UNIVERSITY OF ME

THE INTERNET AS A DISRUPTIVE INFORMATION RESOURCE

A lot of people describe the Internet as a source of fake news and misinformation that needs regulation. That's wrong. If you have ever bought a university text book you will immediately go into sticker shock with the price. The cost of writing the book, proofing the writing, editing the content, typesetting it, printing it, binding it, finding stores to carry it, putting it on a truck to ship it and taking it back if the store can’t sell it all go into the cost of the book. Huge expense.

It should be noted that in addition to cost, the investment in time and effort needed to author a text and pressure to publish may cap the accuracy of the information given in the text book, information which will only degrade with time. Although the subject may be much harder to study if the content is constantly updated, textbooks that develop in real time may prove to be far more effective. 

What if you could lump the entire process into one and distribute the whole thing electronically? Then your only real cost besides writing the book, and only if you choose to do so, is the cost of paying someone to proof the writing and edit the content. I worked with a Microsoft group for a number of years and have used their products since the company started. Microsoft turns the products it makes into tools that can consolidate as many of your daily processes as possible in one piece of software to eliminate many of the costs described above and in so doing makes their software indispensable. Any document you create can be saved as a PDF, a web page, an xml document as well as many other formats. All of that capability today is designed for use with the web, a disruption Microsoft missed in its entirety.

The Internet is one big information and content delivery system, an electronic library, and it is the fastest, best and cheapest delivery system in the world with nearly everything you can possibly imagine to study and learn from, immensely shortening the time it takes to get valuable information. While going to college may be immense fun and offer a piece of paper at the end, will it reflect who you are and want to be, or make you conform to a role so you can get a job somewhere?

Think of the Internet like the train in this picture. The tracks, the engine and the cars are all brilliant pieces of infrastructure designed to deliver people and goods from one place to another cost effectively. The fact that crazy riders may cling to the train to stretch its capacity does not in any way diminish the train’s value as a delivery system. So it is with the Internet.
 
While there are certainly ideas on the internet that seem crazy like the people clinging to the train, think of them as a barometer of the population. You may not agree with their ideas, but people post those ideas for a reason, and understanding and working with these people is part of the opportunity of being alive. For example I do not agree with the idea that women are subservient to men, yet many religions teach that. Ask yourself how you can change that idea in a world of committed religious believers? The current solution is to not talk about it, disregard religion, and make laws preventing persecuting religious believers. Where is the solution that fixes the belief?  People used to believe in witches and burn them at the stake. Somehow that idea disappeared. How did it happen?

Every thought and idea are part of the fabric of the world, and ignoring the people that have them does not make the ideas go away. You only have to think back to your childhood when someone did not listen to you or pay any attention to you to understand the importance of listening and understanding.  Listening does not mean you agree, but recognizing the living human being with the idea is important.

Most public libraries, university libraries, research libraries, and the majority of research publications, as well as thousands of classes and teaching programs are on the Internet. The image below is from a University library which is on the web, dispelling the idea that the Internet is just a dangerous source of lies and fake news. A quick search of just one subject on the University library site below lists 156,294 peer reviewed articles on the subject searched, over 250,000 if you do not care if they are peer reviewed. I would guess almost everything that has been researched and developed in the recent past, along with every scholarly paper, every university course, many government documents, and pretty much anything else you may want to study has been published on the Internet.  



There are those in politics and the media that would like you to believe the Internet is so full of fake news it needs to be regulated. They are simply trying to limit the information the public has access to because an educated public is dangerous to the official propagandized narrative.

If you have some idea of your interests, and you are willing to work at them rather that drift aimlessly, then there are many options, and the internet is a vast storehouse of information to help you if you want to do something about it. It provides a tremendous opportunity to pursue your own way for once and study what interests you. Forbes hosts an article about the meaning of education and Huffpost offers ideas on self help in that area.  I have invented things that are in use worldwide today, and somewhere a long time ago I learned that you simply have to study how you personally feel about something and you will understand a good part of how the world thinks too.  

Many of the most successful business people and inventors in the world were self-taught. The Internet increases the opportunity for self help, exploring and educating yourself using the world's resources now at your fingertips. But if you want a job employers will want to see your degree. Can you imagine an employer turning down Thomas Edison because he was taught at home by his mom? Or what about the morons that fired Steve Jobs and nearly sunk Apple?

Or even worse, what about everybody that lines up on the railway tracks of conformity to pay a major University for a degree, just so they can get a job with a company that will pay the least amount possible, hide their profits offshore, go to third world countries where they will pay the lowest wages possible, except to themselves, and eventually replace you with a robot when they can? While there are many professions that benefit from deep learning and the degrees that recognize skills, there is a opportunity in trying to figure out how to do things with a better model and sink those that are busy destroying the world.

"Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought." - Ludwig Von Mises

Inventors in grade school

Inventors in grade school
“A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.” - Andrew Carnegie

 And on the way figure out how to prove to people that they don’t need to buy anything just because an advertiser manipulates you to do so. A good start will be to completely ban the use of Facebook and Google in your home and if you have children, until they are 18. We are expected to prevent underage children from drinking, doing drugs, and create a safe path to teaching them how to drive, so why expose them to technology which is simply manipulative spyware for advertisers and we are learning the military. We need to protect them from this conduct and teach them to think and research what is happening in the world of propaganda and manipulation and to pursue what sparks their imagination on the Internet, in libraries, in online courses with some guidance. Not one thing on earth is above rethinking. 

 I refused to ever take my children to a church, not because a religion may not offer something of value, but due to the fact that if you are going to facilitate the indoctrination of a young mind then the subject should not be completely vulnerable and old enough to understand and think the process through for themselves.  I owed them that.

But if you insist on believing in a Superbeing, try looking in the mirror, and free your mind. Watch a 5 year old play at anything. They are what they imagine themselves to be at that point.  They think FROM the position of being the person they imagine, not TO an imaginary being down the road.  Why is that important?  To understand that idea look at the picture of the ski jumper and think of being in that person’s skis telling yourself that in two years from now (a future goal) you will learn how to land!  Bad idea, here is the right one.

Now you may say "oh the kid is not really the person they imagine", but there is another way to look at it.  And that is what if they are the person they imagine, they just need more training to get better at it?  I don't think you can accomplish anything without thinking you can and imagining what it will be like when you do. Sure, everything requires work, but knowing why you are doing it and what you gain in the end is important.

Back to the Internet, and the other stuff in p2p articles. The Internet can supply you with vast reservoirs of information to teach yourself whatever you want to learn about.  Unlike a text book, the information available online from valuable sources is constantly expanding. Knowledge is not static.  Even though some ideas in the universe may seem to be correct for longer periods of time, like certain scientific theories, other information is subject to change as circumstances change. For example:
 
There are too many people in the world and yet religions would have you believe you should go forth and multiply, not have abortions and don’t use birth control.

Businesses want to flood the market with immigrant labor so they can lower wages and create competition for your jobs, and oh by the way, replace everyone with robots when they can. But you should keep buying their crap, even when you are broke, facing an uncertain future, and are buried in debt.

Car makers want you to buy new cars that are full of software you don’t own, that they use robots to make, and in third world countries where they pay the lowest wages possible, and they work with Google and Facebook to mine your mind to hustle you into buying the outright lie that you will be a better person for it. 

The military tells you they are the smartest, toughest SOBs on earth and no one can attack your country, and they have the largest military budget on earth, greater that the next ten countries combined, yet they are spending trillions of your tax dollars to start wars in countries than cannot possibly beat them in a war. 

To Einstein these situations are simply problems to be solved, and you don’t have to save up to go to Harvard to beat the educational system and teachings that created blind acceptance of this world order. Start using the Internet like it was intended and come up with new ways of doing things, all your own invention. And forget asking for permission to earn a living. Invent your own ways to do it and know that if you sink competing systems in the process people will have more of their own money to spend on new ways of doing things. Its called altering the disposable income window.

For example, forget the nitty gritty and look at services like Uber and Lyft. Uber and Lyft did not invent magic fairy dust that they sprinkle on people to make them use their services. And it was not some magic app that gets people to ride in Uber and Lyft cars. What happened is the existing taxi companies started maximizing their profit over the years, reducing their pickup times, probably paid their people crap to lower operating costs, creating unhappy and indifferent drivers, and created a ride environment where getting rides was tough. In other words they had a dominant position supported by politicians and regulators who reinforced a monopoly they abused. Plus they built up capital which allowed them to use lawyers to block changes to the market dominance they had. Sound familiar! But over all, their service WAS CRAPPPPPP!

So along come the guys that founded Uber, probably pissed about never getting a cab when they needed it, and said there has to be a better way. And there was. Services like theirs. AND SO THEIR CUSTOMERS OVERTURNED THE APPLECART BY USING UBER WHENEVER THEY COULD.  Uber did not do anything more than let the market opportunity burst out of the jail the dominant party held the public in. Now of course the Apple cart is fighting back, but that is part of the fun. The devil was created for your pleasure.

So it will be with work, bauble consumerism, spying on you, and policies to tell you you must accept cheap labor undermining your opportunity to earn a living, advertisers telling you you need new crap built using software to fall apart at just the right time so they can sell you more, shopping malls that put merchandise on display like you are some kind of squealing monkey going ape over shiny baubles, and liars in the military industrial complex who tell you you have to participate in killing people in other countries, and religions that tell you their god is over there, way over there, just keep looking and you might see him/her/it, and oh yes that twitch in your elbow is god speaking to you, its A SIGN.

Bottom line, don't for one second believe a word about anything and simply ask yourself if you like the way earning a living works, if you like the way politics works, if you like being spied on and people like Facebook, Google, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA spying on you, if you like being told you need new anything to be a better person, if one day a robot will take your job, if you can't get paid that much because someone else will work cheaper and on and on.  No?  

Guess what, you are not alone and the only people that tell you you should like it, want you to stay that way. However everything is subject to the same disruptive forces UBER, Airbnb, Apple Macintosh, Apple IPad, Apple iPhone created in the world. Saying oh screw it, I am not doing it is already disruptive. And one bullet you already own that is free is simply to vote to sink these lying clowns. Another is to keep your money, no matter how little it is.  

And when someone tells you globalism and open borders are love and kindness, and that opening markets to corporations that will sue your country if you demand to protect yourself and it hurts their profits, simply hold a picture in your mind of that person being the biggest liar on earth. The imagine Superman or Superwoman coming down from the sky and firing them off into space never to return. Now you are really doing something.  And then vote them out and bankrupt their funders. Not sure what will replace them though, that's your job.
"The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science." - Albert Einstein

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." - Albert Einstein