---
Show: Reality Exploit Roundtable
Episode: 15
Date: Nov 20, 2012
Topics: Desert Farming, Gold Smuggling, Bitcoin sleeping with the State, Drone Economics,
Moderator: Plato
Panelists: Voodoo, Wise-Guy, Hiro, Smuggler, Plato
Tags: aquaponics, hydroponics, gold, smuggling, bitcoin, banking, drones
---
Reality Exploit Roundtable
Episode 015 Show Notes
Moderator: Voodoo
Intro music by Sun Araw - "Deep Cover"
- Voodoo: Black and Yellow Pages, Beer Can Engines
- Smugggler: http://anarplex.net, http://shadowlife.cc
- Plato: Twitter, Reddit
- Hiro: Agorist Radio
- Wise-Guy
Desert Farming http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/nov/24/growing-food-in-the-desert-crisis
In a dry, dusty part of the Australian Outback, an Ontario, Canada banker has created a hydroponic greenhouse that uses no fresh water and almost zero carbon-based fuels.
The Guardian reports:
A 75m line of motorised parabolic mirrors that follow the sun all day focuses its heat on a pipe containing a sealed-in supply of oil. The hot oil in turn heats nearby tanks of seawater pumped up from a few metres below ground – the shore is only 100m away. The oil brings the seawater up to 160C and steam from this drives turbines providing electricity. Some of the hot water from the process heats the greenhouse through the cold desert nights, while the rest is fed into a desalination plant that produces the 10,000 litres of fresh water a day needed to keep the plants happy.
Plato, the cost of land is what seems to have driven the location of this experiment, but if it's really as successful as they claim, why isn't this being done on rooftops in New York City, LA, and London?
Weather Underground solar calculator
Gold Smuggling http://business.inquirer.net/93838/smugglers-now-control-95-of-philippine-gold-trade
Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas assistant governer, Manuel Torres told reporters that smugglers not control 95% of the Philippine gold trade and there's nothing the central bank can do about it. “The BSP has no police powers to stop such illegal activities.”
Under the law, the BSP is required to buy all the gold from local producers. Since the Philippines imposed a 7% tax at the point of sale, however, gold traders have shied away from the BSP, with most choosing to sell their precious metals to smugglers who do not impose excise taxes.
Wise-guy, in this story and a related story about Italian government actors using violence against gold traders in Europe, it seems to be a game of semantics. That is, smuggling is defined as anybody who doesn't specifically include the government in their contracts. Isn't that about right?
Drone Economics http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/drone-economics-tiny-tactical-drones-get-dirt-cheap-gps-guided-bombs/ http://boingboing.net/2012/12/12/man-arms-diy-drone-with-paintb.html
Although unmanned aerial vehicles are great for bombing weddings and double-tapping the first responders, government actors and the contractors pulling their strings are concerned that they're just too darn expensive. According to ARS Technica, General Dynamics has adapted an 81mm, gps-guided mortar to be used on smaller UAVs than the Predator, Reaper, or Global Hawk.
In a series of three tests using a TigerShark drone—a 200-pound drone with a 17-foot wingspan capable of taking off and landing on its own—the Air Drop Mortar (ADM) dropped the 10-pound test shells from about 7,000 feet. They fell within seven meters of the designated target in every test. The blast radius of a high-explosive 81-millimeter mortar shell is about 35 meters.
Meanwhile, in the United States, local warlords (or sheriffs as they are called) are purchasing UAVs as part of a general militarization against people who oppose their re-election campaigns. One warlord in Montgomery County, Texas has indicated interest in arming his UAVs.
Smuggler, in North America and Europe we're not yet to the point where government actors feel comfortable bombing unapproved bat mitzvehs and I think you have to go back to April 1992 to find an instance of a standoff in an open area of Texas. So, really, the only viable targets for armed UAVs would be individuals assembling at a time, place or manner of which the warlord does not approve. My questions to you are, who supports this kind of thing and do they really think this technology will not be turned against them at some point in the near future?
Milo Danger has built a six-rotor UAV and armed it with a paintball marker. In a YouTube video Danger demonstrates the effectiveness of this weapon system against human-shaped plywood cutouts.
Voodoo: Blackandyellowpages.com
Smuggler: Shadowlife.cc
Wise-Guy has nothing to plug, but we did not forget him.
Hiro: AgoristRadio.com, orlingrabbe.com
Plato: Fun strategic card game http://dominion.isotropic.org/
Bitcoin Smackdown http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/12/10/the-controversy-of-bankhood.html
Bitcoin-Central, owned by Paymium, has partnered with a French payments processor to offer state-regulated services through a limited-service bank. Not surprisingly, some people have a problem with this.
Jon Matonis said in Forbes:
Those who support the antithetical overlay of bitcoin on the current financial system ensure us that it will only be temporary and that we must build bridges. That would be nice but it’s a fairy tale. It reminds me of the Marxist theory of historical materialism and the Marx-Engels ideology that if we only tolerate the bourgeois state during the transitional advancement to a higher phase, we will see the complete "withering away of the state."
But supporters of the move have a different take.
Eric Vorhees wrote in genesisblock:
As this gets easier and easier, and people (of all kinds, not just those ideologically motivated) grow comfortable with Bitcoin, it will gradually replace those legacy systems, and perhaps, if this experiment succeeds, those old systems will start crumbling and falling apart, as individuals gradually chose the superior Bitcoin system instead of them. But this is a process, and can never happen if Bitcoin remains isolated from the normal financial world. A life boat can never save anyone if it does not first go pick up the survivors.
Hiro, blah, blah, blah what's the impact of this beyond a new service available if someone chooses to use it?
shadowlife.cc: Necessary conditions for the long-term success of Bitcoin