Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 420-423

…using a high-technology method to sort the sperm of dairy bulls, they could produce mostly female calves to be raised into profitable milk producers.

Now the first cows bred with that technology, tens of thousands of them, are entering milking herds across the country — and the timing could hardly be worse.

The dairy industry is in crisis, with prices so low that farmers are selling their milk below production cost. The industry is struggling to cut output. And yet the wave of excess cows is about to start dumping milk into a market that does not need it.

…“We’ve just got too many cattle on hand and too many heifers on hand, and the supply just keeps on coming and coming.”

…Desperate to drive up prices by stemming the gusher of unwanted milk, a dairy industry group, the National Milk Producers Federation, has been paying farmers to send herds to slaughter.
From Science, Plenty of Cows but Little Profit
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
New York Times
Published: September 28, 2009



Cross-connected scheduling systems allow anyone to assemble, with a few clicks, a complex, multimodal travel itinerary that would have taken a human travel agent days to create.
If that last example sounds prosaic, it simply reflects how embedded these kinds of augmentation have become. Not much more than a decade ago, such a tool was outrageously impressive—and it destroyed the travel-agent industry.

That industry won’t be the last one to go. Any occupation requiring pattern-matching and the ability to find obscure connections will quickly morph from the domain of experts to that of ordinary people whose intelligence has been augmented by cheap digital tools. Humans won’t be taken out of the loop—in fact, many, many more humans will have the capacity to do something that was once limited to a hermetic priesthood. Intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity.
Get Smarter
by James Cascio
the AtlanticJuly/August 2009


While some may find the concept of a guaranteed basic level of income for citizens to be a rather provocative idea, it is important to remember there are already a variety of similar scenarios already in place within the business community of every developed nation around the world. For example, a vast array of businesses have created their own Guaranteed Incomes out of the millions of credit cards holders who only make minimum payments and who carry ever-increasing interest bearing balances from month to month. Mortgages that take decades to pay off do the same thing for banks. Companies, both public and private, that supply local and regional customer services such as phone, cable and electricity to a captive customer base for a monthly fee may well see their customers as walking and talking guaranteed income generators.
BASIC INCOME
­Greater Freedom of Choice Through
Greater Economic Security of the Person
William D. Clegg, B.A. Phil