Adoption, Not Just A Game For Brangelina

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

Who would have guessed that US Patent No. 3,906,166, granted in 1975 to Martin Cooper of Motorola would completely change the world?

My kids tell me that was a long time ago, which I suppose it was....

Here"s global cell phone penetration over the last decade. Not bad...

With hindsight we can look at this adoption phase and marvel, but let"s not miss some key points.

Specifically, how radically phones have infiltrated so many aspects of our lives. And no, I"m not talking about Sally who"s addicted to the endorphin rush she gets from hitting refresh on Instagram to see how many "likes" her stupid photo of her chicken-avocado salad is getting. I"m talking about real isht. Life changing isht.

Like the millions of Africans who now receive anti-malaria texts from football hero Didier Drogba:

It’s 9pm, are you and your family safe under nets? This is Didier Drogba, sleep well.

Ah... the humble mobile phone — doing more to fight Malaria than the UN, the WHO, or any government ever has. Power distributed and decentralised.

Or...

The Indonesian midwives" mobile phone project, which has drastically reduced infant mortality rates as villagers place more trust with midwives who can now talk to obstetricians and gynaecologists in the cities and provide better care.

Or...

Farmers, who prior to the mobile phone used to walk in blazing heat for up to two weeks to get to market, where they"d sell their livestock.... and sometimes wouldn"t because demand wasn"t there.

Those same farmers now use mobiles to determine ahead of time market prices for their goods before deciding where best to trade their livestock or crops. Not only that, but receiving live pricing of livestock and crops allowing them to more accurately plan and run their farming practices. Power distributed and decentralised.

And speaking of farmers in the third, world it was back in 2003 or 2004 — I can"t remember exactly — when my lovely lass (before she succumbed to my charms and became Mrs. Chris) and I were traveling in Kashmir, and I vividly remember realising then just how powerful the mobile phone really was.

We were chatting to a peasant rice farmer, I"ll call him Ranjeet. Because his father had done it before him, and his fathers father before him, and he himself had been at it for over 30 years since, Ranjeet was doing the only thing he knew: He was growing rice.

And like his forefathers before him, Ranjeet simply took whatever price was offered by the Delhi traders when they turned up at harvest time. Together with his fellow rice farmers in the village Ranjeet had no way of knowing whether the price he got from the traders from Delhi was fair or not.

Enter the mobile phone.

He, together with fellow farmers, had all clubbed together and bought a WAP phone. Remember those?

It was man"s first crack and connecting a mobile phone to the internet.

Ranjeet and his buddies would huddle around the phone, getting live pricing from the rice market in Delhi. And whoo... boy, had it made them mad. Ignorance, they say, is bliss.

Try telling that to Ranjeet, and he"d have punched you in the face. So when those slimy rice traders from Delhi rolled into town to buy Ranjeet and his buddies" rice, these dirt poor peasant farmers could no longer be hoodwinked into selling it at deeply discounted, "kill my family, make me starve" prices any longer. Power distributed and decentralised.

For most of us, we"re lucky enough to live in a developed country where we don"t think about this stuff.

The mobile phone helps us do many of the things we were already doing, but now we just do it without getting off the sofa.

But for those in emerging and submerging markets mobile phones help people do things they could never do before. They are, in other words, not a luxury but a necessity.

Ask folks today, and I"ll bet they"d sooner leave home without their underpants on than leave home without their phone.

What else?

Education. The mobile phone has revolutionised that, too. I was reading that in Vietnam 75% of the kids use their phones for educational purposes. This is good news because it means that Brangelina and Brangelina wannabes won"t have to adopt starving illiterate Vietnamese orphans any longer.

It was Malcolm Gladwell, the author, journalist, and speaker, who said:

Poverty is not deprivation. It is isolation.

I"m going to put my neck out and say that the mobile phone has probably done more to break isolation and reduce poverty than almost anything else in the last 50 years.

So What?

Well, the mobile phone is similar to how to think about blockchain, and of course the most powerful (to date) blockchain is Bitcoin, which I spoke about last week. One changed the world. The other will change is changing our world.

Like the impact of the mobile phone before it, it"s going to be HUUUGE!

HUUUGE! I tell you!

Now, I"m going to suggest that Martin Cooper was an amateur, compared with Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever the hell she is. This is because blockchain technology has the potential to do what the mobile phone has already done but on steroids.

Applications are already being built in: Asset management (trade and processing settlement), insurance (claims processing), payments, title registry, deed registries, personal identification, distributed cloud storage, and an entire squadron of other applications far too long to mention here.

Many will scoff and laugh at it... and many do. This is how it must be, but I warn you. To ignore this is like ignoring the impact mobile phones were going to have on society when the first mobile handset went on sale in 1973. Completely revolutionary and disruptive technology would be neither revolutionary nor disruptive if it didn"t... how do I say this... disrupt.

And it"ll be fought hammer and tongs, especially by those who see it as a threat to their own business models. Hello Jamie :-)

But ultimately new technologies become overwhelming, and even those who poo poo it will be dragged kicking and screaming into its clutches because the utility function is too powerful.

And we should all be as happy about this as these guys.

Because power in the hands of many is always everywhere better than power in the hands of the few.

To the future... and a jolly fine weekend. Thanks as always for reading!

- Chris

"Disruption is a process, not an event, and innovations can only be disruptive relative to something else." — Clayton M. Christensen

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Liked this article? Then you"ll probably like my other missives on

this topic as well. Go here to access them (free, of course).

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Addictions: Social Media & Mobile Phones Fall From Grace

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Identifying social media and mobile phones as addictive is only the first step in a much more complex investigation.

For everyone who remembers the Early Days of social media and mobile phones, it"s been quite a ride from My Space and awkward texting on tiny screens to the current alarm over the addictive nature of social media and mobile telephony.

The emergence of withering criticism of Facebook and Google is a new and remarkably broad-based phenomenon: a year or two ago, there was little mainstream-media criticism of these tech giants; now there is a constant barrage of sharp criticism across the media spectrum.

Even the technology writer for the Wall Street Journal has not just curbed his enthusiasm, he"s now speaking in the same dark tones as other critics: Why Personal Tech Is Depressing.

The critique of social media and mobile telephony, has reached surprising heights in a remarkably short time. Consider this article from the Guardian (UK) which compares Facebook and Google"s social media empire to world religions in terms of scale, and unabashedly calls them addictive and detrimental to health and democracy: How Facebook and Google threaten public health – and democracy.

A decade ago, social media was considerably different. One of the first social media sites to break into the mainstream was My Space, which began as a forum for bands to post new songs and interact with their fans. This was a great tool for thousands of musicians who had few ways to publicly post their songs and establish public communications with their fans. My Space was a useful idea, and even I posted a few songs my friends and I had recorded.

Around the same time frame, Facebook was limited to college students. I recall reading about FB and going to the site to see what it was all about: the splash screen asked you for your college affiliation.

Mobile telephony featured tiny little screens and an awkward double-click method of texting that only teens could master.

Keeping up on mass-media related technologies is part of my job as a blogger, as bloggers inhabit a little village of the mass-media world that seems to be shrinking as social media expands. I joined Twitter in June 2008, about two years after its initial launch, and Facebook in 2009.

I was struck by this quote from the above Guardian article:

"The term "addiction" is no exaggeration. The average consumer checks his or her smartphone 150 times a day, making more than 2,000 swipes and touches. The applications they use most frequently are owned by Facebook and Alphabet (Google), and the usage of those products is still increasing."

Wow! Do you check your mobile phone 100+ times a day? Even if this is an exaggeration, it still represents an addictive attachment.

I think we can safely call anything that people interrupt sex to do (like check their mobile phones) addictive.

What"s the source of social media and mobile telephony"s addictive power?

I think we can start with the innate attraction of distractions and novelty. The higher the density of inputs in our environment, the more quickly we become bored and fidgety. So we turn to our phones for distraction and novelty.

Being social creatures, we want to stay connected to our tribe, group, family, etc. Social media and mobile phones feed this desire directly.

But social media and mobile telephony have peculiar qualities that are unlike actual face-to-face interaction. They don"t require the same kind of commitment or engagement; it"s understood everyone can log off at any time.

It"s also easier to dump on people in the safety of anonymity.

While many people form longlasting online friendships, myself included, as a generalization social media tends to superficiality because it rewards being "liked", i.e. receiving positive feedback, even from those we don"t even know.

The broad reach of the dynamic of winning approval is explored in this Guardian article on the rise of "fake news": How did the news go ‘fake’? When the media went social.

As social creatures, we all desire a positive standing in our tribe, and the respect and approval of our peers. Social media is like a lens that can make us appear bigger, shinier and more deserving of respect than we might otherwise be.

The temptation to post self-congratulatory Christmas letters ("Josh just graduated with honors, Mia is on her semester abroad, my new painting won first prize, and we"re all meeting in Barbados for the holiday"), or divulge TMI (too much information) to elicit sympathy is strong; it"s also tempting to express righteous indignation to solicit "likes" from like-minded members of our ideological tribe.

I"ve commented previously on the relative poverty of opportunities to feel respected and admired in our society; most of us don"t have a lot of power or control over our lives, nor do we have the high-status positions and signifiers that automatically earn respect in our centralized, hierarchical social structure.

I think we should acknowledge the power of our natural desire to "be somebody" in our social circle, and in the world at large, and acknowledge the attraction of social media in furthering this desire.

So by all means, we should honor the accomplishments of our loved ones, and proudly display our winning painting, and post photos of our fabulous family holiday. But we also have to acknowledge that "likes" online are not substitutes for the recognition and respect of a real-world circle of peers, or for the self-respect we all desire.

Social media is real enough in its own terms, but it is not a substitute for real relationships and positive social roles. Perhaps this is the addictive pull of social media: the idea that we can substitute a carefully controlled social-media substitute (avatar) for our less-than-perfect real-world self.

If Facebook vanished, our "real" lives would still be intact. If we turned off our phones and social media, how much would we miss them in a week, or a month? How much "smaller" would we become? What would we lose, and how much of ourselves would we lose? What might we gain that"s been lost?

These are questions worth exploring, for identifying social media and mobile phones as addictive is only the first step in a much more complex investigation.

This essay was drawn from Musings Report 45. The Musings Reports are emailed weekly to subscribers and major patrons / contributors.

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If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com. Check out both of my new books, Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print) and Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print, $5.95 audiobook) For more, please visit the OTM essentials website.

 

Chain-Store Stock Carnage Continues (Despite Biggest Jump In Retail Sales Since 2016)

Oh the irony - as bulls celebrate the best jump in retail sales since 2016, the scene for retailer stocks is an utter bloodbath...

Earlier today, US Retail Sales in July rebounded dramatically to a 0.6% MoM gain - the most since Dec 2016 - driven a surge in motor vehicles (record incentives) and department stores (more inventives?). Year-over-year saw upward revisions and a rebound to a 4.2% rise in July.

The last two month"s declines in Retail Sales have been revised away magically and we have now gone 5 months without a decline...

But one glimpse at the carnage in chain-store stocks tells a very different story... Following a week of disappointing earnings from J.C. Penney Co. and Macy’s Inc., the drumbeat resumed Tuesday as results from Advance Auto Parts Inc., Coach Inc. and Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. sent their shares crashing...

As Bloomberg notes, at this rate, the group is poised for the worst annual decline in share prices since the financial crisis.

“Everybody is being burned in retail and people are just questioning, ‘Is there any place that’s Amazon-free?’” Gary Bradshaw, a Dallas-based fund manager for Hodges Capital Management Inc., said by phone.

“There will be some winners in retail but boy, it’s just a land mine."

However, Vitaliy Katsenelson more accurately states It’s not just Amazon’s fault. Changing consumer habits are killing old retail biz...

Retail stocks have been annihilated recently, despite the economy eking out growth. The fundamentals of the retail business look horrible: Sales are stagnating and profitability is getting worse with every passing quarter.

Jeff Bezos and Amazon get most of the credit, but this credit is misplaced. Today, online sales represent only 8.5 percent of total retail sales. Amazon, at $80 billion in sales, accounts only for 1.5 percent of total U.S. retail sales, which at the end of 2016 were around $5.5 trillion. Though it is human nature to look for the simplest explanation, in truth, the confluence of a half-dozen unrelated developments is responsible for weak retail sales.

Our consumption needs and preferences have changed significantly. Ten years ago we spent a pittance on cellphones. Today Apple sells roughly $100 billion worth of i-goods in the U.S., and about two-thirds of those sales are iPhones.

Consumer income has not changed much since 2006, thus over the last 10 years $190 billion in consumer spending was diverted toward mobile phones. Between phones and their services, this is $340 billion that will not be spent on T-shirts and shoes.

But we are not done. The combination of mid-single-digit health-care inflation and the proliferation of high-deductible plans has increased consumer direct health-care costs and further chipped away at our discretionary dollars. Health-care spending in the U.S. is $3.3 trillion, and just 3 percent of that figure is almost $100 billion.

Then there are soft, hard-to-quantify factors. Millennials and millennial-want-to-be generations (speaking for myself here) don’t really care about clothes as much as we may have 10 years ago.

All this brings us to a hard and sad reality: The U.S. is over-retailed. We simply have too many stores. Americans have four or five times more square footage per capita than other developed countries. This bloated square footage was created for a different consumer, the one who in in the ’90s and ’00s was borrowing money against her house and spending it at her local shopping mall.

But the bottom line, as we noted previously, is that America"s malls, retail stores, and fast-food restaurants are hugely overbuilt.

You Won't Believe This Stupid New Law Against Cash And Bitcoin

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

This one is almost too ridiculous to believe.

Recently a new bill was introduced on the floor of the US Senate entitled, pleasantly,

“Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017.”

You can probably already guess its contents.

Cash is evil.

Bitcoin is evil.

Now they’ve gone so far to include prepaid mobile phones, retail gift vouchers, or even electronic coupons. Evil, evil, and evil.

These people are certifiably insane.

Among the bill’s sweeping provisions, the government aims to greatly extend its authority to seize your assets through “Civil Asset Forfeiture”.

Civil Asset Forfeiture rules allow the government to take whatever they want from you, without a trial or any due process.

This new bill adds a laundry list of offenses for which they can legally seize your assets… all of which pertain to money laundering and other financial crimes.

Here’s the thing, though: they’ve also vastly expanded on the definition of such ‘financial crimes’, including failure to fill out a form if you happen to be transporting more than $10,000 worth of ‘monetary instruments’.

Have too much cash? You’d better tell the government.

If not, they’re authorizing themselves in this bill to seize not just the money you didn’t report, but ALL of your assets and bank accounts.

They even go so far as to specifically name “safety deposit boxes” among the various assets that they can seize if you don’t fill out the form.

(Yet another reason to consider storing cash, gold, and silver in an overseas safety deposit box.)

This is unbelievable on so many levels.

It’s crazy to begin with that these people are so consumed by the fact that someone has $10,000 in cash.

But it’s even crazier that they’re threatening to take EVERYTHING that you own merely for not filling out a piece of paper, without any due process whatsoever.

Oh, and on top of civil asset forfeiture penalties, there are also criminal penalties.

Right now according to current law they can imprison you for up to FIVE YEARS for not filling out the form. Five years.

But apparently that doesn’t go far enough to protect us against evil men in caves.

So this bill aims to double the criminal penalty to TEN years in prison.

And if that weren’t enough, this bill also gives them with new authority to engage in surveillance and wiretapping (including phone, email, etc.) if they have even a hint of suspicion that you might be transporting excess ‘monetary instruments’.

Usually wiretapping authority is reserved for major crimes like kidnapping, human trafficking, felony fraud, etc.

Now we can add cash to that list.

It’s not just government spy agencies to worry about, either.

Banks in the US are already unpaid government spies, required by law to fill out suspicious activity reports on their customers.

Then Congress started expanding those requirements to include other businesses and industries that might come into contact with cash.

Stock brokers. Casinos. Currency exchanges. Precious metals dealers. Pawnbrokers. The Post Office.

According to the law (section 5312 of US Code Title 31), those industries are also required to spy on their customers for the government.

But under this new bill, they want to forcibly recruit even more unpaid spies, including any business which issues or redeems ANYTHING that’s prepaid.

Prepaid credit cards. Prepaid phones. Prepaid retail gift cards. Prepaid coupons.

So, Amazon.com, which issues and redeems prepaid gift cards, will be required under this bill to file reports to the government.

For that matter, TGI Fridays and Chuckee Cheese will also become unpaid government spies since they both issue and redeem prepaid vouchers.

Truly these Senators have figured out how to strike at the heart of ISIS.

Further, their bill wants to pull any business which “issues” cryptocurrency under the anti-money laundering regulatory umbrella.

Here’s where these people demonstrate that they have no idea what they’re talking about.

No one “issues” Bitcoin. There’s no Bitcoin central bank. There’s no Chairman of Bitcoin who decides on a whim to increase the supply.

Bitcoin is created automatically amounts that are pre-determined by its code. It’s software.

So the Senate is essentially trying to force the Bitcoin core software to comply with money laundering regulations.

How pathetically clueless.

The bill also attempts to drop a major bomb on Bitcoin by including it in the list of monetary instruments that must be reported when entering or leaving the US.

So theoretically if you leave the US with more than $10,000 in Bitcoin or Ether, you’d have to confess this fact to the authorities or otherwise face the aforementioned penalties, i.e. prison time, civil asset forfeiture, etc.

As Smaulgold.com"s Louis Cammarosano  explains, the bill contains a provision that would require the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection to devise a “border protection strategy to interdict and detect prepaid access devices, digital currencies, or other similar instruments, at border crossings and other ports of entry for the United States, including an assessment of infrastructure needed [emphasis added] to carry out the strategy.”

The respective Secretary and Commissioner would present their findings to Congress no later than 18 months after passage of the bill.

The obligation to declare amounts in any form over $10,000 exists, irrespective of whether custom officials have a way of detecting such holdings. Since digital currencies technically travel with the holder where ever the holder goes, one would have to declare one’s entire crypto portfolio each time the holder entered the U.S.

Such a declaration is not required for travelers who may happen to have bank accounts or precious metals worth more than $10,000 stored outside the United States.

The type of infrastructure required to detect foreign holdings may come in the form of (i) expanding Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act to currently unregulated foreign crypto currency exchanges and to non U.S. citizens. FATCA currently only applies to U.S account holders of certain foreign financial and non financial institutions; (ii) some type of global monitoring of blockchain activity; or (iii) extreme vetting at the border and penalties for non disclosure that would encourage full disclosure.

HOORAY FREEDOM!

As you can see, this bill criminalizes or delegitimizes the most mundane and harmless financial activities, all under the guise of keeping us safe.

Of course nothing in this bill is about keeping people safe.

ISIS couldn’t care less about forms and penalties.

This bill is nothing more than another weapon in their ongoing War on Cash… and now cryptocurrency too.

Do you have a Plan B?

Police Now Routinely Crack and Extract All Phone Data from Arrestees

Muckrock filed Freedom of Information Requests with multiple US police forces to find out how they were using “mobile phone forensic extraction devices” — commercial devices that suck all the data out of peoples’ phones and make it available for offline browsing.

They discovered that the practice of sucking up the entirety of arrestees’ phones was incredibly common, and that often, cops sucked up this data without a warrant, after first obtaining “consent” from arrestees.

Mobile phones are troves of sensitive personal information, which is presumably why the police are so interested in them. But the same data-richness that interests police departments should also give us pause: it’s never been the case that a cop busting a low-level, nonviolent offender would be allowed to probe that person’s entire network of friends and relations; read all the correspondence between the arrestee and their doctors, lawyers, kids and spouse; get a neat list of all the places the person had visited; and be able to look at everything from bank balances to spending history.

The major provider of mobile forensic tools is the Israeli firm Cellebrite, who made headlines when the FBI revealed that they’d used a Cellebrite tool to crack the San Bernadino shooters’ phones, and then again when a hacker dumped 900GB worth of internal Cellebrite info, revealing that the company routinely repackaged hacking tools from the darkweb and sold them to police departments without first verifying that these weren’t leaking data to third parties or otherwise creating risks for their users and their targets.

The kicker really is how often these are being used – it is simply really hard to believe that out of the 783 times Tulsa Police used their extraction devices, all were for crimes in which it was necessary to look at all of the phone’s data. Even for the 316 times Tucson PD used theirs in the last year, it is still a real stretch to think that some low-level non-violent offenders weren’t on the receiving end. There are some days where the devices were used multiple times – Tulsa used theirs eight times on February 28th of this year, eight again on April 3rd, and a whopping 14 times on May 10th 2016. That is a whole lot of data that Tulsa was able to tap into, and we aren’t even able to understand the why.

One “preview sheet” we received from Tucson had a column for whether they received a warrant to crack into the phone, or whether the user gave them consent. It is easy to imagine a scenario where someone doesn’t want to risk angering police by refusing consent, or even just didn’t fully understand what they were consenting to.

Theresa May Vows To Rip Up Human Rights Laws To "Restrict The Freedom Of Terrorist Suspects"

Following a series of devastating attacks in the U.K. and mounting criticism of her counter-terrorism record, Theresa May has vowed to do whatever necessary, if re-elected later this week, to "restrict the freedom and movements of terrorist suspects" even it means ripping up "human rights laws that get in the way."  Among other things, the Prime Minister has said she will make it easier to deport foreign terror suspects and will extend existing laws that restrict the freedom of British suspects on whom authorities "have enough evidence to know they present a threat, but not enough evidence to prosecute them in full in court." Per The Telegraph:

"When I stood on the steps of Downing Street after the London attack I said enough is enough and things have got to change."

"We need to take on the ideology that unites and motivates the perpetrators of these attacks."

“We should do even more to restrict the freedom and the movements of terrorist suspects when we have enough evidence to know they present a threat, but not enough evidence to prosecute them in full in court."

"And if human rights laws get in the way of doing these things, we will change those laws to make sure we can do them."

"If I am elected as Prime Minister on Thursday, I can tell you that this vital work begins on Friday."

As the Telegraph further notes, other contemplated actions would include efforts to force internet service providers to restrict access to extremist websites, tighter restrictions on mobile device usage by terror suspects and more aggressive curfews.

May had already announced plans for longer prison sentences for terrorists and a clamp down on internet firms that enable access to extremist material, but she now wants to go further.

She will extend the powers of police and the courts to restrict the movements of terrorist suspects using Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures (Tpims).

It will mean suspects can be kept under curfews for longer periods each day, tighter controls on suspects associating with each other and more people being banned from using mobile phones and the internet.

Human Rights laws also held up the deportation of the hate preacher Abu Qatada to his native Jordan, and Mrs May says she will find ways to prevent future deportations being delayed.

If not for the artful wording, one could almost confuse the comments above for Trump quotes.  Of course, if Trump dared to propose such aggressive measures to combat terrorism the accusations of racism would ring out far and wide and Maxine Waters would have impeachment proceedings scheduled by the end of the day.

IMF De-Cashing: Soft-Selling Financial Enslavement

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Posted with permission and written by Rory Hall of the Daily Coin (CLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL)

The IMF (International Monetary Fund) or as I like to call them – International Mafia Federation – is showing its true colors and proving beyond question this organization is nothing more than street-corner-thugs in high priced suits.

With the release of this latest working paper on how to enslave nations, steal the remaining sovereignty of the people and the nations they have drawn up plans to force a cashless society upon all the people within IMF member nations.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington has published a Working Paper on “de-cashing”. It gives advice to governments who want to abolish cash against the will of their citizenry. Move slowly, start with harmless seeming measures, is part of that advice.

In “The Macroeconomics of De-Cashing”, IMF-Analyst Alexei Kireyev recommends in his conclusions:

 

Although some countries most likely will de-cash in a few years, going completely cashless should be phased in steps. The de-cashing process could build on the initial and largely uncontested steps, such as the phasing out of large denomination bills, the placement of ceilings on cash transactions, and the reporting of cash moves across the borders. Further steps could include creating economic incentives to reduce the use of cash in transactions, simplifying the opening and use of transferrable deposits, and further computerizing the financial system.

The private sector led de-cashing seems preferable to the public sector led decashing. The former seems almost entirely benign (e.g., more use of mobile phones to pay for coffee), but still needs policy adaptation. The latter seems more questionable, and people may have valid objections to it.

De-cashing of either kind leaves both individuals and states more vulnerable to disruptions, ranging from power outages to hacks to cyberwarfare. In any case, the tempting attempts to impose de-cashing by a decree should be avoided, given the popular personal attachment to cash. A targeted outreach program is needed to alleviate suspicions related to de-cashing; in particular, that by de-cashing the authorities are trying to control all aspects of peoples’ lives, including their use of money, or push personal savings into banks. The de-cashing process would acquire more traction if it were based on individual consumer choice and cost-benefits considerations.
Source

It doesn’t get much clearer than that – if the people resist, simply change the rules and, as we have stated time and again, simply enact a new law that the majority of people will accept and the remaining 3-5% will be forced into enslavement with the rest.

Let’s break it down a little so the picture is as clear as possible.

Step one – The de-cashing process could build on the initial and largely uncontested steps, such as the phasing out of large denomination bills, the placement of ceilings on cash transactions, and the reporting of cash moves across the borders.

Strip out, for example, the $100 bill from the U.S. economy. This would eliminate more than half the cash value in circulation with one
stroke of the draconian pen.

Next, as France and Spain have already done, and most of the European Union have cash transaction limits – set a limit, for example, transactions larger than$1,000 must be made using electronic means or have a bank involved at some level, e.g. cashier check so their is a record of the transaction for tax and tracking purposes. The good news is, Germany attempted to set a $5,000 euro cash transaction limit and the people revolted.

Finally, make it almost impossible to get cash out of your country and into another. In the U.S. you are required to declare more than $10,000 cash moving across the border and my guess is this suffer a substantial cut.

Another handy tool the criminals are planning on using is to have, for example, “big-box stores” to simply no longer accept cash “for your safety” of course. By implementing this type of policy change the government is not seen as the ‘bad guy’ but a much more friendly “retail outlet” looking out for your safety and the safety of their employees. One question – when was the last time an armed robbery occurred at any big box store world wide? Criminals are not so stupid as to attempt to rob a big-box store due to the sheer volume of cameras on the grounds and inside the stores.

Once these the steps are in place, it makes it much easier to get people to accept financial enslavement as a “convenience” and “for your protection and safety” – “for the children”.

Note, that the author is not talking about unreasonable objections and imagined disadvantages: He does count it among the advantages of de-cashing in the very next paragraph that personal savings are pushed into banks and he also does count total control of all aspects of financial life under the pros, as in the last sentence of the last quote below.

“As de-cashing gives incentives to economies’ agents to convert their currency in bank deposits, the deposit base of the banking system will increase, which can help reduce the lending rates and expand credit.” Source

As the criminal banking cabal becomes more desperate to steal our remaining wealth, they are devising more devious ways of doing it. Soft-sell the people into their own enslavement instead of forcing them. The past few decades we have been treated just a step above cattle, now the gloves seem to be coming off and the banking cabal no longer cares that we can see their crimes and their true colors.

You can read the entire – pdf that will download to your computer – IMF plan to financially enslave the planet by clicking here.

Questions or comments about this article? Leave your thoughts HERE.

Posted with permission and written by Rory Hall of the Daily Coin (CLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL)

UK Puts Nuclear Power Plants And Airports On Terror Alert Over "Credible" Cyber Threat

The global cyberwarfare scare washed ashore the British isles this weekend after UK nuclear power stations and airports were told to tighten defenses against terrorist attacks in the face of increased threats to electronic security systems, after intelligence agencies concluded terrorists could plant explosives in laptops and mobile phones that won’t be caught by normal security screenings.

The Telegraph reports that British security services issued a series of alerts in the past 24 hours, warning that "terrorists may have developed ways of bypassing safety checks."

To be sure, there was no surprise as to the bogeyman behind the latest terror threat: intel agencies believe that ISIS and other terrorist groups have developed ways to plant explosives in laptops and mobile phones that can evade airport security screening methods.

What is perhaps surprising, is that it is this latest intelligence which is said to be behind the recent bans, in both the US and UK, of travellers from a number of countries carrying laptops and large electronic devices on board. Furthermore, "there are concerns that terrorists will use the techniques to bypass screening devices at European and US airports."

There are also fears that computer hackers were trying to bypass nuclear power station security measures. Government officials have warned that terrorists, foreign spies and “hacktivists” are looking to exploit “vulnerabilities” in the nuclear industry’s internet defences. Energy minister Jesse Norman told The Telegraph that nuclear plants must make sure that they “remain resilient to evolving cyber threats”.

Norman said: “The Government is fully committed to defending the UK against cyber threats, with a £1.9 billion investment designed to transform this country’s cyber security.”

He said the civil nuclear strategy published in February sets out ways to ensure that the civil nuclear sector “can defend against, recover from, and remain resilient to evolving cyber threats”.

Meanwhile, back in the US, intelligence officials have warned that groups including ISIS and al-Qaeda may have developed ways to build bombs in laptops and other electronic devices that can fool airport security. There are fears that terrorists made the breakthrough after obtaining airport screening equipment to allow them to experiment. FBI experts have tested how the explosives can be hidden inside laptop battery compartments in a way that allows a computer still to be turned on.

The US Department of Homeland Security said in a statement: “Evaluated intelligence indicates that terrorist groups continue to target commercial aviation, to include smuggling explosive devices in electronics.

“The US government continually reassesses existing intelligence and collects new intelligence. This allows us to constantly evaluate our aviation security processes and policies and make enhancements when they are deemed necessary to keep passengers safe.”

Manny Gomez, a former FBI special agent, cited by the Telegraph said: “We had the shoe bomber, cartridge attempt, now this is the next level. We need to be several steps ahead of them.”

For now there have been no effected cyber-terrorist attacks, although few things can redirect public attention and send the world to scramble demanding the "safety of the government" quite like a terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant. We can only hope that despite the overt warnings, such an escalation will not take place.

"There's A Global Riot Against Psuedo-Experts" Nassim Taleb Exclaims "This Is Not About Fascism"

Economist-mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb contends that there is a global riot against pseudo-experts

After predicting the 2008 economic crisis, the Brexit vote, the U.S. presidential election and other events correctly, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the Incerto series on global uncertainties, which includes The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, is seen as something of a maverick and an oracle. Equally, the economist-mathematician has been criticised for advocating a “dumbing down” of the economic system, and his reasoning for U.S. President Donald Trump and global populist movements. In an interview in Jaipur, Taleb explains why he thinks the world is seeing a “global riot against pseudo-experts”.

I’d like to start by asking about your next book, Skin in the Game, the fifth of the Incerto series. You do something unusual with your books: before you launch, you put chapters out on your website. Why is that?

Putting my work online motivates me to go deeper into a subject. I put it online and it gives some structure to my thought. The only way to judge a book is by something called the Lindy effect, and that is its survival. My books have survived. I noticed that The Black Swan did well because it was picked up early online, long before the launch. I also prefer social media to interviews in the mainstream media as many journalists don’t do their research, and ‘zeitgeist’ updates [Top Ten lists] pass for journalism.

The media is not one organisation or a monolithic entity.

Well, I’m talking about the United States where I get more credible news from the social media than the mainstream media. But I am very impressed with the Indian media that seems to present both sides of the story. In the U.S., you only get either the official, bureaucratic or the academic side of the story.

In Skin in the Game, you seem to build on theories from The Black Swan that give a sense of foreboding about the world economy. Do you see another crisis coming?

Oh, absolutely! The last crisis [2008] hasn’t ended yet because they just delayed it. [Barack] Obama is an actor. He looks good, he raises good children, he is respectable. But he didn’t fix the economic system, he put novocaine [local anaesthetic] in the system. He delayed the problem by working with the bankers whom he should have prosecuted. And now we have double the deficit, adjusted for GDP, to create six million jobs, with a massive debt and the system isn’t cured. We retained zero interest rates, and that hasn’t helped. Basically we shifted the problem from the private corporates to the government in the U.S. So, the system remains very fragile.

You say Obama put novocaine in the system. How will the Trump administration be able to address this?

Of course. The whole mandate he got was because he understood the economic problems. People don’t realise that Obama created inequalities when he distorted the system. You can only get rich if you have assets. What Trump is doing is put some kind of business sense in the system. You don’t have to be a genius to see what’s wrong. Instead of Trump being elected, if you went to the local souk [bazaar] in Aleppo and brought one of the retail shop owners, he would do the same thing Trump is doing. Like making a call to Boeing and asking why are we paying so much.

You’re seen as something of an oracle, given that you saw the 2008 economic crash coming, you predicted the Brexit vote, the outcome of the Syrian crisis. You said the Islamic State would benefit if Bashar al-Assad was pushed out and you predicted Trump’s win. How do you explain it?

Not the Islamic State, but al-Qaeda at the time, and I said the U.S. administration was helping fund them. See, you have to have courage to say things others don’t. I was lucky financially in life, that I didn’t need to work for a living and can spend all my time thinking. When Trump was running for election, I said what he says makes sense to a grocery store owner. Because the grocery guy can say Trump is wrong because he can see where he is wrong. But with Obama, he can’t understand what he’s saying, so the grocery man doesn’t know where he is wrong.

Is it a choice between dumbing down versus over-intellectualisation, then?

Exactly. Trump never ran for archbishop, so you never saw anything in his behaviour that was saintly, and that was fine. Whereas Obama behaved like the Archbishop of Canterbury, and was going to do good but people didn’t feel their lives were better. As I said, if it was a shopkeeper from Aleppo, or a grocery store owner in Mumbai, people would have liked them as much as Trump. What he says makes common sense, asking why are we paying so much for this rubbish or why do we need these complex taxes, or why do we want lobbyists. You can call Trump’s plain-speaking what you like. But the way intellectuals treat people who don’t agree with them isn’t good either. I remember I had an academic friend who supported Brexit, and he said he knew what it meant to be a leper in the U.K. It was the same with supporting Trump in the U.S.

But there were valid reasons for people to be worried about Trump too.

Well, if you’re a businessman, for example, what Trump said didn’t bother you. The intellectual class of no more than 2,00,000 people in the U.S. don’t represent everyone upset with Trump. The real problem is the ‘faux-expert problem’, one who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and assumes he knows what people think. An electrician doesn’t have that problem.

Is the election of Trump part of a global phenomena? You have commented on the similarity to the election of Narendra Modi in India.

Well, with Trump, Modi, Brexit, and now France, there are some similar problems in those countries. What you are hearing is people getting fed up with the ruling class. This is not fascism. It has nothing to do with fascism. It has to do with the faux-experts problem and a world with too many experts. If we had a different elite, we may not see the same problem.

There are other similarities, to quote from studies of populist movements worldwide: these leaders are majoritarian, they build on resentment, they use social media for direct access to their voters, and they can take radical decisions.

I often say that a mathematician thinks in numbers, a lawyer in laws, and an idiot thinks in words. These words don’t amount to anything. I think you have to draw the conclusion that there is a global riot against pseudo-experts. I saw it with Brexit, and Nigel Farage [leader of the U.K. Independence Party], who was a trader for 15 years, said the problem with the government was that none of them had ever had a proper job. Being a bureaucrat is not a proper job.

As a businessperson, you have a point about experts and pseudo-experts who you say are ‘left-wing’. How do you explain the other parts to the phenomenon that aren’t economic: the xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, etc.?

I don’t understand how a left-wing person can defend Salafism, or religious extremism. In a democracy, you can allow people to have any view, but they can’t come with a message to destroy democracy. Why should people who come to the West come with a message to finish the West? This is where the discourse goes haywire. So in Yemen, the [Saudi] intervention is good, but the intervention [by Russia] in Aleppo shouldn’t be allowed. I don’t think Trump was racist when he said Mexican criminals shouldn’t be allowed into the U.S.; he was targeting criminals. If you are Naziphobic, you are not against Germans. If I oppose Salafism, I am not an Islamophobe. Obama also deported Mexicans and refused to accept immigrants.

Is anti-globalisation a part of this sentiment?

I am not anti-globalisation, but I am against big global corporations. One of the reasons is what they cost. Today, every project sees cost overruns because these projects have to factor in global risks as well. In nature there is an ‘island effect’. The number of species on an island drops significantly when you go to the mainland. Similarly, when you open up your small economies, you lose some of your ethnicity or diversity. Artisans are being killed by globalisation. Think of the effect on so many artists who have been put out of work while people are buying wrinkle-free shirts and cheap mobile phones. I’m a localist. The problem is globalisation comes through large global corporates that are predatory, and so we want to counter its ill-effects.

Where do you see the world moving now? Further right, or will it revert to the centre?

I don’t think it will go left or right, and I don’t know about the short term. But I think in the long term, the world can only survive if it lives like nature does. Many smaller units of governance, and a collection of super islands with some separation, quick decision-making, and visible implementation. Lots of Switzerlands, that’s what we need. What we need is not leaders, we don’t need them. We just need someone at the top who doesn’t mess the system up.