Unpopular Opinion time:
I STILL don’t think “food” or “housing” or “education” are, in any sense, Basic Human Rights.
I believe you have a right to all that you produce or recieve freely from others, and the unfettered ability to do said producing and recieving.
I think there’s no sane or just world possible where you DON’T have food, housing, education, etc., but focusing on your Right to Have Material Stuff itself just obscures the structural injustice that’s deprived you of it in the first place.
Talk about my Right to Books obscures the injustice of attempting to restrict the free flow of information. Talk about my Right to Food obscures the injustice of enclosing the commons. Talk about my Right to Housing obscures the injustice of a rigged capitalistic financial system and Statized, centralized systems of property ownership. Talk about my Right to a Living Wage obscures the injustice of monopolized and hierarchical modes of production.
By declaring A Decent Life a basic human right, all you do is hide the ugliness of the system that would make decent living impossible without protest and politics in the first place.
+1
we’re going to have to tell future generations that the united states officially declared and waged an actual war against an abstract concept for over a decade and they’re not going to believe us
It so happens that a young man, usually a navy officer, accompanies the president where ever he goes. This young man has a black attache case wich contains the codes that are needed to fire nuclear weapons.
I can see the president at a staff meeting considering nuclear war as an abstract question. He might conclude, “On SIOP Plan One, the decision is affirmative. Communicate the alpha line XYZ.” Such jargon keeps what is involved at a distance.
My suggestion them, is quite simple. Put that needed code number in a little capsule and implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer will carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanies the president. If ever the president wants to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he can do so is by first, with his own hands, killing one human being.
“George,” the president would say, “I’m sorry, but tens of millions must die.” The president then would have to look at someone and realize what death is - what an INNOCENT death is. Blood on the White House carpet: it’s reality brought home.
When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon, they said, “My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the president’s judgement. He might never push the button!”
—Adapted from “Preventing Nuclear War” by Roger Fisher, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1981 (via 21st-century-classical-liberal)
Patent lawyers: Help! The evil Makers won’t let us apply for bullshit 3D printing patents!
Two minor characters from my novel Makers have apparently come to life and written an article for 3D Printing Industry. These two people are patent lawyers for Finnegan IP law firm, Washington, DC, which I don’t recall making up, but this is definitely a pair of Doctorow villains (though, thankfully, I had the good sense not to give them any lines in the book — they’re far too cliched in their anodyne evil for anyone to really believe in).
These patent lawyers are upset because the evil Makers (capital-M and all!) are working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to examine bad 3D printing patents submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office. The problem is that 3D printing is 30 years old, so nearly all the stuff that people want to patent and lock up and charge rent on for the next 20 years has already been invented, and the pesky Makers are insisting on pointing out this inconvenient fact to the USPTO.
This breaks the established order, which is much to be preferred: the UPSTO should grant allthe bullshit patents that companies apply for. The big companies can pay firms like Finnegan to file patents on every trivial, stale, ancient idea and then cross-license them to each other, but use them to block disruptive new entrants to the marketplace. The old system also has the desirable feature of arming patent trolls with the same kind of bullshit patents so that they can sue giant companies and disruptive startups alike, and Finnegan can be there to soak up the tens of millions of dollars in legal fees generated by all this activity.
Can’t these darned Makers understand? The point of a patent isn’t to protect novel, useful inventions! It’s to put the brakes on out-of-control innovation and to ensure that the children of the partners at Finnegan can go to a good college! What will happen to GDP if we divert money from the honest business of barratry and allow it to be squandered on making and selling stuff that people find useful?
The America Invents Act changed U.S. patent law to allow preissuance submissions, a mechanism by which third parties can submit patents or printed publications to the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) for consideration during patent examination, along with “a concise description of the asserted relevance of each submitted document.”[2] The U.S. Congress intended preissuance submissions to help the USPTO increase the efficiency of examination and the quality of issued patents.[3] Congress did not, however, intend the use of this mechanism to interfere with patent examination.[4] Nor did it intend preissuance submissions to allow for third party protest or preissuance opposition.[5] Yet a segment of the 3D printing (3DP) community, known as Makers, is using preissuance submissions as a sword to oppose 3DP-related patent applications. Perhaps more importantly, they are leveraging the concept of crowdsourcing to do so, potentially creating problems for patent applicants everywhere.[6]
To understand why and how Makers are mobilizing to challenge patents through presissuance submissions, one must first understand what 3DP is, and the composition of the 3DP community. 3D printing—more formally known as additive manufacturing—is a technology that creates three dimensional objects from CAD files. There are many legacy and emerging 3DP technologies. Generally, 3DP works by fusing layer upon layer of materials, such as plastics, powder metals, and ceramics, to build a final, fully formed product, much as Athena sprung full-blown from the head of Zeus. This process requires a digital 3D model of the product, stored in a CAD file, and a 3D printer. Digital product models can be obtained by either (1) designing the product with a CAD program; (2) downloading an existing CAD file from the Internet; or (3) scanning an existing product with a 3D scanner to create a CAD file. Further, almost anyone can buy a 3D printer today; they are sold through Skymall and at Staples. Where 3DP was once cost prohibitive for most, ‘prosumer’ and home printers are now available at reasonable prices.
Crowdsourcing Prior Art to Defeat 3D Printing Patent Applications
(via Beyond the Beyond)
(Images: Caricature of William Otto Adolph Julius Danckwerts, Caricature of Charles Russell, Leslie Ward/Vanity Fair/Wikimedia Commons)
Intellectual property is theft.
“We see an aversion against strategy, leading radical communities to smash the same window year after year without long-term tactics. We see a lot of energy spent fighting non-essential elements in the system like Fast Food chains and sports shoes corporations leaving aside the three basic structures that keep the system alive, and we mean the structures that ensure the flow of money, information, and energy to those in power. If you’re lacking ideas, there’s a drone testing facility somewhere in the desert of Arizona if you want to pay them a visit.”— lebanon, a letter to north american anarchists from radical beirut (via no-vvolf)
how I feel about black blocs in the U.S.
i think agorism should be just one strategy in the revolutionary struggle, to be used alongside and compliment the other strategies we have
21st-century-classical-liberal:
over population is a very 17th/18th century concept that’s been disproven time and time again
“seapunk will never die” i holler as i’m forcibly removed from my boss’s lawn
(Source: babustation)
Reminder that u r loved!! u r cute and cool and I love u!!
