[geeks] KVM for Sun Sparc Servers with USB keyboards

nate at portents.com nate at portents.com
Tue May 5 15:51:33 CDT 2009


>> churchill [?] was right when he said democracy is the worst form of
>> government except for all the others,
>
> Possibly.  While I'd rather have slow-growing colon cancer than a cancer
> that rapidly eats my brain or liver, I'd rather have no cancer at all.

I think it is possible to make existing republics/democracies better than
they are, though the task isn't easy.  The whole power/corruption issue is
truly a difficult one.

For instance, I was surprised to learn recently in the film Food, Inc.
that Monsanto has used it's GM seed patents and money and power to hire
private investigators to watch over and investigate and sue small farmers
and business owners who are not using Monsanto products, who are using
non-GM seeds, and who are using or selling seed-reclamation equipment (so
they can plant next year's non-GM seed crop without having to buy new
seeds but instead use seeds from last year's crop, how farming used to be
done), and sue those people out of business for violations such as
intellectual property rights, patent infringement, and seed piracy.  For
*seed reclamation*!

We live in an age of the tyranny of the corporation, the corporation which
has it's teams of lawyers and lobbyists.  An age of multinational
companies with revenues greater than the GDP of small nations.

I don't see how the founders of the countries the people of this planet
live in could have anticipated this scenario to any reasonable degree, and
I don't hold them accountable for the mess we're in.

And I don't think promoting some sort of regression away from our current
hyperindustrialized global economy is the answer.  That genie is largely
out of the bottle.

Rather, I hold every single person on this planet collectively responsible
for improving our existing systems of government to scale to the scope of
these problems, myself included.  I just hope that we all continue to work
at it, and make things better together.

- Nate



More information about the geeks mailing list