] Could the recognition of our imperfect understanding
] serve to establish the open society as a desirable form
] of social organization? I believe it could, although
] there are formidable difficulties in the way. We must
] promote a belief in our own fallibility to the status
] that we normally confer on a belief in ultimate truth.

Decius's comments:

Wow, this might be the most important thing I've read since MemeStreams started. [ I agree 100% with Decius here. I was planning to respond directly to his comments and this article, however its going to have to come connected to something else. I just don't have the time right now. Way too much to go into and/or comment on. - nick ]

First off, despite the title, this is not an anti-capitalist screed. George Soros is an investment banker and the 38th richest man in the country. In fact, this article isn't really about capitalism. This article is about everything. The title is so poor that I almost changed it.

What Soros is saying about Capitalism is that there are people who accept the concept of free trade in a ideological way, in an absolutist way, and that is a problem. The problem with religious states, which requires the separation of church and state, is that when laws are the product of man, they are open to debate, but when laws are the product of God, to question is heresy. If you have a society in which the law cannot be questioned, you have a totalitarian society. It is only a matter of time.

The thing that Soros is saying here is that any absolutist ideology can be abused in this manner. It doesn't matter if your ideology is based on the Bible, or the writings of Marx, or the writings of Adam Smith. If you have a nation of people who believe that their principals are beyond question, ultimately you have a totalitarianism. It is only a matter of time before the inconsistencies your absolutism forces you to ignore cause fissures which break your society down.

Reading this essay caused me to think back across many of the discussions that I've had on this site over the past two years. My instinct that Fukuyama's belief in an ultimate solution was flawed. Being able to see great tragedies of history reflected in the idea of pre-emptive military action and being unable to demonstrate that its not "ok" if you're doing it for Democracy. In our worries about the state of the IT industry. In my various discussions about politics with people from various perspectives.

I've had a really hard time deciding where I fit in the political spectrum. I know what the tests tell me, but somehow I'm never comfortable with the answers. When I talk to conservatives they think I'm a liberal. When I talk to liberals they thing I'm a conservative (or at the least that I've been duped by them). One thing I've come away from years and years of these conversations with is the idea that people usually i... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The Capitalist Threat - George Soros

... an entire generation of lowered expectations ...

This author doesn't understand why we are ignoring the problem. If you look one article back in my MemeStream to "Creative Class War" you'll get the why to go along with this article's what.

Education Is No Protection

] Thanks to the GOP takeover of Washington, and the harsh
] realities of the Big Sort, economically lagging parts of
] the country now wield ultimate political power, while the
] creative centers--source of most of America's economic
] growth--have virtually none.

Decius's comments:

This is a very good article that gets off to a slow start. It resonates with a lot of the things we've been discussing here. The author is arguing that the migration of creative people from the midwest into the country's urban centers during the .com boom created the political situation which led to the Bush win in 2000. (The Democrats' political base is now concentrated into smaller geographic areas, cutting their electoral edge on the GOP.) Now the creative class is politically disenfranchised.

You can see this directly in the election. Bush is offering tax cuts to people who are handling multi-million dollar inheritances and who make most of their money from capital gains. Dean and the other Democrats are offering to help families who make less then $50,000 a year. They talk about manufacturing jobs and steel workers. This country's economic future is not going to be built by steel workers. It is also not going to be built by the bored and dull sons of sons of sons who have more money then you can count and no real ambition as a result.

This country's economic future has always been built by people who are both capable of building it and motivated to do so. This author is arguing that we might not see it at all. He is seeing brain drain out of the US to Canada, Europe, and Australia. We wouldn't feel that right now if we had it, as the US isn't using the people they have. What's cutting a little muscle when you aren't running at top speed? The authors suggest a serious risk that the next runner to the front of the pack is likely to be a country that creates opportunities for the creative class, and right now thats not us.

'Creative Class War' by Richard Florida

] Eight security experts held a Red Team exercise on
] January 19, using a GEMS server and six AccuVote-TS
] terminals, replicating an election scenario with no prior
] knowledge of source code. As suggested by the earlier,
] Hopkins report, the team quickly guessed the hardcoded
] passwords to administrator and voter smart cards. At a
] cost of less than $750, they were able to reset voter
] cards to allow multiple votes with the same card and
] suggested similar abuses with forged supervisor and voter
] cards. All 32,000 statewide terminal locks are identical,
] and the team picked them in less than 10 seconds,
] allowing physical access to the PCMCIA bay, which
] contains cards for the modem and the ballot definitions
] and results. These cards could be tampered with,
] destroyed, or stolen for their valuable data. Attaching a
] keyboard to the terminals allowed resetting of all
] counters in the PCMCIA bay without an administrator card
] needed.
]
] The server was missing over 15 Microsoft security
] updates, and the team was able to use the flaws used by
] the "Blaster" worm. By using insecure USB ports or more
] secure CD drives, the team was able to modify results and
] databases

LawMeme - Voting Machines Compromised in Election Simulation

] Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than
] any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B
] CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the
] Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered
] substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new
] English words, and trained robotic cockroaches.
] Technically.
]
] Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination
] Engines Inc. in Maryland Heights, gets credit for all
] those things, but he's really just "the man behind the
] curtain," he says. The real inventor is a computer
] program called a Creativity Machine.

Computers that create patents

] When the internal architecture of a trained
] artificial neural network is gradually relaxed or
] destroyed, that network tends to spontaneously
] produce a succession of "impressions" from it's
] learned knowledge domain. I refer to this state
] as "dreaming." A dreaming net's output stream
] often holds a mixture of both straightforward and
] hybridized exemplars from its training set. If we
] allow a second neural network to watch for any
] useful concepts that emerge from the first, we
] form a so-called "Creativity Machine." Creativity
] machines may perform remarkable feats of
] invention and discovery, ranging from the composition of
] music to the prediction of totally new ultrahard
] materials.

Hardcore irony.. I made my previous post when I was trying to read this and was unable to concentrate.

A technical discussion of Creativity Machines

] Just in time for today's New Hampshire primary, here's a
] candidate scorecard. It rates members of Congress on how they voted
] on technology-related legislation and awarded them a score
] of 0 to 100.

This is interesting, but also lacking. There is hole here that needs to be filled.

[Politech] Where Democratic presidential candidates stand on tech

DJ Spooky's Magazine. Jaron Lanier, Barabasi, Coldcut, Hackers, Remix culture, Big Brother, Islam, Drugs and, of course, Genesis P-Orridge... This is it...

21C Magazine

Immediately after I saw that Drudge had posted up an MP3 of Dean's yelp, I yelped myself. Only this is me, so its IRC:

Jan 20 08:18:01 [rattle] Common remix culture.. I wanna here a techno track featuring Dean's yelp by the end of the day!

And I did.. Lots of people yelped.

Now, having seen this page.. Less then a week out.. Umm.. Hot damn!

You know, this is a pretty interesting time to be alive. In many respects. None of this should surprise me anymore.

See, there in lies the both the danger and the power. The danger is that group think can become so misguided. I asked for techno. I consider myself "in the know". I should not have to detail this any further. The power, lies in the eye of the beholder of this page.

Net Goes Nuts, Just Add Reason

] In a ruling handed down late Friday and made available
] Monday, U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins said the ban
] on providing "expert advice or assistance" is
] impermissibly vague, in violation of the First and Fifth
] Amendments.

Nothing but good news here..

The court system, at the very least, is responding to attacks on itself. And yes, that provision was an attack on the courts.

] [David] Cole declared the ruling "a victory for everyone
] who believes the war on terrorism ought to be fought
] consistent with constitutional principles."

Those principles being the foundation of the open and free society.. Law, order, due process, etc.

Federal Judge Rules Part of Patriot Act Unconstitutional (washingtonpost.com)