Category Archives: Enegery

THE BEADY EYE ASKS. CAN WE ADAPT TO LIVING WITH CLIMATE CHANGE?

12 Thursday Aug 2021

Posted by in 2021. The year for change., Climate Change Summit Scotland 2021, Climate Change., Cop26., Earth, Enegery, Human Collective Stupidity., Humanity., Inequality, Modern day life., Our Common Values., Post-Covid-19, Reality., Survival., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Truth, Unanswered Questions., We can leave a legacy worthwhile., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Ten -minute read) 

It’s time to cut out the bullshit and get a grip when it comes to climate change.

The effects of human activities on Earth’s climate to date are now irreversible on the timescale of human lifetimes.

So the key question is, what will our emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants be in the years to come?

The simple reason for this is that it is impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy just how much greenhouse gases are going to be released in the next few centuries, and just how much this is going to affect the climate.

Electrical Cars, Solar Panels, Wind turbines, and technology might all help reductions in carbon emissions but they are all products.  They all use the earth’s finite resources to produce profit for companies that created the world of Profit for Profit’s sake that has to lead us down the slippery path to climate change.  

In my opinion, any new normal ( which is going to be far from normal ) has to hold fossil burning industries accountable or nationalizing them till we reach a point where sustainable energy generates higher financial returns than coal and oil. 

 The harsh reality of climate change is now playing out in real-time before our very eyes, with some of the negative changes already locked into the climate system, while global efforts to reduce carbon emissions are not moving fast enough to avoid irreversible damage to the planet.

Any solutions are going to take years to have any effect so we need to adapt: or, in other words, get used to the realities of this new, heated-up, wet, violent, world.  

We all know that the climate challenges we are facing on the planet transcend national boundaries.

At present we being told that’s, it’s not too late to stop the forthcoming climate changes totally making our planet unlivable if we move to clean energy. 

However clean energy is only one part of the challenge because the inequalities in the world demand a fundamental overhaul of existing social, political, and economic norms.

It is this new perception that needs to be contagious so it is adopted globally.

The shocking truth is that climate change has only just begun.

In other words, whatever the mitigation efforts of future civilizations, climate change is here to stay.  Regardless of future emission trends, the CO2 footprint from our brief passage on Earth is going to remain in the climate system and impact the well-being of all terrestrial life forms for what could almost be considered an eternity.

In the last year, we are seeing with the current Covid pandemic that we live in a world where HARMONIZATION of any actions is impossible.  

We will witness this in the forthcoming Cop-out / Cop26 summit. 

The above perception is highly unlikely to happen.

Why?

Because the climate change problems will probably worsen before — or indeed if — it gets better, no one wants to bear costs of change that will fall on  – the poor.

Long before this ever happens, humanity must prepare itself for an inland retreat and a constant battle against rising seawater that will continue for hundreds and hundreds of years into the future. 

We are incredibly adaptable, but at the psychological level, there’s going to be tremendous disruption among families, societies, nations, etc. when change occurs.

Anything that helps an organism survives in its environment is an adaptation.

Adaptation is an acknowledgment that this.

Some of that change is a given, but not all of it.

For example:

Loss of traditions, habitat, and cultural heritage, and the distress that comes with moving away from the land where your ancestors are buried, where you’ve lived all your life.  Not to mention the extinction of species, animals and plants, and coral reefs, and all kinds of living things, those we depend on and those with which we simply share ecosystems.

None of the solutions so far even begin to address the possibility of an impending mental health crisis due to the upheaval associated with managed retreat and other forms of climate migration.

How do you convince a community that their home will not be habitable?

How do you make room for rural refugees to live in a crowded city?

Climate mitigation is hard, and we are running out of time to do it, but I would argue that adaptation in its absence will actually be a million times harder.

Without substantial cuts to our collective carbon imprint, many more lives will be lost trying to adapt to a changing environment, and countless more will be made meaningfully worse.

Why wouldn’t we do what we can to avoid that?

The long course of human evolution shows that climate disruption, which is what we’re going through right now and in the foreseeable future, is associated with the demise of ways of life.

As difficult as it may be, there is a vast scale of loss associated with climate change that one has to try to comprehend and accept in order to understand the urgency of the situation.

THE NEED FOR HARMONIZATION to anticipate the actual and expected effects of climate change and take appropriate action to prevent or minimize the impacts.

How will we feel when the air inside feels tinny and canned when all of this feels like our future?

The two main responses so far to climate change are Mitigation and Adaptation – they must go hand in hand. 

Adaptation can be planned in advance but it must go beyond just development to include the global food system, which encompasses production, and post-farm process such as processing, and distribution is also a key contributor to emissions. And it’s a problem for which we don’t yet have viable technological solutions.

Food is responsible for approximately 26% of global GHG emissions.  So we will need a menu of solutions: changes to diets; food waste reduction; improvements in agricultural efficiency; and technologies that make low-carbon food alternatives scalable and affordable.

Methane warms the world twenty times faster than carbon.

Junk-food chains, including KFC and Pizza Hut, McDonald’s have spread around the world.

Take McDonald’s. 

  • It has about 28,000 restaurants worldwide, opening around 2,000 new ones each year

The food industry spends billions a year in advertising and promotion to persuade people to eat more food.

In short, then, this is another example of wasted wealth, wasted capital, wasted labor, and wasted resources.Climate Change What Happens after 2100

On top of all this while the earth warms up it has the capability of releasing 1.5 trillion tons of organic carbon twice as much as Earths, atmosphere currently holds.

The planet is the ultimate ‘global commons’. It belongs to neither a particular individual nor a particular nation. Nor does it belong to a single generation such as us, our children, or our grandchildren.

Instead, it belongs to all living creatures both alive now and in the future. Just as all of humanity is connected ‘horizontally’ across the globe, so too are all past and future life forms bound ‘vertically’ in a continual unfolding of the story of life.

So when you buy something, you buy something that lasts; you buy it because you really need it and want to take care of it. It is none other than this consideration for future human beings and other life forms that should form the yardstick by which we set our mitigation targets — not merely what is politically and economically feasible for the industrialized world today.

Yet the political and economic institutions of our civilization are fixated on enjoying the present and unable to account for the consequences of our actions on tomorrow.

Corporations and governments are forever borrowing from the future in order to improve the present.

All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin. 

 

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS; IS THIS OUR BRAVE NEW WORLD?

26 Monday Jul 2021

Posted by in 2021. The year for change., Climate Change Summit Scotland 2021, Climate Change., Disaster Capitalism., Earth, Enegery, Human Collective Stupidity., International solidarity., Modern day life., OLYMPICS GAMES., Our Common Values., Reality., Survival., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, Telling the truth., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , We can leave a legacy worthwhile., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Ten-minute read) 

We are at a pivotal moment in human history not because we still don’t really know where we come from, or if we are alone in the Universe, or do we really matter. 

It is, of course, impossible to put into a sentence or a paragraph what is wrong with the world never mind the Universe.  

But it’s possible to describe our world in a word.  Beautiful and we humans occupy an extraordinary place in it. 

The strange fact is that in this age of information when data is our currency of communication, most of us have no idea how to picture the world never mind the universe. 

The last time the Western culture shared a coherent understanding of our world I would say, was away back in the middle ages, when Galileo discovered that we were not the center of the universe. 

Now with climate change and the current Pandemic, it is as if we have just started to see the world in color,  and that changes, not just what is far away, but what’s right here. 

This discovery of the state of our plant challenges us to reframe everything and there is little point in learning a lot of science unless you can do something valuable in life with that knowledge.

                                                       ——–

There is only one image of our world that shows us this.

The photo shows no countries on our planet, only landmass, oceans, and clouds. 

Our endless preoccupation with nations and racial or ethical groups is completely misleading our intuitions.

This image shows our glorious plant in its true state without language in all its forms, cultural identification, religious beliefs, all are just tools, to shepherding ourselves successfully through the coming state of the world 

This is going to require tremendous creativity, combined with more than a large dose of common sense, which unfortunately down the centuries and now is lacking in the collective management of our planet Earth.  

                                                          ————–     

However, we live in a world where all information is freely available at the click of a mouse, so what has changed?

We’re seeing a lazy entitlement wash over the world where everyone feels as though they deserve what they want from their government the second they want it, without thought of repercussions or the rest of the population.

It seems like people don’t actually want democracy anymore, they want a dictator who agrees with them.

The sickest and most grotesque NEWS TOPPING THE CHART, dominating our attention and the news cycle, dividing and recruiting us into its ever more polarized camps, giving us a skewed view of how other people in the world really think, act, and live.

It seems like our new brave world is JUGED by a group of people that represents 0.01%, who take refuge in their own precious identity politics with us buying more and more into a worldview that is disconnected from cold data and hard facts?

The impact of the pandemic is showing despite loud warnings that continuing economic growth is incompatible with sustainability.

                                      ——————–

So let’s take a look at the state of the world.

Even if we did stand on the moon it is a sad read and any solutions will not be found in religious beliefs or technology or in politics but in learning from history.  

There have been over 250 major wars in the world since World War II, in which 23 million people have been killed., tens of millions made homeless, and countless millions injured and bereaved. Over 37 (or 42) million people have by killed by wars in the 20th century. Three times more people have been killed in wars in the last 90 years than in all the previous 500.

Over 35 major conflicts are going on in the world today.

There are approximately 30,000 nuclear warheads in the world today.

Current global military spending is approximately $800 billion per year; more than the total annual income of the poorest 45% of the global population.

Genocide and other mass murders killed more people in the 20th century than all wars combined.

33% of the world’s people live under authoritarian, non-democratic regimes. 35% of the world’s people live in countries in which basic political rights and civil liberties are denied.

 1/3rd of the world’s labor force is unemployed or underemployed.  

1 out of 6, children ages 5 to 17 worldwide are involved in child labor.

3 billion of the world’s people (one-half) live in ‘poverty.’

Women account for 70 percent of the world’s people who live in absolute poverty.

800 million people lack access to basic healthcare. 

1.1 billion do not have safe drinking water. By 2025, at least 3.5 billion people, or nearly 2/3rd’s of the world’s population will face water scarcity. 

870 million of the world’s adults are illiterate.

Over 100 million people live in slums.

The richest 1% of the world’s people earned as much income as the bottom 57%.

The wealth of the world’s 7.1 million millionaires ($27 trillion) equals the total combined annual income of the entire planet.

Poor countries (which contain 4/5th of the world’s people) pay the rich countries an estimated nine times more in debt repayments than they receive in aid.

Half of the forests that originally covered 46% of the Earth’s land surface are gone.

Between 10 and 20 percent of all species will be driven to extinction in the next 20 to 50 years.

60% of the world’s coral reefs, could be lost in the next 20-40 years.

More than 20 percent of the world’s known 10,000 freshwater fish species have become extinct.

Desertification and land degradation threaten nearly one-quarter of the land surface of the globe.

Global warming is expected to increase the Earth’s temperature by 3C (5.4F) in the next 100 years.

An estimated 40-80 million people will be forcibly evicted and displaced from their lands.

                                               —————-

The reality no matter how one looks at it, is that the old assumptions that provided the unifying ideas within our cultures are eroding because of our technological advancement, and although we are seeing what may prove to be the emergence of a new worldview consensus based on the Critical Theory it has not solidified its hold on society as yet.

With technology and Algorithms, our cultures have and are continuing to accept the idea that objective truth is inaccessible and that truth itself is, therefore, relative and personal, but how we conduct ourselves is just as important — even more important is how we do it sustainably and so far we have made a great job of it.

The world is now facing a collision of not just climate change but is colliding with finite resources in a much that the current economic growth could end or totally collapse in the not-so-distant future.  

                                              —————

But a free and functioning democracy demands a populace that can sustain discomfort, tolerate dissatisfaction, be charitable and forgiving of groups whose views stand in contrast to one’s own, and most importantly, that can remain unswayed in the face of some violent threat.

The words ” We Need” are only words.  They should be replaced the words ” Action Now” 

Why?

Because we also need to be clear in our own hearts and minds about the solution to the world’s problems. If we are to do anything we must break the alignment between theological advancement –  climate change and pollution. 

The world is at a crossroads as the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on the global economy have combined with increasing polarization and highly charged elections.  

                                                    —————

So what will we do? 

Probably have a conference.

But if you could change the world, what would you do?

We live our entire lives as aspiring presidents, aspiring movie producers, aspiring artists, aspiring authors, aspiring human rights activists, aspiring world-renowned scientists, and aspiring thought leaders while we sit in front of our TV screens, walk around glued to Smartphones, or Ipads that fed us pictures of climate change, wars, the covid pandemic, racism, political/economical collapse.

All Encouraging us on one hand, to think that the world is more violent than it really is while on the other hand promoting the glamorous life of people that believe that they are better off than we are;

What I fear is that we’re seeing now is a loss of that ability to handle discomfort and dissatisfaction.

What I would do is help people think for themselves.

Amazon Owner Jeff Bezos Travels Into Space  

While governments introduce more and more taxes to pay for inequality/economic growth charities competing to raise funds to save almost everything, from adopting everything from a child to a fish or animal to a plant, in the real world.

Taxes form a key ingredient in the social contract between citizens and the economy but How taxes are raised and spent can determine a government’s very legitimacy. 

Health programs:  Military: Social Security: Interest on the national debt: Education programs:  Food and agricultural benefits: Pensions. Government machinery.

                               —————————-

Our new world now needs solidarity more than ever to make the world a better place.

Presently in a year when the world is fighting a pandemic, the Olympics in Japan will once again show us what we are capable of in sport to bring our true authentic selves to every situation.  ( See:  Post –  The Olympics games show be permanently hosted in Greece.)  

It represents a true coming together not separation, in a true spirit of humanity.

Without this coming together there will be no new world but a world run by algorithms that will not treat us as equal.

But how can you take on the problems of the world when there’s so much to do already?

In science, we have been staggered by revelation after revelation that things are not what we previously thought them to be, and beneath each layer of reality we have unpeeled lies another.  It is not hard to piece together all this information to comprehensively picture what the end times will look like.

 If so, what are we to do about it?

The only way to beat the attention economy is to opt out of it.

As the growth models of countries cannot be sustained Countries need to overcome political hurdles to invest in infrastructure and human capital.

How?

One way is to publish the information about political capture so that the public can hold politicians to account for reforms.

Because the only way for human rights to persist is for everyone to collectively agree to accept that things don’t have to go their way 100% of the time.

Freedom can only exist when you are willing to tolerate views that oppose your own when you’re willing to give up some of your desires for the sake of a safe and healthy community when you’re willing to compromise and accept that sometimes things don’t go your way and that’s fine.

Finally, we must accept that world problems will always be with us.

The world has woken up to the need to curb emissions and invest in climate resilience.
But we all need to move faster down this path, we now have less than 100 days to go until the UN climate summit, Cop26 arrives in Glasgow.

Five years on from the Paris Agreement, and with countless evidence that the climate crisis is worsening, the negotiations will focus on nationally determined contributions to stop the world from warming above 1.5 degrees. But as the countries confer with each other, it will be the people of the world who have the most to say: we need action, need more of it, and need it now.

They will not address nature and climate as one. 

HOW CAN YOU GET INVOLVED? 

We know that the production of energy is the biggest contributor to global warming.

If we want action not promises to reduce carbon emissions in twenty years in thirty years there is no reason that non-repayable grants could be made available to everyone to convert to green energy by installing solar panels.

So why not use the tools that are available to demand our governments to do so on

Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Emails to  cop26@cabinetoffice.gov.uk.    

All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

 

THE BEADY EYE SAYS. THE CLIMATE CRISES IS NO LONGER A LOOMING THREAT IT IS ARTFICAL INTELLIGENCE.

29 Saturday May 2021

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Climate Change Summit Scotland 2021, Dehumanization., Digital age., Enegery, Environment, Fourth Industrial Revolution., Green Energy., How to do it., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Modern Day Communication., Modern day life., Post - truth politics., POST COVID-19., Purchasing Power., Reality., Renewable Energy., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Eight-minute read) 

We live in an age in which intersecting crises are being lifted to a global scale, with unseen levels of inequality, environmental degradation, and climate destabilization, as well as new surges in populism, conflict, economic uncertainty, and mounting public health threats.

All are crises that are slowly tipping the balance, questioning our business-as-usual economic model of the past decades, and requiring us to rethink our next steps.

In the next few months, we will once again witness a gathering of verbal diarrhea in Scotland all promising to go green.

There is no doubting in the last few decades that we humans have achieved advances away beyond what our ancestors would have believed possible. The irony is that to survive we have to become something very different from what we are. 

Many optimists believe that technology can transform society and solve climate change.

To a great extent, this is probably true no more so than in the field of medician. 

Take the discovery by Alexander Fleming in 1928 of Penicillin.

Before its discovery, we were dying thirty years early than we do today. 

His discovery was down to an accidental piece of bacteria landing on one of his Petri dishes which took another ten years to develop into a drug to save lives. 

Today with human intelligence and machine learning we can produce drugs in a matter of months.     

The way forward to reducing CO2 emissions is not a by-pass lane it is by using the technologies that already exist.  

It’s time to cut out the verbal and bull shit and make these technologies affordable to all. 

Yes, the world today is in a dire state and a new kind of social and ecological environment needs to be created with green energy the price of which is toppling daily.

Comparing global problems involves lots of uncertainty and difficult judgment calls, but every problem is solvable if we devote resources to building a just world and not guns.

THE WORLD RUNS ON ELECTRICITY.  

SO IF WE WANT A GREEN FUTURE NON-REPAYABLE GRANTS TO CONVERT FROM FOSSIL FUELS GENERATED ELECTRIC TO ENERGY BY NON-POLLUTING RENEWABLE MATERIALS – WIND – SUN- WATER-  GEOTHERMAL – HYDROGEN. 

SUCH A MOVE WOULD CREATE MILLIONS OF JOBS AND COULD BE FUNDED BY PLACING A WORLD AID COMMISSION OF 0.05% ON ALL ACTIVITIES THAT HAVE PROFIT FOR-PROFIT SAKE AT THEIR HEART. ( See previous posts) 

                                  _______________________ 

 

We are now presented with two very different futures. 

The last generation that can stop devastating climate change. We have the knowledge and the tools – we just need politicians to lead the way.

or

We fail to meet climate mitigation goals.

For certain, either outcome will not be easy or cheap and it is happing faster than we wish to acknowledge.  

The problem is the two outcomes are profoundly interlocked with lots of uncertainty.

HOWEVER, UNLIKE THE CURRENT PANDEMIC CLIMATE CHANGE WON’T JUST DISAPPEAR IT WILL REQUIRE A NEW MEANING OF LIFE.

To recognize that we are entering a new world with opportunities and perspectives is an enormous challenge not because of climate change but because of the current inequalities existing on the Planet.

The choice we are now confronted with is one we will have to make over and over again as we transition to a more resilient, zero-carbon, just, and healthier future.

The question is who is going to pay for the transition.  

New transformative technologies may promise a radically better future but also pose catastrophic risks.

THERE IS LITTLE POINT IN REDUCING GLOBAL TEMPERATURES IF BY THE TIME IT HAS STABILIZED HALF OF THE WORLDS POPULATION HAS BEEN DESTABILIZED OR DISPLACED.

A lack of global emphasis on foreign aid, conflict, and political factors have kept poverty as a driving factor of Inequality.

To adjust to the coming new kind of social and ecological environment, how do we frame either of the above outcomes constructively.

We will have to relearn the world to do so. 

We have to become more aware of the future of our planet and our future and the legacy of the human species to start a serious battle to make up for the damages.

At the moment it is difficult to know the changes in the ecosystems that surround us not to mention the social uncertainty to come.

The fundamental economic problem is related to the issue of scarcity.

Society is mostly dominated by people wishing to consume more goods and services that are available.

One in nine people in the world go hungry each day and suffer from nutritional deficiencies as a result.

Currently, 1 in 9 people lack access to clean water across the world.

The problem is not that we aren’t producing enough food, but rather that people lack access to food. Many people do not have enough money to purchase food and cannot grow their own.

To try to work out which global problems are most pressing and make progress on foundational questions about how best to address them is impossible unless we address the fundamental problem.

To recognize that scarcity will drive almost everything. 

To recognize a sense of shared humanity. 

To recognize that approximately 600 million children are not mastering basic mathematics and literacy while at school.

To recognize that is not just climate change that treating the world but artificial intelligence and the way we are using it.

Using only the interaction of its embedded sensors, computer programming, and algorithms in the human environment and ecosystem — is becoming a reality that cannot be ignored anymore.

Because building autonomous weapons systems are one thing but using them in algorithmic warfare with other nations and against other humans is another.

They will in no uncertain terms alter the very fundamentals of security and the future of humanity and peace.

As global temperatures continue to rise, technology improves and the world economy grows, it gets easier to cause destruction on an ever-larger scale with the weaponizing of artificial intelligence both military-wise and as a social tool. 

The Weaponization Of Artificial Intelligence

The development of autonomous weapons system (AWS) is progressing rapidly, and this increase in the weaponization of artificial intelligence seems to have become a highly destabilizing development. It brings complex security challenges for not only each nation’s decision-makers but also for the future of humanity.

There are always unforeseen consequences when new technology is introduced. Those unintended outcomes of artificial intelligence will likely challenge us all.

 AI algorithms must be built to align with the overarching goals of humans.

As more and more data is collected about every single minute of every person’s day, our privacy gets compromised.

Look at what is happing in China with its social credit system, it could devolve into social oppression.

Unless you choose to live remotely and never plan to interact with the modern world, your life will be significantly impacted by artificial intelligence.

The transformative impact of artificial intelligence on our society will have far-reaching economic, legal, political, and regulatory implications that we need to be discussing and preparing for.

Sure, it can transform our lives for the better.

In fact, people have gotten used to depending on AI for almost everything and can’t imagine not having these technological advancements as part of their life. Because many processes and applications are getting automated, people are getting addicted to these kinds of inventions which can be an issue for future generations to come.

Societies will face further challenges in directing and investing in technologies that benefit humanity instead of destroying it or intruding on basic human rights of privacy and freedom of access to information.

  • In the future, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence will play an even more fundamental role in content creation that will affect our wallets, health, safety, and lives.

The mistake we are making is to think that this situation is the only future. 

That it is impossible to regulate AI because of the rate of AI change entails. 

This is not true as it is possible to Audit all AI technology and algorithms to ensure that comply with human values and to make their programs totally transparent. 

Why is the above urgent?

Because combined with climate change we are faced with and a transactional wealth of a new currency of unknowable value called personal data inequality will ravage the planet we all live in and on.    

These are not some science fiction movie scenarios the current Pandemic is revealing a much more tragic and fragile world that requires more than trust. 

The United Nations (UN) currently lists 22 “Global Issues”. 

These correspond with the most important issues of our time and are known as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).

Here is a few of them. 

FOOD SECURITY.

HEALTH ISSUES.

EDUCATION.

GENDER EQUALITY.

AFRICA.

ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES/ POLLUTION. 

OCEAN CONSERVATION.

WATER SCARCITY.

GLOBAL ISSUES THAT REQUIRE POLICY SOLUTIONS.

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. Rather, it serves as an overview of some of the major issues all global citizens should be aware of.

Artificial intelligence is not on the list. 

Because the biggest challenge facing the planet needs every solution possible including technology like artificial intelligence (AI). 

But AI is not a silver bullet it can only unlock new insights, pinpointing those responsible for it.

The current environmental issues pose so many problems to industry and society that not enough action has been taken to stop turning Climate change into a product. 

My goal in this blog is not to convince people climate change is real, or that AI is destroying society it’s to get people who do believe that climate change is real and that Algorithms for profit’s sake are plundering the world to do more to affect change.

What can be done by any of us against the might of Capitalism that will have any effect? 

There is only one weapon available to us all and that is our buying power.  

 If we use our collective buying power you will then see not just governments but global corporations change their tune from profit to sustainability.     

We decide whether we want to look at the world in one way or another, always making tradeoffs.

As Harvey Sacks observed.

” If only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed” 

” But the best and brightest devices must be accommodated within existing practices and assumptions in a world that has whatever organization it already has”  

All are under threat because all are happening at what scientists estimate to be about 1,000 times the normal pace and are yet to be quantified.

All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

 

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: ARE WE ENTERING AN ERA OF DO IT YOURSELF ECONOMICS, BASED ON PEOPLES INTUITIONS.

16 Tuesday Jun 2020

Posted by in 2020: The year we need to change., Capitalism, Climate Change., COVID-19, Enegery, Environment, Fourth Industrial Revolution., How to do it., Humanity., Inequality, Life., Micro v Macro Economics., Modern day life., Populism., Post - truth politics., POST COVID-19., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., United Nations, VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Economic Depression., World Economy.

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(Twenty-minute read)

I am no economist but you don’t have to be to realize that long before the Covid-19 Pandemic, the state of the global economy was already in disarray, now with viruses the economic problems to come are in general as serious as they have ever been.

To deal with the accumulated liabilities history suggests some radical alternatives, including a burst of inflation or an organized public default, one way or the other the economic fallout defies calculation.

It makes sense with everything happening at once to take a hard look at the coming economic depression. (which is going to be deep and long)

It will require not just governments to be more visionary to lead the way out of the crisis but new economic thinking to rethink the whole Globalisation of economies before they disappear into the world of digital data and become difficult to measure, or tax.

The question, of course, is what form that will take and which political forces will control it.

We all know that economic relationships are complicated and changeable. The influence of anyone variable in an economy is not easy to isolate even with the use of sophisticated data. This is why economists are unable to agree on any course of action when it comes to deciding how the economy actually works and how it ought to work.

Even if they could agree countries have different moral and political judgments.

What I see is that we entering an era of doing it yourself economics, based on people’s intuitions,but unfortunately macroeconomic is choosing between inflation or unemployment.

With countries trying to reopen their economies and given that economists can not agree or have sufficient knowledge to predict any direction one could be forgivin to ask are they performing a useful purpose in the first place.

The coming economic depression can only be diluted by the creation of a new interrelationship with the resources of the earth, their use against their value to the ecosystems as a whole not the continuation of profit for profit sake.

We must recognize that the civilizations of the world are entwined in a global economic system that is incapable of functioning for the common good of humanity, other species, and this planet, which is our home.

It is clear that serious reflection is in order.

Simply to stand back and question what has happened and why would be to compound failure with failure: failure of vision and failure of responsibility.

A sustainable and prosperous global economy needs to be grounded in the common good of all living species, not profit.

The failure of markets, institutions, and morality during the current coronavirus crisis has shown that the emergence of global capitalism brings with it a new set of risks that call for an ethical, moral change.

Leaders are now gambling with public health, safety, and the future of younger generations. They unapologetically prioritize serving themselves over the people they were elected to serve. We have to make them raise their game.

A new approach to economics is required that puts values, compassion, generosity, kindness, people, planet, and the common good at the heart of our economic system. 

Now is the Time for a Revolution in Economic thinking.

A new definition of the “Bottom Line.”

Given today’s global challenges, such as climate change, financial crises, oil depletion, renewable energy, inequality, and poverty, what kind of new economic theory is called for?

Therefore this post is an appeal to economists, academic colleagues in business, finance, management, political economy, philosophy, theology, ethics, environmental studies, sociology, anthropology, and others to come together, so that, all of us, collectively, can prescribe a working solution to our commonly shared challenges.

As we transition from a service-based economy to a knowledge-based economy, human capital will not be enough, the next generation will see large tax increases in order to pay off the national debts.

The work, of which we are a part, which is so needed, has barely begun.

The pandemic will continue to change the economic and financial order

forever.

It will lead to permanent shifts in political and economic power in

ways that will become apparent only later.

However, the coronavirus crisis has been a powerful reminder that the basic political and economic unit is still the nation-state. Countries will have to strive for a better balance between taking advantage of globalization and a necessary degree of self-reliance.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a wartime atmosphere in which such changes suddenly seem possible.

Perhaps the emergency payments to individuals that many governments have made are a path to a universal basic income and universal health insurance.

The pandemic has laid bare the vulnerabilities of open borders.

Firms that are part of global supply chains have witnessed first-hand the risks inherent in their interdependencies and the large losses caused by disruption.

Supply chains will have to become more local and robust—but less global.

The real risk, however, is that this organic and self-interested shift away from globalization by people and firms will be compounded by some policymakers who exploit fears over open borders. They could impose protectionist restrictions on trade under the guise of self-sufficiency and restrict the movement of people under the pretext of public health.

It is now in the hands of global leaders to avert this outcome and to retain the spirit of international unity that has collectively sustained us for more than 50 years.

The rise of populism in many countries further tilts the balance toward home bias.

Even after the pandemic is brought under control (which may itself prove a lengthy process). The post-coronavirus financial architecture may not take us all the way back to the pre globalization era, and the damage to international trade and finance is likely to be extensive and lasting.

The gap between rich countries (along with a few emerging markets) and the rest of the world in their resilience to crises will widen further. Economic nationalism will increasingly lead governments to shut off their own economies from the rest of the world.

Now and for a long time to come, central banks will become entrenched as the first and main line of defense against economic and financial crises. They may come to rue this immense new role and the unrealistic burdens and expectations it will impose on them.

We urgently need more and deeper conversations, dialogue, and engagement at all levels and from a variety of perspectives to bring the different cultures, civilizations, and viewpoints together, in order to find common ground and agreement on joint action.

The pandemic and subsequent recovery will accelerate the ongoing digitalization and automation of work changing the future composition of GDP.

The share of services in the economy will continue to rise. But the share of in-person services will decline in retail, hospitality, travel, education, health care, and government as digitalization drives changes in the way these services are organized and delivered.

The downturn will accelerate the growth of nonstandard, precarious employment—part-time workers, gig workers, and workers with multiple employers—leading to new portable benefits systems that move with workers and broaden the definition of employer. New low-cost training programs, digitally delivered, will be required to provide the skills required in new jobs.

The sudden dependence of so many on the ability to work remotely reminds us that a significant and inclusive expansion of Wi-Fi, broadband, and other infrastructure will be necessary to enable the accelerating digitalization of economic activity.

We cannot achieve our hopes and dreams without such conversations and dialogue. Only then can we hope for the understanding between civilizations, peoples, and points of view necessary to construct an economy that truly works for the common good.

No country or economic activity is going to be impervious to the drastic impacts of climate change.

It is cuckoo land to think that we can continue to ignore the pending disasters, compounded by the social problems, highlighted by the epidemic that has brought all manner of issues to the surface. From the coronavirus pandemic and police brutality to the marginalization of minority communities around the world, leadership is broken.

For years we have listened to their rhetoric without action that has given full rein to self-harming market forces.

The Normal Economy is Never Coming Back.

This much is certain:

Just as this disease has shattered lives, disrupted markets and exposed the competence (or lack thereof) of governments, it will lead to permanent shifts in political and economic power in ways that will become apparent only later.

It would be fair to say that if we are to move to Green sustainable economies the first thing that is needs is green energy that is free of costs to the user. 

The whole concept of economies becoming attached to the fundamental values required to protect and revitalize the fundamental resources of the earth that provide us all with life is idealistic and will remain so as no one wants to foot the bill to make it happen. 

However, for the first time in human history, before profit disappears into the cloud we have the technology to apply a World Aid commission of 0.005% on all activities that are in existence for profit sake only.

One of humanity’s greatest weaknesses is greed. 

One can see this throughout history, with the present-day examples personified by Wall Street and other world stock exchanges now run by high-frequency trading algorithms. 

Such a commission would create a perpetual fund of billions almost invisibly to the markets. It would spread the cost of changing world economies fairly to achieve the desired outcome both the earth’s needs and our needs.    

It would turn a begging United nation into a giving United nation. 

No one country wants to foot the cost of change and it cannot be achieved if visible to Wall Street

Micro and Macro Economics are neither different subjects, nor they are contradictory, rather, they are complementary. The only important point which makes them different is the area of application.

A fund like this could give grants, not loans. It could buy the sunshine and turn it into energy, buy the protection of forests, freshwater, fresh air, remove the need for mass farming, reduce inequality, afford education, change our lives for the better. 

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. IS THE CURRENCY AND THE ART OF THE HANDSHAKE GOING EXTINCT.

28 Tuesday Jan 2020

Posted by in Communication., Disconnection., Emotions., Enegery, Face Recognition., Facebook, Human values., Humanity., Life., Our Common Values., Reality., Social Media, The art of a handshake., The power of touch.

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(Ten-minute read)

Remember when people use to initially judge you by your handshake. It formulated a picture of a person we were meeting for the first time.

In the span of a few seconds, it lay the foundation for how others perceive and feel about us — and we about them.

“It was wet,” “It was creepy,” ” It was firm,” It was crushing,” “It a Mormon handshake,” “It a Mason probing handshake”, enthusiastic, vigorous, prolonged, high-fives to fist-bumping.

A handshake was a globally widespread, brief greeting or parting tradition in which two people grasp one of each other like hands making impressions that have a very long shelf-life based on a brief but important meeting.

Your handshake is the business card you leave behind.

Believed by some to have originated as a gesture of peace by demonstrating that the hand holds no weapon.

It is a reassuring tactile touch that we as social animals share is essential for social interaction, social harmony, health, survival, and security, as well as for communicating our true feelings.

It serves as a means of transferring social chemical signals between the shakers.

What is even more startling is how long we remember those bad handshakes — sometimes we remember for decades.

Today we pay for items with the swipe of our phone or by inserting a small plastic card into a reader. The old handshake just doesn’t have its place anymore.

We can also spend thousands of hours clicking a mouse over a small image on a computer screen. Nothing is real, nothing is said – only ones and zeros racing around the globe in small packets of data.

The world of technology continues to tractor us into a world absent of looking at one another in the eyes the Art of the handshake is dead.

With, Social media, Face recognition, Instagram, Facebook, Smartphones, Emails etc our most valuable currency of the handshake is evaporating and being replaced by digital signatures or passwords, that are undermining our trust in each other.

It’s no wonder that so many people get something so simple as a handshake wrong. 

Take the Politician’s Handshake:Corporate-Image-Two-handed-handshake5

Two hands to cover or cup the other person’s hands twisting the other person’s hand so that yours is superior or playing hand jujitsu to let the other person know you are in charge is just rubbish.

In the real world-shaking a person’s hand allows you to establish your friendliness and accessibility. 

For example meeting your future in-laws for the first time, your first job interview.

It might be true that in the future daily and weekly media will be more and more electronic, but physical media will always exist.

Stand in front of the webcam and send a digital emoji and you could be shaking hands with the devil. 

You cannot reproduce a handshake with meaning electronically.

This is a part of the beauty and the freakiness of the internet no handshake required.

Its no wonder there is grooming.

There was a time that a person had to put on nice clothes and go out into the real world to meet a love interest.

Today, you can be “out there” without ever having to go out- online dating.

You can even engage in a virtual relationship by using email or instant messaging. It is possible to get to know a person on a relatively deep level without ever meeting at all.

Customs surrounding handshakes are specific to cultures and can offer some real benefits.  Take Brazilan negotiators they touch each other almost five times each half-hour where there is no physical contact between American negotiators. 

In postmodern society, superstitions don’t have much of a place, for most of history they have a played a huge role in shaping culture and society before the arrival of the handshake.

The internet cares not what you do. You miss out on real contact with people.

It is affecting our ability to connect with others as equals. Not being able to manage the normal tasks of adult living resulting in more and more limper handshakes. Which leads them to problems with society and unable to get along with others.

Although teens are staying in constant contact via the Internet and texting, these friendships do not foster trust and intimacy the same as face-to-face contact.

The century’s old practice to seal a deal may seem quaint but its importance in the future will tell us whether its a robot or not.

As the appreciation of small things disappears; nature loses its brilliance.

Our planet is in a tight spot lets shake hands on that.

As we know there can be no peace no universal action on anything without it. 

All the verbal diarrhoea in the world cannot replace it. 

 

Corporate-Image-handshake2

Corporate-Image-Finger-tip-grab-handshake3    

 

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: PERPETUAL GROWTH IS COMING TO AN END.

26 Saturday Oct 2019

Posted by in 2019: The Year of Disconnection., Enegery, Environment, Evolution, Fresh Water., Humanity., Inequality, Life., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Reality., Sustaniability, Technology, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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( Seven-minute read)

Economics is not an unbiased academic discipline, it’s an ideology. Furthermore, economics is based on the false premise that perpetual growth is achievable.

Can economic growth be sustainably achieved?

Finite resources make perpetual growth theoretically impossible. No amount of technological breakthrough or creative accounting can counter that physical fact.

Is economic growth desirable?

The short answer appears to be no.

Exponential growth will eventually take you to impossible places.

Unfortunately, we live in a world of capitalists that thrive on the great Myth of Perpetual Growth, endless growth, ad infinitum, forever, till the end of time.

It seems as though we are damned if we grow and damned if we don’t.

We’ve now with Algorithms for profit sake got to a position where there’s nothing to keep us in check – so we have to do it ourselves.

It’s a waiting game now – to see if we can learn to behave differently to bacteria in a petri dish before it’s too late and we kill our host.

It’s not worth the risk.

Ecology and economics have to be intertwined, or we’re in serious trouble.

It’s time we all get our head out of the smartphone and become smart.

We can have debates about what we’re going to do about this and that, but if you can’t see the reason in the core of what I am saying, we’ll be having two very different conversations.

There is little point in arguing any longer whether Neoliberalism is to blame for damaging ecology beyond its ability to support us. It has lead to the inevitable collision between an insatiable economic model and a finite planet whose resources are stretched to the hilt.

The perception of the need for perpetual economic growth is a fraud and this assumption creates massive risk when reaching the limits of our natural systems.

With a world population nearly at 7 billion people, the implication for economic growth seems obvious as we cannot assume that the status quo will hold in a changing climatic environment. Reaching the earth’s resource limit is inevitable if it is not already occurring.

However changing our society’s behaviours cannot be achieved through some overseeing organization.

Perpetual growth has been ingrained through exposure to intensive branding and marketing by the very corporations who provide jobs and economic growth, and round and round we go…… Enacting such dramatic change through a highly centralized governing structure that dictates appropriate resource use, population levels, and actively redistributes wealth is a hard sell even in dire times.

As a result, we cannot continue consuming more and more water, spewing out more and more carbon dioxide and burning more and more coal.

In the past 22 years, half of all of the oil ever burned has been burned.

At present, the global population is increasing by 83 million people annually and we are already consuming natural resources as if we have “1.5 Earths.”

If every person used as many resources as the average North American, more than four Earths would be required to sustain the total rate of consumption. Other words if everyone lived like the average American, the Earth could sustain only 1.7 billion people — a quarter of today’s population.

27 billion people will inhabit the planet by the end of the century and hidden in every calorie of food eaten are 10 calories of fossil fuels.

Technology can lead to greater efficiencies, it requires energy — it does not create it.

Water is obviously a key component of human life. It is also vital to energy, industry, agriculture and livestock.

With all of this in mind, it’s time to abandon the perpetual growth economic model and move instead to a model that stresses conservation, efficiency, recycling and renewability. Clearly, the world is on an unsustainable path and, by definition, anything that is unsustainable won’t last.

Above all else, we must redefine the quality of life as something other than just having “more.” The goal should be to simply have enough. Our quality of life should not be measured by “stuff,” but instead by the things that make life rich; our relationships, our hobbies, our work and our passions.

GDP merely measures what people are willing to pay for, which is not necessarily connected to the use of energy, or any other physical resource.

The world will be confronting shortages of hydrocarbons, metals, water and fertilizer, which will dramatically affect global agriculture. The latter is critical.

So why are we unable to change direction.

Because of the threat, transnational organizations have over the nation-state.

Because no one is willing to bear the costs.

Because of the amount of power capital has over labour.

As it stands, nearly half the world’s population — more than 3 billion people — lives on roughly $2 per day.

The solution is to get profit for profit sake to pay:

By introducing a World Aid commission of 0.05% on all High-frequency trading, on all sovereign wealth funds acquisitions on all foreign exchange transaction over $50,000, on all gambling and lottos wins creating a perpetual world aid fund.

By issuing United Nation Green Deal non-trading Bond.

By the introduction of a World Day of non-consumerism Advertising.

By building non atomised Societies that are attached geographical – belonging not defined by competition.

By eating together one a week.

The question is how do we communicate this obvious message, in the face of corporate control of the media, and increasingly academia, science and the political system?

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WE ARE WELL ON THE WAY TO TOTALITARIANISM

23 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by in 2019: The Year of Disconnection., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Dehumanization., Democracy, DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Enegery, Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Modern Day Democracy., Modern day life., Our Common Values.

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(Twenty-minute read.)

If we are not vigilant we might by accident and neglect combined with the erosion of civil liberties and with the increasing disenchantment of politicians easily sleepwalk into a form of a totalitarian society.

You could say at present that the world has more pressing problems but I consider this as a very dangerous trend and, sadly, unlike climate change perhaps unstoppable.

Why?

Because corporations belong to no land, no country, no people and have no loyalty to anything apart from profit – their profits and the profits today are on an unimaginable scale. 

Because individual liberty which our ancestors fought for generations to establish are now been blowing away in the wind with Artifical Intelligence turning our politics into a form of Digital Dictatorship.

Control of society above personality.

The modern sense of entertainment, for example, has led to the shallowness

of life that permeates all aspects of life, separates us from the seriousness of

existence, and fills this existence with false content.

What we are seeing is a widening of inequality, a rise in racism and ant semitic traits all of which are essential to a totalitarian society. Individualism itself is diminishing and in the end, people will embrace the totalitarian state’s ideology.

This fourth industrial revolution as it is called is presently without any AI laws other than the EU guidelines on the trustworthiness of AI – what data to use or not use to train other Algorithms.

The last industrial revolution taught us a lot about basic human rights and social values to wake us up, to help us prepare for the future however what we are seeing with smartphones is a form of doublethinking that leads to banality or to implicit acceptance of the standard of psychological normality, the lost of limits.

You are going to work with a digital colleague that has no set rules, no personal judgment. 

The threat of climate change with the rise of stateless refugees is forcing millions around the world to realistically confront a future in which their lives, at a minimum, look radically worse than they are today.

At the same time, emerging algorithms are giving a small technocratic elite the power to radically alter our species to a point when it will no longer resemble itself.

They both will call into question the basic ideas of who are and how we think about ourselves.

There are technologies now already emerging that are asking this question with the very fundamental assumptions about what it means to be human.

Why is this?

Because by limiting the choices and activities that have given us our basic sense of identity we can’t express our own opinions because they fear individual power.

There is nothing we can really do to change the course of our civilization except to patiently and persistently saying the truth about false worldviews, both on climate change and materialistic algorithms for profit both of which are and will have dramatic consequences. 

Take Climate change and  Fossil fuel:

It seems that fossil fuel owners and technology only goals are to protect their business models at all cost.

Climate change will shrink the size of the world that is livable on. while allowing unregulated technologies to rule it.

Algorithms Data Apps are tools by means of which, once installed, they start making decisions on your behalf. They will enable governments to assert their ideological and intellectual authority over party members and employees of party-run institutions, including schools and media.

Their messages becoming inescapable.

The beauty of digital media technology — disquieting for those who care about privacy and freedom from intrusion — is that our smart apps know a great deal about our actual behaviour.

Technology now interacts with you and takes the measure of you. It can determine just how “smart” you are when it comes to your devotion and your grasp of the ideological essentials.

This is where we seem to be headed for compelling materialist reasons, not ethical reasons. 

Habitual smartphone user was spending a great deal of time glued to the screen, as a result, the potential of the smartphone to be used as a tool through which authoritarian regimes can shape and reinforce dominance over the population is no longer a fantasy – China.  

It is reinventing the process of ideological dominance for the digital era.

In China, censorship, is now largely automated, reaching “unprecedented levels of accuracy, aided by machine learning and voice and image recognition.  It has an estimated 200 million surveillance cameras, with plans for 626 million surveillance cameras by 2020.

China is building a digital dictatorship to exert control over its 1.4 billion citizens. For some, “social credit” will bring privileges — for others, punishment.

If successful, it will be the world’s first digital dictatorship.

The flawless totalitarian state, powered by digital technology, where the individual has nowhere to flee from the all-seeing eye of the Communist state. who has done what (and for how long)

They can leverage digital media products to reshape the whole process of ideological control in ways that are far more personal, and far more effective, than anything we have witnessed in the reform era.

We, on the other hand, need to find out once again how to make decisions not just as individuals but as a society.  We need new economics theories of not top-down but bottom-up. Its isn’t capital that creates economic growth its people. It isn’t competition that creates prosperity its cooperation. The economics that is not inclusive will not allow modern society to thrive. 

Its painfully obvious that the fundamental assumptions of neoliberal economics are wrong.

The market now with profit-seeking algorithms can never distribute wealth because there is no equilibrium.

So is there any way of combating the technological growing algorithm market.

Inclusion will be the only brake.

We must allow people to get involved while improving all stakeholders in the market. The laws of economics are a choice.

So give people the choice to invest in the future by the creation of Nation backed non-trading Green deal bonds. ( See previous posts) This is about creating a platform for real and measurable engagement.

Algorithms all ready control 99.9% of stock exchanges. 

Taking self-responsibility and living life the fullest will not only enrich our own lives but as well the lives of others.    

Then the question arises:

No government in what used to be called “the free world” seems prepared to take the steps that can stop this inexorable decline.

Totalitarianism is a political concept of a mode of government that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life.

Big data:  The length of time that it took them to use unfettered free speech to subvert and undermine all of our core institutions. Thus we arrive at the present situation where the brief a historical version of freedom of speech has reverted back towards what the state deems controversial today might be very different to what it deems controversial tomorrow.

Take Brexit for example. Nostalgia is that it’s become a political weapon. Politicians are creating nostalgia for an England that never existed and selling it, really, as something we could return to.

Do we want to be told what to think and do? Or are we ready to come up with our own solutions for the consequences we’ve caused?

The idea of the totalitarian state can never be a true and effective form of government rule. Increasing state interference, a crumbing electoral system, the loss of a free press and loss of freedom of speech are grave threats to our democratic system. 

The potential consequences that come from using AI, such as giving up privacy are only the ice cubes in the bucket. 

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE ASK,S. WHICH CAME INTO EXISTENCE FIRST – TEMPERATURE-GRAVITY- PROTONS- ELECTRONS – ATOMS – MOLECULES- MATTER- LIGHT- TIME.

01 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by in Enegery, Evolution, Scientific., The Atom., The Obvious., THE ORIGINS OF THE UNIVERSE., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH

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( A HALF AN HOUR CONFUSING READ.)

Theoretical Science has endeavoured to explain what the universe is made up of with some success until it comes to the vast emptiness of spaces.

Perhaps some logical thinking is needed to enable us to understand how the universe began.

It requires developing a better theory of how space, time, and matter are related.

Every single second of every single day, you are being bombarded by trillions upon trillions of subatomic particles, showering down from the depths of space. They blow through you with the strength of a cosmic hurricane, blasting in at nearly the speed of light. They’re coming from all over the sky, at all times of the day and night. They penetrate the Earth’s magnetic field and our protective atmosphere like so much butter.

These tiny little bullets are called neutrinos.  Neutrinos have this annoying habit of changing character as they travel. That’s right, as a neutrino travels in flight, it can switch masks among the three flavours.

Although many subatomic particles break down into other particles, so far no one has caught the decay of protons or neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms.

Neutrinos continually challenge everything we know about physics.

Neutrinos are the ghosts of the subatomic world. Interacting via only the weak nuclear force, they can pass through matter without interacting nearly at all.

The visible universe—including Earth, the sun, other stars, and galaxies—is made of protons, neutrons, and electrons bundled together into atoms.

(Protons and neutrons are particles called baryons, and baryogenesis means the creation of baryons. (Understanding this requires more brain power than I have.)

The rest of the universe appears to be made of a mysterious, invisible substance called dark matter (25 per cent) and a force that repels gravity known as dark energy (70 per cent).

Perhaps one of the most surprising discoveries of the 20th century was that ordinary, or baryonic, matter makes up less than 5 per cent of the mass of the universe.

Although astronomers understand what the universe was like just a few seconds after the Big Bang, no one yet knows what happened at the instant of the Big Bang – or what came before.

The key assumption of this model is that just before the Big Bang, space was filled with an unstable form of energy, whose nature is not yet known. 

Energy comes in different forms:

  • Heat (thermal)
  • Light (radiant)
  • Motion (kinetic)
  • Electrical
  • Chemical
  • Nuclear energy
  • Gravitational
  • Energy sources are divided into two groups: Renewable / Nonrenewable.

In fact, all the matter in the universe could have arisen from a bit of primordial energy weighing no more than a pea.  At some instant, this energy was transformed into the fundamental particles from which arose all the matter we observe today.

This energy in the form of light comes in discrete packets called photons.

All the results, the origin of space and time rest with the Big Bang.

This leaves us with the question what caused the big bang, what was there before.

According to the Big Bang model, the Big Bang took place everywhere in space (not just at a point).

The Big Bang could have been triggered when our own universe collided with a “parallel universe”  which set off tiny gravity waves in motion.

After the Big Bang, all of space was filled with matter so hot that it glowed -In fact, a steady stream of this light is continuously arriving at Earth, from distant regions of space, having travelled for billions of years to get here.

So the afterglow of the Big Bang IS still filling the universe today- with cosmic microwaves.

This is where it starts to get complicated.

Light is being distorted and magnified by massive, invisible clouds of dark matter in the foreground-a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.

The inflationary model predicts that Big Bangs are continually taking place in other regions of space – and string theory suggests that these other mini-verses may be so different from our own that even the laws of nature and the number of dimensions of space may be different.

The inflation model makes several testable predictions. One of the most important is that the primordial energy would have been “lumpy” – i.e., unevenly spread out in space – due to a kind of quantum noise that arose when the universe was extremely small.

However, there is not enough mass to support a universe that is closed so it expands forever.  New space is continuously coming into existence between galaxies. Thus, the creation of the universe – or at least of the space in the universe – is a continuous process that is still taking place.

If there is enough mass, the gravity attracting all the pieces to each other will eventually stop the expansion and pull all the pieces of the universe back together in a big crunch. The universe would then be closed universe made up of dark matter, dark energy, and antimatter.

An international team of astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a ghostly ring of dark matter that was formed long ago during a titanic collision between two massive galaxy clusters. It is the first time that a dark matter distribution has been found that differs substantially from the distribution of ordinary matter. This image shows the galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17 (ZwCl 0024+1652) as seen by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The image displays faint faraway background galaxies that had their light bent by the cluster's strong gravitational field. By mapping the distorted light and using it to deduce how dark matter is distributed in the cluster, astronomers spotted the ring of dark matter. One of the background galaxies is located about two times further away than the yellow cluster galaxies in the foreground, and has been multiple-imaged into five separate arc-shaped components, seen in blue.

For something that supposedly takes up 80 per cent of the total mass of the universe, we don’t know a whole lot about dark matter, antimatter, or dark energy.

There is little or no evidence supporting their existence.

We are yet observed dark matter directly, however, scientists are confident it exists because of the gravitational effects it appears to have on galaxies and galaxy clusters.

If this is so dark matter came into existence before gravity.

However, if dark matter and dark energy are interchangeable, the same thing and do not absorb or emit light and interacts with visible matter through gravity, Gravity came first for it to be able to interact in the first place.

Is dark matter even real? And if it’s not, then is everything we know about gravity wrong?

One leading hypothesis is that dark matter consists of exotic particles that don’t interact with normal matter or light but that still exert a gravitational pull but there are multiple forms of gravity and all are attractive forces irreverent of their strength.

According to another idea, dark energy is a fifth and previously unknown type of fundamental force called quintessence, which fills the universe like a fluid. A  repulsive force that counteracts gravity, keeping the universe from collapsing in on itself.

I ask why the strange force exists in the first place.

For example, why is the speed of light not faster than it is?

Why are electrons so much lighter than the protons they orbit in atoms?

Why are the constants and laws of nature just so, and not different?

If there was nothing, to begin with, then where did the laws of nature come from?

How did the universe “know” how to proceed?

And why do the laws of nature produce a universe that is so hospitable to life?

What we do know is that if these fundamental laws and constants were even slightly different from what is observed, then life as we know it would not exist.

If the universe is expanding what is it expanding into?

If the universe is infinitely big, then the answer is simply that it isn’t expanding into anything; instead, what is happening is that every region of the universe, every distance between every pair of galaxies, is being “stretched”, but the overall size of the universe was infinitely big, to begin with, and continues to remain infinitely big as time goes on, so the universe’s size doesn’t change, and therefore it doesn’t expand into anything.

The answer is that we really don’t know what, if anything, the universe is expanding into. The space between the galaxies “stretches”, so we have no way to see “outside”  to get a sense of the entire shape and figure out where the centre is.

So we don’t think there is any way to observe or measure what is beyond unless it had some effect on us that we currently don’t know about. It would be really weird to imagine reaching the “end” of space.

What would it look like, for example?

If the universe is indeed infinite, it doesn’t have anything to expand into.

So the total size of the universe is the same!

You and I aren’t expanding, the Earth isn’t expanding, the sun isn’t expanding, even the entire Milky Way galaxy isn’t expanding.

That’s because, on these relatively small scales, the effect of the universe’s stretching is completely overwhelmed by other forces (i.e. the galaxy’s gravity, the sun’s gravity, the Earth’s gravity, and the atomic forces which hold people’s bodies together).

It is only when we look across far enough distances in the universe that the effect of the universe’s stretching becomes noticeable above the effects of local gravity and other forces which tend to hold things together.

Massive collisions are produced as pairs of black holes or neutron stars — both incredibly dense objects left behind after a star explodes — draw close to one another.

As they dance, they cause gravitational waves to ripple outward until the objects eventually collide. This explosion is more than just a pretty sight; it is the main source of the elements that make up our planets and all the other objects in the night sky.

So how are the elements that make up matter created in the first place?

From what element are all other elements made?

Elements are subdivided into several categories based on where they originated from: The Big Bang, Cosmic Rays, Large Stars, Small Stars, Supernovae, and Man-Made labs.

Everything is made starting with hydrogen. But where did the hydrogen in the universe come from? From a proton and an electron.

So maybe it is particles that came first.

Where do those fundamental particles, and their even more fundamental particles come from? No one knows because it would require knowing exactly how the universe began, and where all matter in it originated from.

Humans will never know that.

When particles of both collide, heat would naturally move from the warmer body to the colder one, causing the warmer body to cool ever so slightly.

Humans and their galaxy have about 97 per cent of the same kind of atoms.

A new element is discovered, by smashing atoms together to see what happens.

Each element emits distinct wavelengths of light from within a star they are substances that cannot be broken down further.

There are several ways to consider the composition of the human body, including the elements, the type of molecule, or type of cells.

Some 60 chemical elements are found in the body, but what all of them are doing there is still unknown. Roughly 96 per cent of the mass of the human body is made up of just four elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, with a lot of that in the form of water. For now, we can only say for certain what 20 or so elements are doing.

Although humans share most elements with the stars, the proportions of those elements differ between humans and stars. For example, humans are about 65 per cent oxygen by mass, whereas oxygen makes up less than 1 per cent of all elements measured in space.

So here are my logical conclusions:

The assumption here is that “before the big bang” actually means something.

The standard cosmological model is based on time and space both being countable numbers in natural units. This assumes we have a meaningful definition of void and exist without our universe being around.

Our model does not provide these definitions, so our assumptions rely on some false hypothesis premises.

I’m not going to say there was emptiness or nothingness before, at least not in the sense you mean them.

Nothing does not indicate emptiness (where there is no matter) but indicates the  NOT existence.

Only with Quantum Mechanics is it hypothesized that even in nothing can be created with quantum fluctuations the Universe. I have not understood how it is possible but it seems that there are Physicists who imagine this possible.

Why is there something, instead of nothing?

Go one step back and remember that before vacuum, you have to have space and before space, you have to have a dimensionality.

Nothing was Fluctuating.

The WHOLE UNIVERSE (and then some) is a Cold Black Hole.

Currently, we consider Black Holes to be gravitationally induced space deformations where not even light can escape.

THIS IS A FALSE LOGICAL FLAW SINCE BLACK HOLES ARE MADE UP BY MATTER AGGREGATES.

THEY PRODUCE TIME SPACE DARK ENERGY DARK MATTER ECT AND THE BIG BANG.

SO BLACK HOLES CAME FIRST. 

HOWEVER, Without time, we and THE UNIVERSE  wouldn’t be here.

SO TIME CAME FIRST AND WILL EXIST EVEN IF THERE IS NOTHING.

Even physicists agree that time is one of the most difficult properties of our universe to understand. … In the sciences generally, time is usually defined by its measurement:

The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present and future regarded as a whole.

Clearly, time is not an object or substance we can touch or see.

It may be considered as potentially infinite. We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes.

Even in empty space, time and space still exist.

So there’s an infinite number of universes behind us and an infinite number of universes coming ahead of us.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked into the black hole.

 

 

THE BEADY EYE LOOK’S AT THE PROSPECTS FOR THE EURO IN 2019.

31 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by in 2019., Brexit v EU - Negotiations., Enegery, European Commission., European Union., Populism., Sustaniability, The common good., The Euro, The new year 2109, The Obvious., Unanswered Questions., What needs to change in European Union.

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( SIX MINUTE READ)

While we are all distracted by Brexit which has several possible outcomes in March 2019, all given a certain probability by market analysts:
– No-deal
– Canada-style trade deal
– Chequers plan
– EFTA/Norway agreement.
– Suspension of Article 50
– Reversal of Article 50.

Each is given a probability in terms of its likelihood but I would pay little attention to those probabilities as market analysts are not political insiders and in general, a lot of experts have misjudged the EU, as its rule-based way of operating has caught many out, not least the British negotiation team.

No matter how you look at the European Union it is a market run by rules which Independent Countries join to trade in a currency called Euros.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of the euro currency"

Although the creation of the euro, in particular, was deemed to be a key component helping to move the EU to an “ever closer union,” riding the continent of centuries of historic enmities, in reality, it has and is doing the opposite.

The monetary union and the austerity-linked conditions governing membership in the eurozone continue to create conditions ripe for extreme nationalist movements in Italy, France, Hungary, Poland and elsewhere.

The two principal goals of prosperity and political integration … are now more distant than they were before the creation of the eurozone.

The euro crisis was always likely to have a second act, and the stage was always likely to be Italy. (The only member yet to come to terms with the single currency. To do that, Italian democracy must be allowed to rise to the challenge.)

Were a further divorce to happen within the Union it would create a tremendous financial fallout for the rest of us, and likely mean the end of the euro itself.

The Euro to date has been both the glue and dissolvent of the European market.

Since the financial crisis of 2007-09, after dealing with Greece and the potential for defaults that led to a bailout of the EU member just a few short years ago, Italy is now on the list.

As such, these “states” are or were subject to solvency risk, because they themselves cannot create the euros to fund their debt.

With Brexit, it will become clear that we shouldn’t wait for the next crisis.

The next one could be very harmful, if not destroy the euro altogether.

A construction like the eurozone only partly rests on rules, technical procedures, institutions, etc. It relies on the fact that governments can trust each other at a minimum level. Take that away, and the whole edifice suddenly becomes much more fragile and the willingness to reform shrinks.

In these terms, a sustainable European currency requires either the export of the foundations of German economic strength to the periphery or Germany’s willingness to relinquish its obsession with ordo-liberalism and achieving a large current account trade surplus.

To date, its willingness to act to save the euro has not in fact been put to the test.

Far from involving domestic sacrifices imposed to save the euro, Germany’s handling of the eurozone crisis thus far has been, first and foremost, an opportunity for Germany to ‘Europeanise’ the burdens of its banks.

Germany may, therefore, end up with total dominance over something that doesn’t work, and holding the creditor bag on a currency that eventually may not exist.

Barring a wholesale shift in ideology, any short-term stitch-up will just set the stage for a bigger problem down the road, likely provoking more nationalist backlashes against the EU, which continues to play with fire, backed by Berlin.

So can the euro survive an Italian Bank/Country collapse?

Italy’s GDP has shrunk by a massive 10%, regressing to levels last seen over a decade ago. In terms of per capita GDP, the situation is even more shocking: According to this measure, Italy has regressed back to levels of 20 years ago, before the country became a founding member of the single currency.

As a result, around 20% of Italy’s industrial capacity has been destroyed, and 30% of the country’s firms have defaulted.

Its competitiveness can only be restored, therefore, via an “internal devaluation,” which in essence means crushing the living standards of the Italian people, so that they can compete in the global export market, rather than using fiscal policy to enhance the country’s domestic economy.

Understandably, the current coalition government in Rome doesn’t want to play along.

Its component parties were elected to defend the interests of the Italian people and deliver a different sort of economic program, which doesn’t consign the electorate to another decade of declining living standards. And Italy’s voters remain supportive if the most recent polls are anything to go by.

Hence the coalition’s resistance to Brussels/Berlin–imposed spending limits.

Europe’s central bank was (and is) the only institution that could credibly backstop the debt without limit because it is the sole issuer of the euro. However, the ECG has recently decided to put a stop to Quantitive Easing.

(Quantitative easing is a modern version of the printing press. It consists of the central bank creating money to buy government or private bonds held by investors on the market. The goal is for the latter to reinject the cash they get back into the economy by lending to households and businesses, which in turn must stimulate growth and inflation.)

As it concerns nineteen countries using the same currency, the ECB’s purchasing program is more framed than that of the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England or the Bank of Japan.

It may have taken Trump, Brexit and the threat of a global trade war, but the markets in Europe are finally waking up to what the end of QE will look like.

The markets are finally facing up to a reality where fundamentals actually matter and are no longer being swept away by ‘QE infinity’.

That should be a relief, given the huge distortions that QE has created in the global economy, most notably in asset price inflation and a consequent widening of inequality throughout the developed world.

The political implications are obvious and are still continuing. But how quickly and safely central banks can be weaned off this great monetary experiment remains to be seen.

If QE is no longer an active policy instrument what will replace it?

Quantitative easing is – and always has been – a dangerous monetary experiment and these are not the times to experiment. Especially not in Europe, where the political gap between north and south has widened in a disturbing way and interdependencies grow bigger and bigger.

What if Germany, France and the Netherlands continue to grow, and Italy, Greece and Portugal don’t?

Then the gap between the higher income rates they have to pay and their lack of growth becomes even bigger.

The political and economic instability of the southern European democracies is eroding the political basis of the euro – and therefore its stability. Because of this everyone suffers.

THE QUESTION IS WILL ITALY BE ALLOWED TO GO THE WAY OF GREECE?

That could prove economically calamitous, exposing the country’s international creditors (including other eurozone nations, such as Germany and France) to literally trillions in liabilities. To be repaid in what? Euros?

A reconstituted, and possibly heavily devalued, lira?

What happens to the pension funds? What about capital flight? Runs on the banks?

The point is that Italy does have leverage, but deploying the leverage will be costly for all concerned.

Considering the political turbulence in Italy which wants to raise its budget deficit by 2.4% in 2019, ( Its current debt is more than 2billion euros 131% of its GDP.)

Driving Italy out of the euro makes no sense at all. Italy is facing not just a financial but a democratic reckoning.

The euro debacle has tested the democratic integrity of the weakest eurozone member states to a breaking point. In Ireland, Spain and Portugal – the other countries affected by the single currency’s woes – democracy not only survived the test but flourished after it.

In 2019 we are going to see Italy’s political class discredited, its economy exposed as a sham, and it can only be rescued with other people’s money on other people’s terms.

It has now brought Italy to the brink of another failure of state as dangerous as the one that occurred during the confrontation with the Mafia in the early 1990s.

One of the major challenges for members of the euro area has always been not simply to rectify external imbalances, but to do so at reasonably high levels of employment. The fact that failures to meet this challenge are encountering political difficulties in Italy and elsewhere is hardly surprising.

So to stabilize the euro area and foster the financial integration across countries, we need to end the vicious circle of youth unemployment in the Southern countries of Europe and not penalise breached of budgetary Rules.

The euro is neither the problem nor the solution.

Italy’s profound problems lie at home — especially in central and southern Italy — and need to be addressed at home.

Both Europes and Italy’s problems arise out of acute regional imbalance.

You can not look at Italy as one economy, but two or perhaps three: North, Centre, South which is reflected in the whole of Europe’s problem.

Take the hyper-competitiveness of Germany.

Its massive current account surplus (8% of GDP) combined with its virtually full employment implies unambiguously that for Germany the euro is significantly undervalued, just as for Italy the evidence suggests that it is overvalued.

So we have an interesting, but risky, game of chicken developing.

Even though virtually every country within the eurozone, including fiscally virtuous Germany, has routinely breached budget limits, these rules do matter because, under Maastricht Treaty terms, countries can be punished by European institutions and also by markets, as has happened to Greece and now is increasingly happening to Italy.

Its debt load is the third-largest in the world and will eventually become unsustainable if the country is unable to revive economic growth.

What can Europe do – that is not already being done – to get its millions of jobless young people into work?

Things cannot be implemented overnight and will never be unless there is a willingness to move on with euro area reforms.

On top of all our problems is the Automation of the job market.

WILL THE EURO SURVIVE?

YES.

Boosting productivity is essential to resolve both problems.

So here is a suggestion.

Why not make the two most Southern Countries of Europe where the sun does shine – Italy Spain – the new green energy hobs of Europe – implementing a huge investment into solar power to supplement the energy requirements of the Northern member states.

All human comments appreciated. All abuse and like clicks chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: DO YOU KNOW THE WORLD YOU LIVE ON

04 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by in 2018: The Year of Disconnection., Arms Trade., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Climate Change., Education, Enegery, Environment, Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., Fresh Water., G7., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Life., Modern day life., Natural World Disasters, Oil, Our Common Values., Politics., Populism., Post - truth politics., Reality., Space., Sustaniability, Technology, The cloud., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., United Nations, War, Wealth., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Organisations., World Politics

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( A FIVE MINUTE READ)

 

7.6 BILLION OF US LIVE ON IT

BUT VERY FEW OF US KNOW WHAT IT IS WHERE IT IS OR WHAT WE ARE DOING ON IT OR TO IT. How Big Is Earth?

IT IS 6.378KM IN RADIUS, 6.6 SEXTILLION TONS IN WEIGHT, WITH A SURFACE AREA OF 197 MILLION SQ MILES MADE UP OF 71% WATER, 29% LAND OF WHICH 5% IS LIVABLE ON.

IT IS 4.54 billion years old, plus or minus 1%.

We humans speaking 7, O97 LANGUAGES of which 23 accounts for half the world’s population has been on it for a mere 0.004% of the Earth’s history.

humans on earth

IT HAS 15,000 BIRTHS PER HOUR. 360,000 PER DAY, 132 MILLION PER YEAR WITH 56 MILLION DEATH PER YEAR.

IT HAS 10.7 percent LIVING IN EXTREME POVERTY WITH 68.5 MILLION DISPLACE PEOPLE, OF WHICH 25.4 million are refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18 with 1% OF RICH PEOPLE owning half the world’s wealth.

 IT IS THE 5TH LARGEST PLANET IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM WITH ABOUT 10 BILLION WITH TONS OF CONCRETE POURED ON IT EVERY YEAR.

3% OF THE WORLD IS COVERED IN URBAN AREAS WITH 33 BILLION METERS OF ROADS.

After water concrete is the single most widely used material in the world – and it has a carbon footprint to match.

As you read this, there are more than 40 conflicts unfolding in countries around the world. Yet these are just the most visible look beyond them and there are plenty more.

Total world military expenditure rose to $1739 billion in 2017.

We can blame terrorism and the fear it inspires despite the statistically unimportant number of casualties it inflicts, or the contemporary media and the breathless cycle of “breaking news”, but the truth remains that the wars that seem to inspire the fanatics or have produced so many headlines in recent years prompt deep anxiety.

And with climate change and profit-seeking algorithms things are only going to get worse.

Surely the needs of humanity should always come first. While there are people on Earth who need help, they should be helped, rather than seeing money spent on sending robots onto other planets. Humanity is the number one priority; keeping the human race alive is a necessity.

But we cannot live without the other species we share the earth with. Okay, guess quickly: how many species do you think we share the earth with.

A trillion.

While that may (or may not) be true, the next sentence is spuriously precise: “Every hour three species disappear. Every day up to 150 species are lost.”

Even putting aside the apparent mathematical error in that claim (on the face of it, if three species are disappearing every hour, 72 would be lost every day) there is an obvious problem in generating any such number. No-one knows how many species exist. And if we don’t know a species exists, we won’t miss it when it’s gone.

BP claimed the earth has enough oil left for about 53 more years at current production levels

So far Nasa has spent trillions on trying to get off it.

Science may well give us good things.

We all know Velcro came from NASA.

But why bother spending all this money exploring space and finding out there was water on Mars at some point in the last few thousand years (we have water in Earth) when these same great minds could be applied to finding better ways to power humanity’s insatiable desire for energy, to feeding the starving millions around the globe, and generally making life down here better before looking up into the heavens.

It seems the authoritative powers have their heads way, way up in the clouds.

Earth first:

14 billion pounds (6B Kg.) of garbage are dumped into the ocean every year. Most of it is plastic. Americans make up 5% of the world’s population, and yet, produce 30% of the world’s waste and use 25% of the world’s resources.

More than 95 percent of the world’s population is breathing polluted, unsafe air.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of earth from space"

THIS IS THE EARTH YOU NOW LIVE ON SURROUNDED BY JUNK.

NOT THE EARTH ON YOUR SMARTPHONE NOR THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENT EARTH.

IF YOU WANT TO GROW UP ON THIS BEAUTIFUL PLANET LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.