Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin on Stupid Evil Stuff People Do

My comments:

Great discussion. Thank you. Bit about the money supply growing at the rate gold comes out of the ground triggered me a bit, but then I realised that under those conditions the gold price would have been the absolutely most stable measure of monetary value. Or am I wrong? Somebody correct me please if so. The thing that triggered me was that gold doesn't just spontaneously come out of the ground like plants, earthworms or water or something... Gold is ripped out of the ground and dissolved in mercury and the tailings and the mercury go into the river and poor people kill themselves to get it. The gold price rises since 2020 were an economic, social, ecological and public health disaster for the regions of Bolivia where there are gold deposits close to the surface. Evo Morales' government never managed to properly regulate miners because they were (and still are) a powerful political group. It was a stupid mess.

44:34 They haven't thought of everything you can be sure. They haven't thought of a way to do money using a completely distributed organic open system that doesn't need to rely on unknown unknowns like the fact that cryptographic checksums and hashes are actually secure. You don't want any kind of system where there is an idea of "they" involved, especially if "they" are the only ones who actually know the system works and who can change it.

1:10:00 or so, on digital Id. What I want to know is why is there no open discussion of secure distributed computing protocols and FHwhatsitcalled when you compute with encrypted data? I forgot. Clearly whatever system any government used needs to be able to interchange ids between governments so that you can know someone from a foreign country is who they claim to be. That's the whole point of an id like a passport. They also need to know who owns what so they can register property and pay taxes and stuff. So whatever this system is it should be something like the UN or the ISO/IETU or whatever they're called in Geneva that does this and provides it to every government except the dodgy ones,... Oh, that's the problem? I don't think so. If it was a decently designed system you could even let the Israelis use it. Why is this not discussed? Why do I only hear activists like Snowden and Assange (who calls himself a Computer Scientist I heard) talking about abuses but nobody talks about what we could actually do to prevent them. In February 2024 I actually went to Geneva to apply for asylum so that I could talk to people about this. I just got told that I was a UK citizen so couldn't apply for asylum and they put me in a migrant hostel for a few months while I appealed. I used to work at the Computer Lab at Cambridge University and people there pretend they don't know what I'm talking about and they teach all this standard BS to the undergraduates. I know because I was teaching it to them too.

Well I made it to 1:28:24 and I thought I'd better point out that the amount of stupid depraved shit people can do is potentially infinite, and there are never going to be enough journalists who have enough attention to give to it all so there is a possibility that it could be a learned helplessness exercise. The more time and attention intelligent people give to the nonsense the less time they have to actually solve the problems. They are not so difficult to solve, but if you continually point to the bad evil stuff they do then people are going to feel like it's human nature that these assholes exist and it's not human nature, I think it's actually learned. I think we teach it to our kids and call it a good education.

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