Posts tagged "current-events":

Freedom outside the press

Yesterday I listened to a 90 minute interview of Kim Stanley Robinson by journalist Ezra Klein in his podcast. It's the first time I'd listened to Klein - I had never even heard of this seasoned American journalist. But the interview was impressive from both sides. Klein, who says that Robinson's Ministry of the Future was the most important book that he'd read that year managed to ask questions about many of the central features of the novel, and, in response, Robinson spoke about topics like Eco-Marxism, which is an ism that I hadn't heard of.

2022-04-10 Spread of Autocracy | Messaging | Degoogle resource | Libre-DNS | Sri Lanka

I am thinking to make the font size of this blog bigger. In my browser, I do that anyway, and I find that I like the look of blogs with a large font size.

World Wide Waste

There's a website called "World Wide Waste" that is dedicated to the subject of digital waste and its costs to the environment. It seems to me that it is less of a subject for the individual than for the corporations, although we are all guilty of over-streaming. I wonder whether the environmental costs of internet streaming is greater than reliance upon satelites? It may be that since both exist, it makes little difference. It must be better to use videoconferencing than traveling and commuting. Harari makes the point that we don't really have an energy problem - there is infinite energy that we could obtain. It's just a technological and an environmental problem. If we can only solve the 21st century technological problems of polluting industries, we will be able to enjoy the tech advantages, but, along the way, we are making terrible misjudgments. Humans are inherently wasteful. We need to cut down on packaging and processed foods, products that are wasteful.

Extraordinary times

We are living in an extraordinary time in which the viability of our institutions, the myths of society, and the true worth of leaders, is severely tested. Some leaders, like Donald Trump, are so completely confounded by the challenges that whatever they do or do not do places them in a situation of appearing ridiculous. Others, like Angela Merkle, do not need to be very vocal, since they sit atop functional systems that just work, or at least work better.

2020-05-05-The coronavirus pandemic has hit Japan’s economy hard

Link: https://vikshepablog.wordpress.com/2020/05/05/the-coronavirus-pandemic-has-hit-japans-economy-hard/

Stallman's resignation from MIT and FSF

https://fsfe.org/news/2019/news-20190917-01.html

Regarding Stallman

I once went to a Buddhist meditation workshop where the teacher pointed out that if we were there in the room, it meant that we had not attained perfection, and that we still had something to learn. It’s also true that if we still believe ourselves to be here on the planet, living a separate existence, we have something to learn. And what we have to learn is basically that there is an underlying unity upon which everything depends. Our world is an illusion because our perception is false. It is false because it fails to include awareness of the unseen unity that gives life to all that we see. Including ourselves. There are many ways to express this truth, and none of them are going to do it very well, because we are attempting to express the inexpressible. When we do so, contradictions emerge – a Buddhist will say this in a certain way; an Adwaita Vedantin will say it in another way, a shaman in a third way, and to our minds they seem to be contradicting one another. When it comes down to words, there are always going to be contradictions. Words are a vehicle for our thoughts, and thought cannot capture the reality that underlies the thinker and her thoughts.