• Why it’s over.

    by  • May 22, 2008 • 0 Comments

    The situation requires a Jefferson. There isn’t one. For whatever reason, the strident, terrifying voices of eternal hostility to tyranny over the mind of man, of give me liberty of give me death, are stilled. The words are mouthed, but without the spirit to back them up. The cultural forces which produce that kind of [...]

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    organized crime: big business

    by  • May 21, 2008 • 0 Comments

    The ‘Ndrangheta, the Italian organised crime group, does yearly business equivalent to some 3 percent of Italy’s economy and more than the total of that of some small European nations, according to a study on Wednesday. The crime group, which has overtaken the Sicilian Mafia for control of drug trafficking, was responsible for the slaying [...]

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    Wealth concentration

    by  • May 21, 2008 • 0 Comments

    The crisis has focused attention on the obscene inequities of this era – the world’s 1,100 richest people have almost twice the assets of the poorest 2.5bn. http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto051520081439544376&page=2 My contention has always been that wealth concentration of this kind requires and implies the political oppression, usually implying force, of those on the losing end of [...]

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    Taxes: 20% of GDP, regardless of actual tax rate?

    by  • May 21, 2008 • 0 Comments

    Mr. Hauser uncovered the means to answer these questions definitively. On this page in 1993, he stated that “No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP.” What a pity that his discovery has not been more widely disseminated. The chart nearby, updating the [...]

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    NGO In a box

    by  • May 20, 2008 • 0 Comments

    NGO-in-a-box offers a set of peer reviewed and selected Free and Open Source software (F/OSS), tailored to the needs of NGO’s. It provides them not only with software, but also with implementation scenarios and relevant materials to support this. http://ngoinabox.org/

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    Flying deck spar for seasteading

    by  • May 20, 2008 • 1 Comment

    The idea is to extend the mast of the Spar above the deck, and then to hang a lightweight deck as a tensile structure, akin to a bridge, off the mast. This is a good idea because tensile structures are cheap compared to compression structures. The cables would probably be fairly light, and number in [...]

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