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Pink Tentacle has a nice collection of assorted posters by Yusaku Kamekura, often considered the... -
✿ Il Giardino Segreto ✿ | via Tumblr on @weheartit.com - http://whrt.it/119Rtsx
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justo la estaba viendo, como me encanta <3!
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CHRIS HADFIELD An astronaut’s advice
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Winter Landscape with Violet Lights, János Tornyai (1869-1936)
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A young woman kicks back the tear gas.
Begging to be turned into a Banksy stencil
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In Besiktas a marriage proposal takes place in the midst of smoke.
If corporations are people and have their rights, then they should not be enslaved, owned and traded as well, no?
Many things were already said about how Internet makes distribution faster and cheaper and how this is putting under the question rationale for intellectual property rights. But Internet through facilitation of crowdfunding is changing also the money flow around the production itself, changing the nature of the investment which arguably has to have a protection of exclusivity to return on the investment. Crowdfunding is changing this because it allows creators to skip the investment-return cycle and directly fund the creation from its users. As such, intellectual property rights are obsolete.
Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
There is a notion of a read-write culture, a culture where we are not just consumers of the culture, but also producers. Prosumers. But we are missing a read-write science culture!
Why you can give a compliment to a girl that she is smart and that her logic if perfect, but not that she is sexy and that her buttocks are well shaped? Aren’t both something we more or less get born with and then through more or less work shape in the direction we want or don’t shape and just leave it be? Isn’t both something to appreciate and cheer and compliment? Isn’t both, what we count as smart and what we count as sexy, something culturally defined and a social construct?
My presentation of the PeerLibrary at Meteor Devshop 3. PeerLibrary aims to enrich the experience of open access scholarly literature by combining real-time discussions with scientific publications. GitHub.
I believe that any government which is involved in the war (or any armed conflict, or in fact any conflict where human rights are violated, or, maybe, even any act where human rights are violated) has failed its people and all other people from all around the world. The government is doing something wrong and should be helped to find a way to stop the war peacefully or be replaced with one which can do that. How can people make this change happen is often not obvious, but definitely it must not be done violently, because this would defeat the main idea behind.
Yesterday I was following the ASUC Senate (student body) discussion whether UC Berkeley should divest $14 million from companies affiliated with Israel’s military in opposition to human rights abuses happening in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was an interesting experience to listen and I believe UC Berkeley has really some great future politicians. But it still made me sad because we all lost once again. We would lost no matter how the decision would be made. I will explain you why.
Why it is not allowed to question democracy? Why this became a taboo? An idea you do not question? A human artifact you do not want to improve? We wage wars in the name of the democracy. It is a stop word for any discussion: “This is not democratic.” Yes? Maybe? It is good to recognize this, but not to stop discussion because of that.
How many of you can count how many times democracy went wrong? How many of you can count how many times a dictatorship turned good? Do you even know about benevolent dictators from our past? Do you believe that there have been none? Or you just have not learned about them? I agree that we have come far in our search for a good system to govern ourselves, but we must not stop our search here. We should be able to look in all directions for clues to guide us to the system which would really have people at its core. Not just in the name.
If this is not a prime example of how Internet can help people collaborate at scales previously not imaginable. So, if we can create virtual words together, can we also govern our own physical world together?
