The new-new-new economy
Today I was thinking about the concept of a basic income, one of many proposition to get out of the current economic situation.
In a few words, basic income means each citizen gets a basic salary just because he is a citizen, without having to work. This basic salary could be 500/600 Euro per month. Now, the concept is difficult to grasp for many people, mainly because they will generally feel that it’s unfair and detrimental to give money “for free”. And they might be right, for what I know.
So, as I was saying, today I was thinking about the basic income, and how it should be linked to a minimum amount of work (let’s say, 16 hours per week).
Let me explain.
Imagine you can get 600 Euro per month if you work 16 hours. You can do any work. You can make up your job (web-designer, musician) or you could work for a factory (16 hours per week is ok), a call center, or even volunteer for the Red Cross or anything else. All you have to do is to get yourself busy somehow. Of course if you work more than 16 hours, you will get paid accordingly.
This is the skeleton of my idea. Its realization is not very easy, because a system must be put in place in order to avoid scams. Perhaps a feedback system a-la eBay might work, along with a microchipped-card similar to the supermarket fidelity cards.
I think that the economic boost something like this would have (imagine how creativity would explode) could pay back the money the governement needs to spend to get the program started.
We have to think about this.
The Imaginary Part of Action
A few days ago an interesting podcast was released on Red Ice Creations radio; it featured Holger Bech Nielsen, a physicist in the Niels-Bohr Institute in Denmark, talking mainly about the Large Hedron Collider and Nielsen’s theory about the “bad luck” which seems to have hit the experiment.
It’s an interesting talk, although a bit technical, so I recommend it to ya.
During the talk, Dr. Nielsen talks about the concept of “Imaginary Part of Action”. The action is the “history” of a certain system. This history has caused the state the system is in at the moment, and we call it action.
Now, according to Nielsen, we can say that at the moment of the creation, there must have been some kind of action (imaginary action), and he goes on by saying that for “mathematical” reasons this action must have been the smallest possible, and “negative”. He also states that “the system that wins is the one with the smallest amount of imagination”.
Now, I have a feeling this might tie up in some way with Terence McKenna’s timewave theory. I just don’t know how yet.
What Nielsen’s theory implies is that we are not going to have UFOs landing, our moms shapeshifting before our very eyes, Maytreias appearing in the sky, and so on. It implies change has to be subtle, natural, harmonius, non-traumatic.
Perhaps change within ourselves and change on the outside are connected in some kind of inverse relation. The more dramatically we change within ourselves, the more subtle yet powerful the change will be in the outside world.
Crop Circles…
I don’t know what your stance is on the crop circles affaire. Some say they are alien made, some say they are natural occurrences, some say they are man-made.
A while ago it occurred to me that it is highly unlikely they are man-made, for a few simple reasons…
According to cropcirleconnector.com during 2009 we had 73 crop circles in UK alone (mostly in Wiltshire) and 46 in the rest of the world (7 in Italy, this one being especially beautiful). Most of these crops are really beatiful works of mathematical art.
If we think or a moment that YES, they are all man-made, this would mean that:
1. We need at least a designer with great visionary skills capable of coming up with around a 100 designs per year. A great artist capable not only of producing aesthetically pleasing compositions but also to often integrate mathematics in these designs.
2. We need a crew of at least 6-8 people (according to videos of manmade crops I’ve seen on the internet) equipped with appropriate tools. This crew would be most probably based in Wiltshire, I guess.
3. These people need a good cash flow to keep going with their creations during 4 months in a row. Cash is needed to pay for cars, fuel, airplane tickets for when cropping abroad, tools, food, sleeping.
4. Hence, cropmakers would need a rather good occult financial support.
5. It would be highly probable that there is more than one cropmakers crew to keep up with the amount of work done, meaning that we need a couple or maybe four designers, and 20-30 more people.
Is this possible? I don’t know, it might be, but what are the chances? To me, it sounds much more likely that crop circles are natural, caused by something we do not understand yet.
Music
Hello everyone
Just a quick update with some download links for music i’m listening to… A few days ago I’ve seen a rather good sci-fi movie, it’s called moon. Here you go. Moon (go to imdb) - Get Torrent
Then, we have a few good bands:
Battles – Mirrored (the video below is from the single Atlas)
Nirvana (not the band, the movie)
Jimi in the black Lodge?
Yesterday I saw Nirvana, an italian/french movie from 1997 (a good two years prior to the Matrix and Existenz, and one year before Dark City). Nirvana is an existential sci-fi flick; the characters constantly wonder about the nature of existence and wheather or not the game can be stopped.
In Nirvana, videogame and reality are not really that different, and they even get mixed up; reality increasingly looks like a game, and viceversa.
The movie is good fun, it is probably not a masterpiece (this is not Existenz, although some people say Existenz is boooooring) but still has some interesting philosophical details and is very psychedelic (especially the Bombay City setting).
What is interesting to me is that a bunch of similar movies (as I said, Nirvana, Existenz, Dark City, Matrix, 13th Floor, and possibly more) all came out around the same time. It simply makes me wonder…
Here’s the torrent, my children!
My take on 2012
I was around Milano with my bicycle at 3.00 AM when the following occurred to me.
IF Terence McKenna was right, we are experiencing an increase of novelty (which is, the amount of stuff happening in my/your/our life), to culminate in 2012.
In my own experience, which might be different from yours, I am actually perceiving an increase in the amount of “stuff” going on within me. I never have a boring moment. I always feel busy even tho I’m not working at the moment.
So, if my own experience is agreeing with McKenna’s ideas (and with the idea of cycles in the Mayan calendar, and the idea of technological singularity in some way) I then assume it has some sort of truth.
This said, what does it mean that novelty is increasing?
It means that the amount of things happening in a second is increasing.
Time is not speeding up, we are.
As McKenna used to say, it is as if there is an attractor at the end of time (he called it, eschaton).
This attractor does not accelerate time itself, it rather does increase the frequency of the oscillation in our lives.
This can only mean we are approching everlasting life. And it is not going to be through a superhuman ability to live on through the ages. It is going to be through a breakthrough on the inside. Time is not an issue anymore.
Some good links:
Here is a Terence McKenna website
here, a timewave calculator (really cool)
Dedicated to Terence – We love you
Tortoise – Beacon of Ancestorship
Tortoise - Beacon of the Ancestorship
In the past I’ve often heard some criticism when talking about Tortoise (one of my all-time fave bands) saying that they keep repeating themselves. Well such criticism will have to go back to the sewer it belongs to, especially after this new album.
Beacon of the Ancestorship doesn’t give a fuck about anything. It’s not easy, it doesn’t belong to any genre (is it jazz? is it rock? is it prog? WTF! who cares), it’s got fat synths, cool drums, weird tempos, it sounds great, and it’s a great evolution from previous albums.
Do yourself a favour, get it, and if you are lucky enough to have Tortoise touring near you, go see them.
News
I’ve not been very active on my blog lately… life has been busy. The news is I have taken the decision to go back to Milano (Italy), my hometown, in October. Very exciting, innit?
Also, Radiohead have just released a new song, Harry Patch. Here you go:
