Category Archives: Freedom Security Privacy

America is Already Great

    I’ve been wondering recently what exactly motivates thousands of Central American refugees to head for the U.S. southern border.  Surely they know Trump is vehemently opposed to their coming and is doing everything he can to stop them. Why are they trying so hard to get someplace where they aren’t welcome?

    My initial thinking was that the conditions in their own country are so terrible and frightening, that they’d rather face the wrath of Trump & Co.   And while that may be true, I’m thinking there may be another reason: they sincerely know and believe that America is the land of freedom and opportunity, no matter what sort of mad men are running its government.

    In other words, we don’t need to “make America great again”– it’s already great and the world knows it.  The President has propped up a straw man to use for promoting himself.  And the straw man simply does not exist. MAGA suggests that as a country we were once great but aren’t now and we need to fix that.  But the reality in the eyes of millions around the world is that we are great and are still living our greatness.

    But somewhat ironically, it seems that after the past two years of lies, incompetence, and corruption we do now need to make America great again, correct some of the harm and hurt that has been imposed on our people and the foundations of our society by Trump and his followers.  We overcame the harm done by Nixon, Reagan, and Bushes. Let’s hope we can overcome the harm being done by Trump and the GOP.

Exploring now– Bitcoin, Augur

TechCrunch today pointed to Ethereum and Augur which started my latest tech exploration and, of course, led to Bitcoin.  In spite of it’s widely recognized role in the underground ‘Net world as a means to conduct financial transactions securely and without regulatory oversight (think Silk Road, marijuana stores circumventing US ban on access to traditional banks), Bitcoin relies upon some very interesting and capable technology approaches.  Deeply rooted in the open source world, Bitcoin is fully de-centralized relying on peer-to-peer technology and top security.

From what I can see, Ethereum is sort of the “meta” version of Bitcoin. It seeks to provide a framework of decentralized connectivity and strong security upon which tools like Bitcoin could be readily built.  And Augur is one of the first efforts to do that.  In Augur’s case the industry is prediction markets.

My exploration has just started but this whole world of open-source, highly secure, decentralized operations strikes me as one of the fundamental economic shifts ushered in by the Internet (noting that “the Web” is only one part of “the Internet”).

Fascinating stuff.