortality are still vague dreams; he will be frozen in liquid nitrogen, which will so thoroughly disrupt his cells that even if we discover how to cure whatever kills him, there will be no hope of recovering the mind and personality of Kurzweil from the scrambled chaos of his dead brain. 2045 will come, and those of us who are alive to see it, will look back and realize it is very, very different from what life was like in 2011, and also very different from what we expected life to be like. At some point, I expect artificial intelligences to be part of our culture, if we persist; theyll work in radically different ways than human brains, and they will revolutionize society, but I have no way of guessing how. Ray Kurzweil will be forgotten, mostly, but records of the existence of a strange shaman of the circuitry from the late 20th and early 21st century will be tucked away in whatever the future databases are like, and people and machines will sometimes stumble across them and laugh or zotigrate and say, How quaint and amusing!, or whatever the equivalent in the frangitwidian language of the trans-entity circumsolar ansible network might be.

And thatll be kinda cool. I wish I could live to see it.

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Singularitarianism? - Pharyngula

New Jersey Medical School – Wikipedia

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New Jersey Medical School (NJMS)also known as Rutgers New Jersey Medical Schoolis a graduate medical school of Rutgers University that is part of the division of Biomedical and Health Sciences. NJMS is the oldest school of medicine in New Jersey. The school of medicine was founded in 1954 as the Seton Hall College of Medicine and Dentistry, established under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark, in Jersey City, New Jersey. On August 6, 1954, the College was incorporated as a legal entity separate from Seton Hall University, but with an interlocking Board of Trustees. The first class of 80 students was admitted to the four-year MD program in September 1956, becoming only the sixth medical school in the New York City metropolitan area. In 1965, the institution was acquired by the State of New Jersey, renamed the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry (NJCMD), and relocated to Newark, New Jersey. With the passing of the Medical and Dental Education Act of 1970, signed into law by Governor William T. Cahill on June 16, the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (CMDNJ) was created, merging NJCMD with the two-year medical school established at Rutgers University in 1961, under a single board of trustees.

With the creation of the CMDNJ, the medical school adopted its title the New Jersey Medical School. In 1981, legislation signed on December 10 by Governor Byrne established CMDNJ as the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ). NJMS served as one of five regional campuses that constitute the UMDNJ health science institution. On June 28, 2012 the New Jersey state legislature passed a bill that dissolved the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and merged most of its schools including New Jersey Medical School with Rutgers University forming a new Rutgers Division of Biomedical and Health Sciences effective July 1, 2013. With a cohesive student body, each class consisting of approximately 170 students, NJMS is experiencing impressive growth on a number of fronts. Robert L. Johnson is the current Dean.

In 2004, the school received $104 million in extramural grants supporting basic, clinical and translational research. New Jersey Medical School is also home to the Global Tuberculosis Institute, The Institute for Ophthalmology and Visual Science, and the Center for Emerging and Reemerging Pathogens. New Jersey Medical School is a charter member of the New Jersey Stem Cell Research and Education Foundation. The Summer Student Research Program provides students with stipends to conduct research in the laboratories of NJMS faculty. Each year, more than 100 first- and second-year students, as well as prospective students considering medical school, participate in the program, which has a strong emphasis on cancer research and heart, lung and blood research. NJMS faculty have contributed significantly to medical science breakthroughs including the development of the worldwide standard in knee replacement, the New Jersey Knee; a patented method for the early detection of Lyme disease; the identification of pediatric AIDS and the development of drug-therapy to reduce the likelihood of pre-natal transmission; and proof of the connection between smoking and cancer resulting in the warning message printed on cigarette packages.

New Jersey Medical Schools core teaching hospital, The University Hospital, is located on campus. It is home to a Level I Trauma Center, the busiest in the state, and one of the nations most active liver transplant programs. The 504-bed facility is also highly regarded for its Comprehensive Stroke Center, the New Jersey Cardiovascular Institute (NJCI), the cochlear Implant Program, a neurosurgical intensive care unit and a special Brain Tumor Program, the Neurological Institute of New Jersey, a federally designated spinal cord injury program and The University Center for Bloodless Surgery and Medicine. University Hospital is also the states single largest provider of charity care. Approximately 500 residents are pursuing advanced clinical training at University Hospital in 18 accredited programs.

Other major affiliated teaching sites include Hackensack University Medical Center, Morristown Medical Center, and the East Orange Veterans Affairs Hospital.

Admission to NJMS is highly selective and competitive. NJMS selects its students on the basis of academic excellence, leadership qualities, demonstrated compassion for others and broad extracurricular experiences. One hundred and seventy students enrolled in the class of 2012, selected from over 5,000 applicants. All applicants must be either permanent residents or citizens of the United States, meet specific course requirements, and take the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).

Deans of NJMS:

Charles L. Brown, MD (195559)

James E. McCormack, MD (196066)

Arthur J. Lewis, MD (1966)

Desmond Bonnycastle, MD, PhD (acting 1967)

Rulon Rawson, MD (196772)

Harold Kaminetsky, MD (acting dean and dean, 197274)

Stanley S. Bergen, Jr., MD (acting 1974)

Vincent Lanzoni, MD, PhD (197587)

Stuart D. Cook, MD (acting 1987-89)

Ruy V. Loureno, MD (December 1989-June 2000)

Joel A. DeLisa, MD, MS (interim July 2000-December 2000)

Russell T. Joffe, MD (January 2001-September 2005)

Robert L. Johnson, MD (October 2005 to present)

Coordinates: 404421N 741124W / 40.73924N 74.190111W / 40.73924; -74.190111

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‘Me too’ and the basic income guarantee | Basic Income News

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On the evening of Sunday January 7, 2018, The Golden Globes Awards program aired. For those who may not know, this is a U.S. television program which airs each year and highlights the accomplishments of actors, directors, and others in the TV and movie industries. This years awards program was the first to be aired since the revelations about movie producer Harvey Weinstein surfaced.

For those who may not follow events in U.S. popular culture to the extent I do, Harvey Weinstein was a major Hollywood movie producer. It was revealed that he sexually harassed a number of women or engaged in other sexual transgressions. After it was revealed that hed engaged in such behaviors, a number of other women came out to accuse other powerful men of sexually inappropriate behaviors of various kinds. In fact, a few of these revelations have had political ramifications.

In one case, they led to the resignation of U.S. Senator Al Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota. In another, they resulted in Doug Jones being the first Democrat the state of Alabama has sent to the U.S. Senate in 25 years. This cascade of revelations, following upon those about Harvey Weinstein, has been dubbed the me too moment.

Initially, much of the attention paid to the me too moment or, as some would argue, me to movement was focused on relatively privileged actors in Hollywood, although they werent necessarily that privileged when the sexual transgressions occurred. But eventually someone pointed out that movie stars or would-be stars arent the only working women who deal with sexual harassment and assault. Those working in restaurants, hotels, and other low wage industries do so on a daily basis.

In fact, Ive heard it said that women in low wage industries suffer the most. Thats because they cant challenge those men they work with who engage in sexually inappropriate behaviors. Such challenges might result in these women losing their jobs. While listening to a discussion about the me too movement on the British Broadcasting Service (BBC), I heard a guest say that the way to empower women on the job is to pay them higher wages. Now I support paying women higher wages, but that might not be the best way to empower them to challenge sexually abusive men they work with. In fact, paying women more, although helpful in other respects, might make it harder for them to challenge such men.

As Bowles, Gintis, and Osborne point out in this paper, the cost of losing ones job increases with ones wage. Think about it. Suppose someone is volunteering their services. A volunteer is effectively working for a wage of 0 cents per hour. If this person decides not to volunteer, there is no pecuniary cost of doing so because they dont forgo any money by ceasing to volunteer. The more money one makes from selling their labor, the more they give up if they quit their job. This is what I meant when I said the cost of losing ones job increases with ones wage. Quitting ones job is, of course, one way of losing it.

Now suppose a woman is being sexually harassed on the job. There are a few of ways she might challenge this behavior. She could directly confront the person, she could report them to her boss, she could quit, etc. Some of these interventions on her part might get her fired. If she quits, shed lose her income just as she would if she were fired. And the bigger her income or wage was, the bigger the loss from being fired or quitting.

I think that if we want to empower women in their dealings with abusive employers, a way to do so is to provide them with a source of income they dont have to sell their labor to receive. And the bigger we could get this non-wage income, the more we could empower them. This is because the income loss from quitting or being fired for challenging sexual abuse at work, would be made up to some extent by the non-wage income. Knowing this is the case might embolden women in their dealings with sexually abusive employers and co-workers. A generous BIG, assuming we could afford it, could serve this function well.

Michael Lewis has written 9 articles.

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'Me too' and the basic income guarantee | Basic Income News

Litecoin Price Prediction: Game-Changing LitePay Launching This Week?

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Daily Litecoin News Update
Fasten your seatbelts, HODLers! The "chikun" may soon be taking another flight. The game-changing "LitePay" launch is just around the corner.

While we don't yet have an official release date, word on the street is that the Litecoin processing service will be launching no later than this week.

For investors who haven't been following this space, we informed our readers about the impending launch last month. (You can follow our daily Litecoin.

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Ethereum Price Forecast: Chaos Is Hiding Long-Awaited ETH “Flippening”

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Ethereum News Update
“Ethereum’s not doing that badly,” is a phrase I hear often. It’s poor consolation, a pat on the back for being the least terrible asset in this crumbling class. But there’s a nugget of truth there.

For all its painful backsliding in January, last month was extremely important for Ethereum. It established the No. 2 cryptocurrency as a true “safe haven” asset, a crypto that investors flock to in times of trouble.

Just take a look at the BTC dominance metric..

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Ethereum Price Forecast: Chaos Is Hiding Long-Awaited ETH “Flippening”

Ripple Price Prediction: Clues That Point to an XRP Renaissance

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Ripple News Update
January was a crushingly bad month for cryptocurrencies. Whether you want to judge it against past years, months, weeks—it doesn’t matter. January was simply awful.

But fast-forward a few years. Does it still look as bad?

Bitcoin topped $1,000 in its early years. Then it crashed to almost nothing. Watching it happen was like watching Armageddon in slow motion...except it didn’t last very long. Bitcoin prices recovered—they are trading above $7,500 today.
Ripple (XRP) Price Chart.

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Ripple Price Prediction: Clues That Point to an XRP Renaissance

Where is Seychelles? / Where is Seychelles Located in The …

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Located in the continent of Africa, Seychelles covers 455 square kilometers of land, making it the 203rd largest nation in terms of land area.

Seychelles became an independent state in 1976, after gaining its sovereignty from The United Kingdom. The population of Seychelles is 90,024 (2012) and the nation has a density of 198 people per square kilometer.

The currency of Seychelles is the Seychelles Rupee (SCR). As well, the people of Seychelles are refered to as Seychellois.

The dialing code for the country is 248 and the top level internet domain for Seychellois sites is .sc.

Seychelles does not share land borders with any countries.

To learn more, visit our detailed Seychelles section.

Victoria is the capital city of Seychelles. It has a population of 22,881, and is located on a latitue of -4.62 and longitude of 55.45.

Victoria is also the political center of Seychelles, which is considered a Republic, and home to its Executive head of state.

This page was last updated on October 2, 2015.

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Victoria, Seychelles – Wikipedia

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Victoria is the capital city of Seychelles and is situated on the north-eastern side of Mah island, the archipelago's main island. The city was first established as the seat of the British colonial government. In 2010, the population of Greater Victoria (including the suburbs) was 26,450 out of the country's total population of 90,945.[2]

The principal exports of Victoria are vanilla, coconuts, coconut oil, fish and guano.[3]

Attractions in the city include a clocktower modelled on that of Vauxhall Clock Tower in London, England,[3][4] the Courthouse, the Victoria Botanical Gardens, the Victoria National Museum of History, the Victoria Natural History Museum and the Sir Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke Market.[3] Victoria Market and the brightly coloured fish and fruit markets are the local hotspot for the Seychellois people. Also nearby is the gallery of local artist Georges Camille.

The city is home to the national stadium, the International School Seychelles and a polytechnic.

Victoria is served by Seychelles International Airport, completed in 1971.[3] The inner harbour lies immediately east of the town, where tuna fishing and canning forms a major local industry.[3] One of the largest bridges in Victoria was destroyed by tsunami waves from the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.[4]

The area that would become Victoria was originally settled in 1778 by French colonists after they claimed the island in 1756, but it was not until after the Treaty of Paris of 1814 was signed that the British formally established Victoria and gave it its modern name.[5][6]

Victoria proper is composed of parts of three Districts of Seychelles:

Greater Victoria encompasses these three, and five more of the 25 Districts of Seychelles as follows:

Victoria is twinned with:

Victoria features a tropical rainforest climate (Kppen climate classification Af) with high temperatures throughout the course of the year. The capital does have noticeably wetter and drier periods during the year, with June and July being its driest months and December through February being the city's wettest months. However, since in no month does the average monthly precipitation falls below 60mm in Victoria, the city does not have a true dry season month. This lack of a true dry season month is a primary reason why the climate falls under the tropical rainforest climate category. The capital averages about 2,000mm of precipitation annually. Although being very rainy, skies are usually clear to partly clear and completely cloudy days remain scarce throughout the year even during the rainiest months.

Coordinates: 43700S 552700E / 4.6167S 55.4500E / -4.6167; 55.4500

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Victoria, Seychelles - Wikipedia

World Pantheism – The online community for scientific pantheists

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This community is the bestplace to find and network with fellow scientific pantheists locally, nationally and globally. Here you can express, inspire and take action for Nature and the planet, human and animal rights, and respect for science. You can explore aspects of practical living from a pantheist point of view and plan activities and gatherings. This community is life and Earth-focused, notsuitable for religious or abstract debate.

This community differs from Facebook in worthwhile ways. Our insights and shares don't vanish down the timeline: they stay for us to learn from. You can join a local group here easily. More groups are created as needed - suggest one HERE. You can search for and friend members near you. You can join many groups for various life stages,health & fitness, healthy eating,nature, interestsandcauses. If a group you are interested in is inactive - post something interestingand start it rolling!

Pleaseadd a photo it makes a huge difference! Introduce yourself in theCommon Room.We suggest you turn off notificationsexcept the ones you want to see.Scroll down to see the latest activity!For more details about scientific pantheism, visitwww.pantheism.net.

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World Pantheism - The online community for scientific pantheists

Stem Cell Therapy | Neuropathy and Pain Centers of Texas

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At Neuropathy & Pain Centers of Texas three convenient locations, including Fort Worth, non-invasive medical procedures are the mainstay of our practice. Using the most up to date techniques, our staff treats patients as whole people, providing a comprehensive diagnostic assessment in order to design a customized strategy for relief from medical concerns in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. The technology has advanced to a point that, at Neuropathy & Pain Centers of Texas, we apply stem cell treatments designed to help our patients attain their wellness goals and achieve a higher quality of life.

For instance, until recently, treatment options for people with osteoarthritis of the knee were limited. Steroid injections, joint replacement surgery, and physical therapy were often the only treatment options. Now, regenerative injections for knee osteoarthritis are available at Neuropathy & Pain Centers of Texas. Regenerative cellular therapy also has applications for treating Achilles tendonitis, rotator cuff tendonitis, and degenerative arthritis.

Stem cell research has made it so these injections work with the bodys natural ability to heal itself. Unlike treatments that simply address the symptoms, stem cell therapy actually promotes repair of the body, restoring degenerated tissue. Stem cell injections also contain hyaluronan, which eases pain and restores mobility by lubricating joints and tendons. This therapy fits well with Neuropathy & Pain Centers of Texass integrated approach to wellness, addressing the source of issues, rather than just treating the symptoms. To learn if youre a candidate for stem cell therapy, contact one of our locations, including Fort Worth to get more info and set up a free consultation with one of our specialists.

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Stem Cell Therapy | Neuropathy and Pain Centers of Texas

Villainous Crush – TV Tropes

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"Just fear me. Love me. Do as I say, and I shall be your slave." Jareth the Goblin King to Sarah, LabyrinthThis trope applies whenever a villainous character has romantic and/or sexual feelings for a heroic one.If this crush takes a turn for the perverse (and most such crushes tend towards this), this can lead to tropes like I Have You Now, My Pretty, Forceful Kiss, Bathe Her and Bring Her to Me, And Now You Must Marry Me, Scarpia Ultimatum, and Go-Go Enslavement where the villain tries to force their desires upon the character, although none of those require a Villainous Crush. Additionally, the villain may become a Stalker with a Crush. If the crush itself is a motivating factor in their Start of Darkness, then it's Love Makes You Evil.This trope isn't always negative, though. This trope can conversely be a very humanising trait for an Anti-Villain. The heroic character may become a Morality Pet, and can be fairly certain that their villainous admirer will never harm them or allow harm to come to them, barring certain exceptions. They may even step in to protect them from other villains who have fewer compunctions. Taken all the way, it may become Love Redeems.If the feelings are mutual or an actual relationship develops, then it's Dating Catwoman instead. When this is purely subtextual, see Foe Romance Subtext. The specific variant when the Evil Empress captures the hero to seduce him is Villainesses Want Heroes. Not to be confused with Foe Yay, which are purely audience reactions.No Real Life Examples, Please!Example subpages:Other examples:

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Films Animation

Mythology

Professional Wrestling

Tabletop Games

Theatre

Web Comics

Web Original

Light: Well, we've been outside talking for awhile and we've decided to make it official. I LOVE L! AND HE LOVES ME! I'm going to dump Misa so I can be with L!

Everyone: Gasp

Western Animation

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Villainous Crush - TV Tropes

Using Psychedelics to Address End of Life and Chronic Illness

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Psychedlic drugs allow people to face their deepest and most troubling fear with a level of openness and honesty that is often impossible otherwise. In a very general sense, psychedelics can remove the painful, fearful, and reactionary associations that we all have with traumatic events.

If you are struggling with the mental pain of a terminal or debilitating illness, loss of a loved one, or other trauma, you mind find relief in conscious use of psychedlics. After treatment, many individuals find that they can face the obstacles in their life with a new honesty and openness and can embrace the path they are on, regardless of how difficult it may be for themselves and their loved ones.

Heres one womans story of being treated with mushrooms as she was facing death, described in a New York Times article (see below):

Before Pam Sakuda died, she described her psilocybin experience on video: I felt this lump of emotions welling up . . . almost like an entity, Sakuda said, as she spoke straight into the camera. I started to cry. . . . Everything was concentrated and came welling up and then . . . it started to dissipate, and I started to look at it differently. . . . I began to realize that all of this negative fear and guilt was such a hindrance . . . to making the most of and enjoying the healthy time that Im having. Sakuda went on to explain that, under the influence of the psilocybin, she came to a very visceral understanding that there was a present, a now, and that it was hers to have.

Two weeks after Sakudas psilocybin session, Grob (the researcher) readministered the depression and anxiety assessments. Over all among his subjects, he found that their scores on the anxiety scale at one and three months after treatment demonstrated a sustained reduction in anxiety, the researchers wrote in The Archives of General Psychiatry. They also found that their subjects scores on the Beck Depression Inventory dropped significantly at the six-month follow-up.

To learn how to use mushrooms for treating depression and anxiety, please see our step-by-step Mushroom Guide.

Psychedelic Psychotherapy for Life-Threatening Illness Anxiety Panel

from MAPS: Psychedelic Science Vimeo Channel.

Psychedelics have been misunderstood and misrepresented for decades. That's changing. Please help us share safe, responsible information on using psychedelics by sending this page to friends, and posting to Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

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Using Psychedelics to Address End of Life and Chronic Illness