Q: Is the U.S. medical system capable of dealing with ebola? You be the judge: About a month ago, when I asked a local upper level librarian about what he knew regarding ebola, and whether anyone at the library might be interested in doing a presentation that could cover emergencies such as Earthquake or Ebola, going over standard heath measures and preparations - water storage, emergency services, etc., his response was that anyone in the U.S. who was afraid of ebola wa...
Great idea, guys! Looks like a natural for group shares, treasure hunts, as well as experimental governmental style services, such as ride-alongs for cops. The infobot could give the officer an extra set of eyes and ears, freeing him or her up to apprehend or investigate, interviewing witnesses, etc. It would be ironic indeed, however, to see info-bots randomly distributed around the country, while cities no longer offer what used to be considered essential publi...
Ebola Now How to deal with the aftermath Published on August 20, 2014 By Phil Osborn In Current Events on www.joeuser.com February 28th, 2016 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-hawaii-dengue-idUSKCN0VI0G2 In the wake of the near panic over Zika, a few voices have noted that dengue and several other deadly viruses are carried by the same group of people-loving mosquitos, species that have hitched rides to new locales, such as the southern U.S. and now...
First, let's test the system. OK... Edit worked... What this is about: What we don't see on the web. Who we don't hear on the web or in general. Censorship directly and by marginalization. The price of the truth and the profitability of deceptions. Who is responsible. Note: the room for storage in the cloud and elsewhere on planet Earth is currently estimated to be about half as big as the data submitted. That means that 50% of all t...
I posted the blog below about two weeks back as a prequel to my commentary in my post on the solution for poverty. "Breaking news! The world currency exchange bank has announced that things are looking uncomfortably like 2007 all over again. People are reportedly bidding up "asset bubbles" right and left in a desperate, frenzied attempt to beat the odds and get something - ANY positive return on their money. A few people at the top of these multitude of instant pyramids jump...
To: CityCouncil@tustinca.org Thanks for your attention to this matter. In brief, the Tustin library has become increasingly unusable for legitimate pusposes, due to the failure to address the problems of various noises making it impossible to concentrate on any serious research. Along with the noise issues, there has been a slowly increasing level of related problems, associated largely with the concentration of homeless with obvious mental problems who nevertheless hang on to e...
Some years ago, I opened the books on a local congressman, all that pesky history that really wasn't so bad, objectively. It was just that he was trying to live a lie - and still is! He comes off as the squeeky clean Mr. Conservative, when only a few decades ago he was dead in the sights of Ronny Raygun, who was bent on using California's home grown storm troupers to prevent the anarchist-libertarian faction of Young American for Freedom, headed by the later congressman,...
I've been intrigued for decades with the way that discontinuities might influence us in subtle - or not so subtle - ways. Most of us ignore the fact that catastrophes happen. We are shielded from death up close and personal. We buy our big screens and SUVs while the future of life on the planet - including all the people we love and their kids and their kids, etc. - is in the balance, and a billion or so of us are on the brink of starvation while we who have a choice, ...
This is the beginning of my long-awaited* extension of my popular earlier blog, which focussed on the concept of property as associated with physical things. That blog was not intended to promote a particular version of property, although it has probably been taken that way by many readers. I will try to maintain some degree of neutrality here, as well. I certainly have my own opinions, positions and implicit agenda, but the standard to which I try to adhere is what suppo...
A Solution – The Shorter Version Last update: 06/31/17 Reasons to support a basic income: http://www.basicincome.org.uk/reasons-support-basic-income What is different, important and unique in my approach to the "Basic Income" proposal? See the source above for the first mention - so far as I know - of the integration of social justice into the debate. My version (below) focused almost exclusively on this as the main supportive theme. &n...
What immediately follows is my own take on the discussion concerning problems with licensing more bars or liquor outlets in downtown Santa Ana, in the face of known problems of public drunkeness, under-age drinking and a history of related problems. People drink because they are in pain or dealing with stress. This "solution" (no pun intended) can work on an occasional or low level - 1-2 drinks per day - but tends to perpetuate the problems, especially when multiple drinks are involved. ...
Notes on Property: Phil Osborn 06/15/2013 (Originally presented at the Santa Ana Escualita.) Note: this is hardly exhaustive of the subject, but I’m hoping it will provoke an ongoing discussion and some good ideas and understandings of the key elements of the various issues. What this covers: A fairly detailed overview of property history and theory focusing mainly on “land” property A number of key examples of differing implementations of prope...
I would suggest that a critical point in the development of true consciousness came when we moved out of the forest. In the forest, the primary sensory mode was scent, the recognition and filing away of discrete molecules that conveyed specific digital meanings as to their source. Moving to the open grassland meant that proto-humans had to shift dominance from scent to sight, rather quickly on the fly. Sight is a completely different kind of processing from scent, requiri...
OK, think back to 1991 or perhaps '92. The web hadn't been invented yet - or implemented anyway. Ted Nelson's Xanadu was known throughout the digerati, and no doubt countless other thinkers had come up with their own mental or prototypical WWW, yours truly included, circu 1979 or so. I even spent most of a year writing a version of Prolog to run on a C64 as the foundation OS for a universal information network that I called the "Personal Knowledge Index" o...
The following is derived from my entry to the Robocall Challenge sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission. The Challenge basically requests submissions of ideas on how to stop "robocalls," with a $50,000 prize for the winning submission. I emailed them yesterday about publishing this, as they do not publically publish the full content of submissions on their site, while I would like to get some feedback, as, even if I don't win the challenge, I am still very motivated to so...