KMO welcomes Frank Rotering to the podcast to discuss ecological overshoot, the logic and institutions of capitalism, technology, and the expression of human biological drives in the economic realm. Frank Rotering contends that ideas like socialism are “solutions of the past” and that new ways of thinking will be required to meet the challenge of the historical singularity that we now face.

Music by The Story Of





And the conversation continues in episode 30 of the Diet Soap Podcast.

I heard, many months ago and probably on the Alex Jones show, that Dick Cheney was quietly getting rid of all US dollar assets and investments that would tank along with the dollar and that he was buying a house in Dubai. Can anyone reference any sources more presentable than Alex Jones to substantiate this claim?

Don't take me to be bashing Alex Jones. I think anyone outside of his inner circle of most devoted fans will understand why I would not want to cite his show as a primary reference for something as important as the claim that this financial crash was engineered and should not be viewed as any sort of accident or unforeseen fallout of well-intentioned business practices and wise oversight.

vector: prester_scott (I think)

In total lazy blogger mode, I'll just give you the link:

http://johncwright.livejournal.com/182201.html

and a bit of advice:

If the first section, the one on Iraq, bores you or rubs you the wrong way politically to the point where you're about to stop reading, skip on to point number 2 rather than just walking away. The thing gets more interesting as it goes along, and the discussion about Japan in the comments section should grab the attention of any peak oil aficionado or singularitarian who doesn't need to have something translated into the vernacular of their sub-culture to see how the points made relate to their interests.

Sam Harris:

...religion remains the only mode of discourse that encourages grown men and women to pretend to know things they manifestly do not (and cannot) know.

It would seem that Professor Harris is not familiar with the academic discipline known as "economics" or the journalistic endeavor of "financial marketplace reporting" wherein talking heads identify simple but un-checkable factors like "optimistic reaction to the president's speech" or "profit taking" to explain the behavior of the vast and stunningly complex dynamic system called "the financial markets."

Or perhaps he would classify these modes of discourse as sub-categories of religion. And perhaps he would be correct to do so.

I just posted the following review of The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America's Economic Future by Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns to Amazon.com:

Naive by Extropian, Transhumanist, or Singularitarian standards.

I’m sitting in the library with a copy of Kotlikoff and Burns’ book. I read the first chapter and saw that the authors were making predictions about the state of the world in 2080. I turned to the index hoping to skip ahead to their discussion of the economic effects of molecular nanotechnology. References to nanotech listed in the index: 0

I checked for discussions of genetic medicine and found no entry. Nor do the authors make any mention of artificial intelligence or robotics. Regardless of how well Kotlikoff and Burns know their respective fields, I can hardly take seriously any extrapolations concerning the state of things seven decades hence that do not take GNR (genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics) into account. Imagine a book about the state of the global economy at the start of the 21st century written in 1930 that makes no mention of the Internet or information technology.

If you want arguments, charts and statistics to justify your dislike of George W. Bush and his ilk (please don‘t take me for a Bush supporter), and if you imagine the future state of technology as looking basically like today except with high definition television, faster computers, and smaller cell phones, then you might find much to like about this book. I will be putting it back on the shelf before I leave the library.

I may retract this review if a lot of people rate it as unhelpful. I tend to ding reviewers who post reviews of books they admit they haven't actually read.