For some time been interested in the topic of economic freedom, on the internet I found a journalist who deals with this topic. He is not only a journalist, but work also as a politician and analyst.
Andrew P. Napolitano (born June 6, 1950) is a former New Jersey Superior Court Judge. He is a political and senior judicial analyst for Fox News Channel, commenting on legal news and trials. Napolitano started on the channel in 1998. (Andrew Napolitano)
I present some of his analyzes and opinions about the economy in the United States.
The root of economic freedom is the recognition of the right to own private property. That includes the right to utilize it unmolested, to dispose of it without anyone's permission and to exclude anyone from it, even the government. Suffice it to say, no American president since the advent of the income tax and the Federal Reserve 100 years ago has fully accepted or meaningfully defended that right. The more the government extracts in taxes and the more it inflates the money supply, the more it rejects and assaults property rights.
The free market:
Every president in the 20th century, even Ronald Reagan, signed legislation raising income taxes. The theory behind the income tax is that the government's need for cash is so great, it can just take it from your employer after you earn it but before your employer pays you -- before you even see the cash -- and use it as it sees fit. This presumes that the federal government has a greater right to your income than you do. There really can be no rationale for income taxes without that belief.
The story of money:
There is not a single example in human history of central economic planning producing more prosperity than a free market. The framers understood that. That's why they wrote a Constitution that prohibited an income tax, forbade the states from interfering with contracts, and prevented the feds from taking life, liberty or property without due process. All those constitutional prohibitions have been nullified by amendment or disregarded by consensus.
I want to describe the gadgets and
technology that may affect us in the future. Some of them appear on
this year, and some have not yet been produced. For starters watch a
movie:
Mirror technology
What do you think of this mirror? It is
easy to guess that this is not an ordinary mirror. On the mirror
displays the transparent interface. This information is derived for
example from the internet. The mirror has dimensions of 800 x 500 x
50 and fits the decor of any bathroom. It has Wi-Fi connectivity, it
is waterproof and never evaporates. Mirror has access to the portal,
you can check the weather forecast, a calendar and other
applications. Mirror costs $ 7,733. It is pretty much how the mirror.
Do you think that is a good gift for a woman?
Another gadget that Smarty Ring.
It is a smart ring. It has a LED
display. Displayed on it is time and notice. The ring also has a
button to answer calls and to play music. The ring looks like this:
The market price of the device is $
275. In addition, please view the presentation:
Is it a functional gadget?
How about this presentation?
It is a concept of a modern mobile
phone and mobile computer. The designer and the author is Tirshathah
Hunter. It is a concept called the Conduit connects the phone with
display, PDA screen TV and a regular cell phone. It looks very
aesthetically pleasing and modern.
Do you like the design? Is it
functional?
Telephone on hand.
Already in briefly on the market should
debut phones displayed on the hand. The principle is simple assume
wristwatch. The phone has a small screen-which is built into the
projector. So you can browse the internet on hand. Met with this
technology?
Often, improvements can greatly improve
the currently available solutions. Feel free to comment on the
technology and equipment that interested you most.
How do you think what's new, you can
still enter? Maybe you have some of your projects, ideas. Please,
describe them briefly.
At the end I wanted to ask you a
riddle. How do you think what it might be? Who is the author,
producer, what is the name?
I'd like to bring up a topic that recently came back to media all over the world due to Amazons' idea to deliver small packages to their customers using automated drons.
For a long time I didn’t know what to write about on this blog. During making the research of what would be interesting for me and for you I found this video:
It turned out that there are many interesting and inspiring new technologies laying behind such a sad story. On this blog I don’t want to talk about the technologies at the cost of such a touchy story. I’d rather want to focus on the technologies with understanding of disabled people’s needs. In the presented video there are many technologies introduced by Henry Evans that are inspiring, useful and interesting.
Henry mentioned about the use of aerial drones to expend the world. It is incredible how he made use of relatively easy solution to improve his life. He uses mouse cursor controlled with his head to pressing buttons in a web browser that allow him to see video from the robot. It gives him sense of movement and watch the world go by around - in his garden, home and even in the roof.
Controlling web interface in this way might not be very comfortable I guess. But using head-mounted display could be a solution when you see exactly what your drone sees. And imagine that such dead-mounted display could translate a head movement onto the drone movement. That is amazing and I think that is possible. What do you think about such idea to use a head-mounted display to help disabled people to explore their surrounding world better?
Let’s focus on computer interfaces to help blind people. Have you ever wondered whether it is possible to “see” with a tongue?
The BrainPort device uses electrodes spatially correlate with the pixels from small camera hidden in the glasses. As William Seiple said, tearning to “see” with a tongue is not different than learning to ride a bike. If you want to read more please read this article:
To open a discussion please watch this movie about “What is Assistive Technology”. It not only refers to the disabled but AT is something more wider in scope.
These are very general movie but if we could talk about assistive technologies that would be great. Below I listed a couple of points that might be helpful for starting a discussion:
Do you know any other kind of devices, application or robots that may be treated as assistive technology?
What are the pros and cons of using such technology?
Is that technology available for a mass ? What can we do to make it more accessible and not expensive?
Can you share links to company that operates in the market and deal with such technology ?
Do you know someone who uses assistive technology to become more self-sufficient? Or maybe you know someone famous?
In an attempt to offer a more lighthearted topic, I'd like to talk about
"professional gaming" - or to be more blunt, playing video games for
money.
The concept itself is relatively new, dating back to the
nineties. While competitive gaming did "exist" in earlier times, it was extremely niche, limited to small groups of people and remaining unknown to the general public. It was
the Internet that really let the idea become popular worldwide. The ability to compete with players throughout the whole world, with almost no limits except for network performance, was a major breakthrough. Games could be designed from ground up to support multiplayer competition, while also adding new ideas to make them more attractive for the viewers. Ability to record replays or "spectator mode" to sit back and watch the game in full were a huge success.
Old school "competitive gaming" back in 1981
Growing popularity of "progaming" lead to
serious corporate sponsorship, both for the whole events and for individual players. Modern day tournaments have numerous sponsors, millions of online
viewers, huge prize pools and some of them are even officially supported
by game creators. On a smaller scale, players are
offered various gadgets, computer peripherals and payment for minor
expenses in exchange for product placement. Despite all that, the games are perfectly accessible for "normal"
players to play at home, while allowing for exciting competition
between the best.
Modern tournaments can gather thousands of spectators.
The definite capital
of pro-gaming is South Korea. It's the only country to offer a regular
24h TV coverage of esports in the world - outside Korea, such attempts
have been rather unsuccesful and quickly abandoned. Top players have
popularity comparable to famous pop stars in the west and it's a huge
multi million dollar business. Competition and training are treated very
seriously, resulting in players who have completely dominated several
games - to the extent that competitors are divided into Koreans and
"non-Koreans", with the latter being near certain winners.
When it comes to Poland, the concept is still
relatively unknown, especially amongst major populace. Younger people
might be somewhat more familiar, but it's a very small niche. The general opinion about video games being violent and
brainless entertainment that corrupts young children certainly isn't
helping. I'm sure we've all seen some news report about it at least once
in our lives. However,
there are still some events held here - for example Intel Extreme
Masters tournament is scheduled for April 2014, with prize pool of
$250,000. And while 250 thousand dollars might seem impressive, it's far from breaking any record. The image below is for individual games, not entire events.
While most of these games involve entire teams, it's still a lot of money.
Another fairly new aspect of pro-gaming - or
esports in general - is streaming. Live internet feeds from various games
have gained enormous popularity, earning their authors serious money
for simply doing what they are doing anyway. While individual streamers
will never have the same number of viewers as major tournaments, there
are still thousands of people following their idols' every step. As for major events, the current record is at 4.5mln unique viewers.
Of
course, it's not all fun and games. True professionals train
obsessively for long hours in order to maintain their position and
remain relevant in the competitive arena. It's a regular job, with trainers,
sponsors, requirements to fulfil. Variety is extremely limited, as they
play the same game day after day, often against the same people, using the
same game settings, going over the tiniest of details. Games can be lost
simply because they did something at 5m23s instead of 5m21s, which
then cascaded into unwinnable situation five minutes later, thus costing
them thousands of dollars.
As small example of that is in the above video - playing Starcraft (and its sequel) at the competitive level requires the player to perfom well over 200 actions per minute. Every single second, throughout the entire match, they have to perform four key or mouse presses or fall behind their opponents - and all of those actions must have a purpose. This requires hundreds/thousands hours of practice, something completely unthinkable for an average person.
At that point, it's not just a game anymore. Then again, is this a bad thing?
How do you feel about people being paid thousands of dollars for playing video games instead of doing "serious work"?
Do you consider this a real "sport"?
Is there any chance of this gaining popularity in Poland? Or even anywhere outside of Korea?
If you were still a teenager with lots of free time, would you ever consider such "career"?
Ash dieback is a phenomena of very fast lethal degradation of the ash trees population.
Currently it concerns Europe including UK but is also reaching US.
In Denmark it killed 90% of ash trees.
The process is caused by the activity of a fungus that ash trees cannot withstand.
After initial attack a sick tree dies within few months or years despite its size or age.
It comparison to the trees growing rate the fungus acts as with tornado speed.
Where does this fungus originate from? It came from Asia.
At its Asia home ash trees are immune and happily coexists with nasty fungus.
Ash trees there had hundreds of years to accommodate and develop defensive mechanisms.
Fungus reached Europe and oversees because of wood used for global transportation.
Most of goods that are shipped across the globe is packed in wooden boxes.
No one considered that the wood those boxes are made of carry the fungus everywhere alongside.
Without that human transport speed boost the fungus would not have a chance to travel that long distances.
Ash trees can disappear from our landscape. There are other tree species in danger because of similar threats.
Why the price for the globalisation is so high?
What is your opinion on globalisation?
Everyone pursue happiness. It is well known that good mood can promote many behaviours that lead to a possitive effects. Thinking in an optimistic way also encourages outright and brave actions that can result in more positive outcome of our activity.
But is it possible that bad mood could also have some benefits?
Recently we notice the increase in teaching techniques where we use the computer and Internet. Of course I am talking about the learning and not conducting lessons (for example: this blog is just a form of conducting and maybe only partially form of teaching, the same is our university platform Edux where we are only dealing with a form of teaching) .
Probably now everyone want the future like in the Matrix movie where you connect to your computer and send directly to the brain the knowledge that you are interested. But this method is very distant from our time;)
We also see continued growth platforms like www.lynda.com which becomes a replacement for e-books but whether it is sufficient solution? Also Dr. Google is a sufficient source of acquiring knowledge?
This subject is quite interesting for me and has a great future. How do you see the future of education with a computer and internet ? How to motivate people to learn? Or maybe you know at this moment some interesting techniques which you can share with us?
You do not haveto watch this movie because it isa littleoff-topic, but it'sa very interesting.
