Endangered Freedom ?

National Healthcare Will Require National RFID Chips

@Neo you're right, here i go with some personal comments about this :

In my opinion, i am quite happy that such a thing doesn't currently happen in my country ... but it doesn't mean i am confident in the futur.
What worry me is that those that have the financial power in their hands (banks & lobbies , Edge Funds, Insurrance Company, governments,International organizations have only one aim : get more money, and controlling more people, regardless of the environemental or human cost.

I like the Dalai Lama approach of money : money for company should be seen as food for human body : a necessary condition to survive but not an aim. The final target of all company should be to contribute as much as possible to bring happyness to people i.e. contribute to better world.
(reading : "The leader's way" by Laurens Van Den Muyzenberg & Dala� Lama)

In a summary he states that to make good decisions you must :

• Have yourself a fair behaviour
• Have a fair vision of the reality (consider as much point of view as they are of people concerned and even more, (the hollistic approach))
• Have fairs intentions (targetting to limit as much as possible the bad effects of your decisions, and make it for the happiness of as much people as possible, making choice for good reasons, not personnal reasons)

I just wish that those who have a lot of money and power would get aware (and ideally ... would apply) this approach.
All that happend

• Water Horizon ( massive pollution ... morgan stanley sold 44% of its BP part 3 weeks before the explosion)
• Financial crisis (letting people getting more debts that they can pay back ... banks)
• The poor countries' privatisations organised by International Monetary Funds & World Organisations
• Massive poisonning of population maintained by Chemical lobbies (Codex Alimentarius)
• Trangenic sterilisations of seeds (hybride) to force farmer to spend more money to buy seeds every year, and making them weak so that more pesticides are required to make them growth
• Turning into an illegal thing to growth old and strong variety of seeds just because they have not been given the approval by Lobbies to be referenced in the catalog of "allowed seeds"
• Nuclear contaminations (waste thrown into the sea, when not thrown in the nature or in low cost countries)

And all that ... just because those that have the power to change this just don't decide fairly... one day those guys will be judged by their children.
I worry about the mentally megalomaniac psychopathic irresponsible coward way those fat cat think and act.

We don't inherit of our parent's soil , we borrow it from our children.

It is a shame to demonstrate such a lack of respect to the earth and to any kind of life.

But just investigate by yourself, and make your own opinion i will never tell someone what he has to think, the freedom of thinking is so far something they can't take to us such a jewel should be used.
In fact it is the lack of using it that bring us to such a situations.

ctsgnb, might be best to post your opinion or editorial comments or reason for posting versus just a link and a title with question mark.

Ok fixed ... I think it should be ok like this ... lol

Quite frankly, i doubt that this will ever be more than a phantasy.

Any system based on specific rules will converge to some homeostasis. This state will be the best-possible optimum of its rule-imposed goals. Example: if the goal of the game of chess would be to capture as much material from the opponent as possible players would find (and optimize) ways to do so. If the rules are would be reversed like in Antichess - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia then the style of playing would adapt to optimally achieve this goal. In both cases any outside considerations apart from pursuing these goals will not apply in what move is considered better or worse.

If someone would ask the players to play in a "more esthetically pleasing way" or something such they would probably answer that the only ruling measure is the goal they are going for.

The same is true for the economic system: it is designed to be driven by the maximum profit - not on the company level but on a very fundamental level. To ask a company to not maximize the profit but to maximize something else is like asking a chess player to select his moves not based on what maximally advances his goals but something else. A chessplayer selecting his moves based on something else than mating the opponent king is likely to fail against an opponent who indeed does so. The same way a company not maximizing its profit (the goal of the economy system) but something else is destined to fail too.

By the way: this, in effect, is what Karl Marx "Das Kapital" is about. What the rules of the economic system are and what the "rules" derived from these rules are (to once again use the chess analogy: what the best methods to play is.) It doesn't matter if Marx' explanation is correct, wrong or partly correct - at least it is a scientific approach and is criticizable scientifically. This isn't true for the "Dalai Lama approach" which is just a nice-sounding phrase which amounts to something like asking for snow on a warm and sunny day. Anybody knowledgeable of how the weather works knows that this is - ultimately because of how physics works - impossible.

The base line is: if you want to change the way things are produced and consumed (the economic system) you have to change the goals of this economic system, which will in turn change the whole system completely! You can't just change one part of the puzzle without changing every other part as well. This means the change will be a political one and it will change every other part of how society works too.

bakunin

@bakunin,

Thanks for your feedback

I agree that my point of view looks like the one of an utopist / dreamer or whatever "everyting-is-pink's world's alien. In fact i just refuse to surrender to the fatalism of a blind acceptation of the system as is without thinking about it and without thinking about how it works, why things couldn't be better and how.

I don't think we have reached the homeostasis of the economic system. I think it belongs to something bigger. It is more than a question about how economy works , it is a matter of human being evolution, the place of human being in this world, on the earth and i am not sure that the current system fit that matter as is.

I totally agree with you regarding the importance and necessity of goal definitions.

The communisme & capitalisme both have there strength & weakness, but the capitalisme allow liberty which is needed to evolve. The point is : total liberty means jungle law = law of the strongest ... which would just bring us several tousand of years back.
This is why freedom must go with reponsibility and that is what our current systems (our current fat cats) lack.

I totally agree when you say you can't just change a part of a puzzle. I also agree when you state the change will be political, but i really doubt it will be initiate by the current politicians because they are just dolls in the hands of those that have the financial power.

very interesting point of view, ctsgnb.

To be honest i feel a bit uncomfortable with giving another answer here: first, because this is leaving the topic of your original thread-opening post and goes in some completely new direction. I understand that this is the off-topic part of the forum, but still i think there should be a minimum of "thread discipline" in effect.

Second, we are leaving the topic of some computer-related political problem (which i feel should be possible here - after all, we are doing a very political job. "Political" in the sense of "having a big impact on how society works".) for a solely political discussion. The former is at least bordering to the great topic of unix.com (which i would describe as "all things server/client"), but the latter is simply misplaced here. There are other places on the net where such discussions belong to (agreed - not many as polite as here).

Please do not mistake my further silence on this for lack of interest. I would be very interested in discussing this but i do not want to misuse Neos bandwidth for things he doesn't have in his scope.

I usually take in political things the same stance i am used to take as an engineer: if you want to make something you have to understand the applying laws and principles first. To build an airplane is only possible when you first accept that gravity exists and that things tend to fall when not being held up by some force. To describe any society in terms of "good", "bad" or any other affection is like calling a "world with gravity" "desirable": missing the point. A society is as it is and it will change when the effort to prolong the status quo becomes higher than the demand to change it - like the airplane will lift off when the force propelling it upwards overcomes the gravity which presses it down.

My personal opinion about when this happens is that it depends on the status of the development of productive forces. As they advance because technology advances production and the way things are produced changes respectively. If this change is big enough society will change to reflect this. Take slavery for example: it was not abolished when people realized that it is an unethical thing to do but when the way of production changed from (mostly) agricultural to (mostly) industrial. You can pick cotton with a bunch of slaves but when you try to let slaves write software you are probably in for a very nasty surprise.

For the same reason the compulsory school attendance was "invented" somewhere in the 18th century - because the demand for literate workers to read instructions was there, created by the industrial revolution which created the demand for an adequate workforce.

Sorry, but i beg to differ: i can't say anything about communism, because this system hasn't been tried yet and i am quite weak in scying. I can say for the capitalism, though, that it is completely indifferent about liberty: for what i know capitalism worked in Nazi-Germany as well as in the "democratic" Switzerland at that time and Nazism isn't commonly reagrded as the epitome of freedom at all. I could prolong the list of countries where capitalism worked best under quite suppressive regimes for quite a long time: Idi Amins Uganda, Somozas Nicaragua, Papa Docs/Baby Docs Haiti, ... Capitalism isn't suppression either, but: capitalism is making as much profit as possible. If that means to suppress then so be it, if it means to give freedom, than this is it. Just don't confuse to get freedom in capitalism with an "inner strive towards freedom in capitalism" - it just fits into the bigger plan.

Btw: the picture of "when (formal) law was absent we had the law of the jungle" is a story, probably put to eternity by luminaries like Hobbes with his Leviathan. In fact many studies of the savage societies (like Lewis Henry Morgans ethnography of the Iroquois or Johann Jakob Bachofen) show that mesolithic societies were remarkably well-ordered despite lacking formal authorities or armed forces like a police. The Iroquois Nation for instance was the first one in history to develop a constitution (in the 11th century), when "civilized christian lands" in Europe just started the crusades and the Inquisition.

Exactly this is the point: "responsibility" is just not the same as "making enough profit as possible". Which is why our "fat cats" don't show any interest in acting responsible - why should they? It is simply not their job.

"Political" was not meant as "vote for party a or party b" (which propose the same anyways). "Political" was meant in the sense of "opposed to being private".

I don't think it is possible to independently change the rules of society locally. Small communities with radically different rules will not likely change the surrounding society but either be treated as obscurities or be outright attacked by ther neighbors. Example for the obscurity treatment would be the Amish people, for the "attacked by the neighbors": the Albigenses or waldensian movements (not to speak of Hussites, or the followers of Thomas M�ntzer).

bakunin

As bakunin points out; systems, by the very nature of creating one (a system) are imperfect. A system creates a boundary around a set of knowledge; a system creates a boundary around acceptance and understanding; a system creates a set of rules and policies and definitions and semantic understanding; a system creates a set of control mechanisms (or a need for such controls); and the list goes on and on about the causality of systems.

In other words, when we take the sum total of human knowledge and experience, and decide to take a subset, partition it (draw a line around it), label it, define it, advocate it, and operate within the system boundaries; we limit knowledge; this is true of all systems. There are no perfect systems, of course, because all things, especially systems, have the qualities of duality (i.e. positive and negative; good and evil; creation and destruction; beautiful and ugly).

This also means that to enter into, or accept and strongly advocate, a system; anti-knowledge is created, because there are systems and there are "anti-systems". What remains is change, evolution, revolution (breaking rigid systems), adaptation; but most systems, by definition, are resistant to anything that is not defined by the system boundary (or boundaries).

I do realize that this reply could seem somewhat abstract; and my closing thoughts are that too many of us discuss and operate within system boundaries without thinking about system theory and understanding the inherent limitations and boundaries of all systems; and also the fact that all systems, by the very nature of system designs, tend to create "anti-systems".

@bakounin

Thanks for your feedback, I sincerly apologize if it made you uncomfortable.

I am not willing to waste bandwith of this site in any way.

I posted that thread in the "Lounge" forum which is entitled "What's on your mind", so i think if there is one section in this site where we can have opened discussion and not only "computer focused" i thought it was the relevant one.

By the way, i initially just wanted to share a link that - i think - could also interest some other people.

I didn't plan to go so far in telling what i think but since i have then been asked for giving more details about what was in my mind, i just went on.

Anyway, it was nice and interesting to read you both. Thanks for having taken the time to share your thoughts.

Oh.. I forgot to qualify my post above as mainly focused on "closed systems"....... it gets more interesting when we discuss "open systems", "living systems", "complex systems", etc.

Naturally, this is an area I am always keenly interested in.... and I tend to think in terms of "systems theory" when looking at situations and things. I even view all belief systems (religions, for example) as "systems" as well as nations, governments, markets, and more.

I think it is good to discuss these topics in our forums, as long as we discuss them through the lens of a technologist or scientist, and not via irrational thoughts based on fear and other emotions that lead to irrational thinking and human conflict.

This has always been the philosophy here at these forums.

Don't be mistaken : i am not willing to bring human conflict here

I agree about the fact that emotions should be avoided or minimized as much as possible when they bring fears or when they bring to an alteration of the quality of the judgement (by making bad (egoist, personnal, ...) reasons coming into account) when a decision need to be made.

But we are not robot, we are human our thought have a part of irrationnal regardless whether people accept it or not. Then it becomes a matter of logic, argumentation, and fact. Then it is up to the audience to judge the quality of the argumentation.

Example : It is not because someone tells some statistics about unemployment (statistics that have scientifically calulated with scientific formula) that we have to take it as irreversible truth. How has this number be calculated ? which part of the population has been included or not in this calculation ? does it reflect the reality ?..... and so on.

So i agree that we should be able to have a logic in our thought and argue why we think this or that, but i emit some reserve about the all-tech-science-rational-only thought.

Not tolerating the inner unavoidable irrationnal part of our thought is - in my opinion - at least an utopy, and - in some worse case - can become a form of lack of tolerance (this would mean that we would not listen to people who don't have a scientific approach or opinion, this is sectarisme, fascism ).

Of couse it is just my opinion, nothing personal

Yes, I understand... but every system has boundaries, and for these forums, we made the decision to keep the "signal-to-noise ratio" high by discouraging emotional arguments and "religious opinions".

Is this a "perfect system"? No, it is not; but it is the system here; and it seems to work quite well. We are not the biggest forum on the net, but we are certainly, with little doubt, one of the highest quality forums.

So, we intentionally created some system "boundaries" here, and those boundaries will make some comfortable and others uncomfortable. That is the nature of boundaries and systems.

... and on a personal basis, I loathe forums and discussion groups where emotions run high, logic is lost, and manipulation and gang and chic mentality runs rampant. I really don't like it when someone who cannot formulate a technical argument in a debate takes the low road and starts using ad hominems, false logic (fallacy), and personal attacks.

These forums were formed and are managed in this manner; and yes, it is not a perfect system, but it is the system here.

Don't be mistaken : i am not trying to argue against the necessity of boundaries or rule on this site, for sur they are necessary to keep this site high-quality.

I totally agree with you regarding the high "signal-to-noise" rule.

In fact if every body would behave fairly & respectuously and with a sufficient auto-disciplin (which -i agree - is currently a pure utopy) , rules would not be necessary

I totally agree that no drift should be tolerated regarding the respect that people should demonstrate to eachother, and - as you stated - this site has a very good quality from this point of view, because of the good work you all - moderator and admin guys - do, and for sure i can just encourage you to keep up doing that great work .

Hi ctsgnb,

Don't worry; I don't think you did anything against the forum rules. From my perspective, I simply added my thoughts, which were grounded in system theory, and tend to reflect how I feel about things; and since I don't get a chance to emphasize the forum philosophy very often, I found the discussion a way to express this view; which is neither perfect nor expert.

From my perspective, I was not and am not interested in a Facebook, where the roots are with people compared "who is hot and who is not" and sharing photos; nor am I interested in twittering my every thought to the world or having a multitude of "followers"; my main interest was to create a technical Q&A platform where everyone can share their ideas, learn and grow, mostly regarding computing and in particular unix/linux, in a way that everyone can participate (novice to expert), with a high quality database of knowledge that has a fairly high (ok, very high) signal-to-noise ratio.

That does not mean folks cannot have other discussions in this area; and they should have; and I hope sharing my system views have not tossed to much of a wet blanket on the discussion you were hoping to have. That was not my intention.

Carry on!