Missive #304

42. NASRUDDIN THE OPTIMIST

Nasruddin’s neighbor saw him kneeling by the side of the lake, spooning something into the water. He was used to Nasruddin behaving strangely, but this was unusual even for Nasruddin. He decided to go investigate and see what Nasruddin was doing.

As the neighbor got closer, he saw that Nasruddin was spooning yogurt into the lake.

“Why are you spooning yogurt into the lake?” asked the neighbor.

“It’s starter!” Nasruddin explained. “I am hoping to turn the whole lake into yogurt.”

“But that’s impossible!” said his neighbor.

“Yes, it’s impossible,” admitted Nasruddin. “But just imagine how wonderful it would be!”

This Tale is from “Tiny Tales of Nasruddin” by Laura Gibbs. The book is licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. © 2019-2022 Laura Gibbs.

Most people in the rest of the world have been asked to regard the dollar’s world role as natural and inevitable. But as Michael and I have shown repeatedly in so many shows, it is anything but natural and inevitable. It is indeed instead unstable, volatile, crisis-prone and profoundly exploitative. The dollar’s world role has always rested, as we have argued in our shows and our writings, on an attempted and never successful imperialism, and it has to give way to international cooperation for universal development and planetary sustainability, and the international monetary and financial system that promotes production, sustainability, equality and a broad-based prosperity, a broad-based well-being, let’s say, if not prosperity.…

However, to get there from here, from our very highly financialized economies, transformations are necessary in a number of spheres. So today we want to focus on some of the main elements of this transformation, and one way to summarize what these elements would be is we’ve tried to divide our conversation into the following topics: Who should create money? What should monetary policy aim for? How do we redesign the taxation system? What about land, rent and so on? Should we nationalize the land and eliminate rent? How should the financial system be regulated? What should replace debt? Obviously, income rather than credit. And finally, how should international money be reorganized? So that’s what we want to discuss today. — Pathways To Solutions by Michael Hudson

Last Wednesday I said I was going to leave things as there were while I learned what I had. That good intention lasted about 24 hours. I didn’t like that DuckDuckGo browser on the Fire 8 very much so installed Opera One. The Vivaldi browser was developed by a company founded by Tatsuki Tomita and Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, who was the co-founder and CEO of Opera Software. Therefore, the two browsers are similar with Opera One claiming to be good for low end devices.

The Bookmarks set up much like Vivaldi but do not have the same appearance – I don’t like it as well. The Fire 8 is a test bench so I gave Puffin browser a try and found that they wanted $ to install it. No thanks! Tried a couple of other browsers that were fast but I could not get Bookmarks transferred so gave up on those also.

Vilaldi has made some changes since I last used it and one of them was the addition of Workspaces. This lets you group tabs together in one Workspace tab which I have just tried and find it to be very useful. I’m also getting used to the Speed Dials again which I liked before but not so much now – we will see.

I also have made the You.com search engine the default in Vivaldi. It is the only browser that I have seen that ‘offers’ it in their list of search engines. Haven’t used it enough yet to pass judgement on it but one of the things that I liked right away was when I did a search for dog food the first page of result contain NONE for Amazon. That got my vote!