What The Whole-And-Entire F**k Is Going On Here?

spiegel  |  The capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo is being overrun by a dangerous new drug called bombé, made from deposits the catalytic converters of automobiles. In a country facing many problems, it helps people forget. 

The videos appeared suddenly, circulating via WhatsApp and on social networks. And what they depicted quickly got a name: The zombies of Kinshasa. The images showed people completely motionless, or moving only slowly – and investigators quickly figured out what it was: a new drug by the name of bombé.

"It is an epidemic,” a leading investigative official told DER SPIEGEL. And the crisis has also captured the attention of the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. President Felix Thisekedi held a special cabinet meeting to discuss the new drug earlier this year. He is eager to demonstrate that he is doing all he can.

But the rapid spread of bombé is also symptomatic of a sick country, and of a megacity that has become downright inhospitable for many inhabitants. Statistics regularly show Kinshasa to be one of the least habitable cities in the world, just ahead of Damascus and Baghdad.

In one of the city’s most disreputable neighborhoods, Selembao, four young men are sitting in a concealed courtyard. A pane of glass is lying in front of them with brown powder on it. Next to the powder, they crumble white tablets to dust and then mix both substances. "The tablets need to be mixed in; they stimulate the appetite. If we didn’t include them, we wouldn’t eat anything for two days,” the youths explain.

The youths then form the powder into three short, thin lines with a razor blade, similar to how lines of cocaine are prepared. Most of it is snorted, with the glass pane being passed around the circle. The rest is crumbled into cigarettes and smoked. After taking it, the youths first become euphoric, but then they begin to move more and more slowly.

The four young men know what the powder supposedly contains: deposits and substances from catalytic converters, all of which has been scraped out of old cars and then processed into a drug. "We aren’t worried about it,” they say. Ultimately, they claim, they have nothing to lose. "Bombé helps us forget everything. In the West, they have bank accounts, I have nothing. With bombé everything is easier.” One of the users says it’s like a veil lying over you. And this for only a dollar per trip.

You don’t get much else for that amount in Kinshasa. A meal in a mid-range restaurant can easily cost 30 US dollars, while rents in the better neighborhoods approach those in Munich and Frankfurt. Kinshasa is among the most expensive cities in the world, at least for foreign workers. There are many super-rich residents, who drive through the wide streets of the business district in giant SUVs.

At the same time, though, the economy is in shambles, the country’s raw materials wealth reaches only a small elite and there is barely a middle class. A large part of the estimated 15 million inhabitants of this metropolis has no fixed job and no regular income, a number that has only grown throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

P2P Meth - Making Psychotics And Killing Off Clients Like Hotcakes...,

theatlantic |  Thus, as P2P meth spread nationwide, an unprecedented event took place in American drug use: Opioid addicts began to shift, en masse, to meth. Meth overdoses have risen rapidly in recent years, but they are much less common than opioid ODs—you don’t typically overdose and die on meth; you decay. By 2019, in the course of my reporting, I was routinely coming into contact with people in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and West Virginia who were using Suboxone to control their opiate cravings from long-standing addiction to pain pills and heroin, while using methamphetamine to get high. Massive supplies of cheap P2P meth had created demand for a stimulant out of a market for a depressant. In the process, traffickers forged a new population of mentally ill Americans.

Over the past year and a half, I’ve talked with meth addicts, counselors, and cops around the country. The people I spoke with told me stories nearly identical to Eric Barrera’s: P2P-meth use was quickly causing steep deterioration in mental health. The symptoms were always similar: violent paranoia, hallucinations, conspiracy theories, isolation, massive memory loss, jumbled speech. Methamphetamine is a neurotoxin—it damages the brain no matter how it is derived. But P2P meth seems to create a higher order of cerebral catastrophe. “I don’t know that I would even call it meth anymore,” Ken Vick, the director of a drug-treatment center in Kansas City, Missouri, told me. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are afflictions that begin in the young. Now people in their 30s and 40s with no prior history of mental illness seemed to be going mad.

Portland, Oregon, began seeing the flood of meth around 2013. By January 2020, the city had to close its downtown sobering station. The station had opened in 1985 as a place for alcoholics to sober up for six to eight hours, but it was unequipped to handle people addicted to P2P meth. “The degree of mental-health disturbance; the wave of psychosis; the profound, profound disorganization [is something] I’ve never seen before,” Rachel Solotaroff, the CEO of Central City Concern, the social-service nonprofit that ran the station, told me. Solotaroff was among the first people I spoke with. She sounded overwhelmed. “If they’re not raging and agitated, they can be completely noncommunicative. Treating addiction [relies] on your ability to have a connection with someone. But I’ve never experienced something like this—where there’s no way in to that person.”

From the April 2015 issue: The irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous

On Skid Row in Los Angeles, crack had been the drug of choice for decades. Dislodging it took some time. But by 2014 the new meth was everywhere. When that happened, “it seemed that people were losing their minds faster,” a Los Angeles Police Department beat officer named Deon Joseph told me. Joseph had worked Skid Row for 22 years. “They’d be okay when they were just using crack,” Joseph said. “Then in 2014, with meth, all of a sudden they became mentally ill. They deteriorated into mental illness faster than I ever saw with crack cocaine.”

Susan Partovi has been a physician for homeless people in Los Angeles since 2003. She noticed increasing mental illness—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder—at her clinics around the city starting in about 2012. She was soon astonished by “how many severely mentally ill people were out there,” Partovi told me. “Now almost everyone we see when we do homeless outreach on the streets is on meth. Meth may now be causing long-term psychosis, similar to schizophrenia, that lasts even after they’re not using anymore.”

I called James Mahoney, a neuropsychologist at West Virginia University who had studied the effects of ephedrine meth on the brain in the early 2000s at UCLA. The psychosis he saw then was bad, he said, but it frequently appeared to be the result of extended sleep deprivation. In 2016, Mahoney took a job as a drug researcher and specialist in WVU’s addiction clinic. Less than a year later, the P2P crystal meth from Mexico started showing up. Mahoney was inundated with meth patients who came in ranting, conversing with phantoms. “I can’t even compare it to what I was seeing at UCLA,” he told me. “Now we’re seeing it instantaneously, within hours, in people who just used: psychotic symptoms, hallucinations, delusions.”

In community after community, I heard stories like this. Southwest Virginia hadn’t seen much meth for almost a decade when suddenly, in about 2017, “we started to see people go into the state mental-hospital system who were just grossly psychotic,” Eric Greene, then a drug counselor in the area, told me. “Since then, it’s caused a crisis in our state mental-health hospitals. It’s difficult for the truly mentally ill to get care because the facilities are full of people who are on meth.”

 

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, Dying Time's Here....,

courier-journal |   Somewhere deep in Mexico's remote wilderness, the world’s most dangerous and wanted drug lord is hiding. If someone you love dies from an overdose tonight, he may very well be to blame.

He's called "El Mencho."

And though few Americans know his name, authorities promise they soon will.

Rubén "Nemesio" Oseguera Cervantes is the leader of Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación, better known as CJNG. With a $10 million reward on his head, he’s on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Most Wanted list.

El Mencho’s powerful international syndicate is flooding the U.S. with thousands of kilos of methamphetamines, heroin, cocaine and fentanyl every year — despite being targeted repeatedly by undercover stings, busts and lengthy investigations.

The unending stream of narcotics has contributed to this country’s unprecedented addiction crisis, devastating families and killing more than 300,000 people since 2013.

CJNG’s rapid rise heralds the latest chapter in a generations-old drug war in which Mexican cartels are battling to supply Americans’ insatiable demand for narcotics.

A nine-month Courier Journal investigation reveals how CJNG's reach has spread across the U.S. in the past five years, overwhelming cities and small towns with massive amounts of drugs.

kctv5 |   As the officer in charge of COMBAT, Jackson County’s Drug Trafficking Task Force Dan Cumming deals with a lot of dangerous people.

“About 100% of what we recover, if you follow it back far enough up the drug train so to speak, comes from Mexico and is cartel related,” Cummings said.

Just last week, COMBAT worked a case at the request of Independence police.

A tip led them to a Kansas City, Missouri street where a search warrant led to the seizure of tires filled with meth.

“My guess is that’s the way it was shipped from Mexico to Kansas City,” Cummings said.

Cartels get creative when smuggling drugs in customs and border protection has a few recent examples.

Fentanyl in a vehicle transmission, heroine in a gas tank, marijuana inside a car door and cocaine in clay figurines.

Cummings says he’s seeing more cartel related drug busts in Kansas City now than he has in his 35 plus years in law enforcement.

“We switched from meth labs to Mexican cartels,” Cummings said.

kmbc |   Two Mexican nationals have been sentenced in federal court for their roles in a conspiracy that distributed more than 14 kilograms of heroin in the Kansas City metropolitan area, some of which is believed to have resulted in overdoses and deaths.

Julian Felix-Aguirre, 46, and Martin Missael Puerta-Navarro, 38, were sentenced in separate hearings before U.S. District Judge Gary A. Fenner on Wednesday. Felix-Aguirre was sentenced to 24 years and seven months in federal prison without parole. Pueta-Navarro was sentenced to 14 years and eight months in federal prison without parole.

fox4kc |  "No where is immune," said Erik Smith with the Drug Enforcement Administration. "There are people who become dependent on controlled substances and have need to satisfy that addiction, and any place there is a consumer, an addict or user, somebody will supply that drug for that."

The DEA special agent in charge said feeding the demand for drugs in Johnson County goes well beyond teenage drug dealers.

Smith said Mexican cartels really are living here in Johnson County.

"Historically, a decade ago, two decades ago, a lot of cartels would limit themselves to the inner city," he said. "But as they become more established and they become more wealthy, it's quite common to see them branching out into suburban areas including Johnson County."

Psychic Dictatorship in America

wikipedia |  The "I AM" Activity was founded by Guy Ballard (pseudonym Godfre Ray King) in the early 1930s. Ballard was well-read in theosophy and its offshoots, and while hiking on Mount Shasta looking for a supposed Esoteric Brotherhood, he said that he had encountered a man who introduced himself as Saint Germain, (as indicated in a historic account in the published book Unveiled Mysteries). Saint Germain is also known as the Comte de Saint-Germain, a historical 18th-century alchemist and a regular component of theosophical religions.^[3]

The Ballards said they began talking to the Ascended Masters regularly. They founded a publishing house, Saint Germain Press, to publish their books and began training people to spread their messages across the United States. These training sessions and "Conclaves" were held throughout the United States and were open to the general public and free of charge. A front page story in a 1938 edition of the Chicago Herald and Examiner noted that the Ballards "do not take up collections or ask for funds".[9]

 Some of the original members of I AM were recruited from the ranks of William Dudley Pelley’s organization the Silver Shirts.^{[citation needed]} Meetings became limited to members only after hecklers began disrupting their open meetings.^[2][3] Over their lifetimes, the Ballard's recorded nearly 4,000 Live dictations, which they said were from the Ascended Masters.^[1] Guy Ballard, his wife Edna, and later his son Donald became the sole "Accredited Messengers" of the Ascended Masters.^[3]


 

Chapter3PsychicDictatorship | Within a period of less than a decade, America has seen the rise and growth of two remarkable movements which bear an odd resemblance to each other.

William Dudley Pelley's "Silver Shirts of America," the first of the two movements, started originally simply as a metaphysical venture, the result of a personal psychic experience, which strangely enough, occurred while residing at a mountain cottage in California.

The Ballard "Mighty I AM" movement, as we have seen, started the same way, with its originator claiming his first contact with Comte de St. Germain on the side of a mountain in California.

The recent reports of the House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, under the chairmanship of Martin Dies of Texas, have given the Pelley Silver Shirt movement front-page headlines, revealing to the public that for years it has not been a "metaphysical" organization as in the beginning, but is a political body which the Dies Committee believes to be un-American in that it is included in the "Nazi-Fascist groups" engaged in "aping the methods of foreign dictators" and attempting "to bring about a radical change in the American form of government." (Associated Press Dispatch, August 31, 1939.)

This book will reveal that the Ballard cult, too, is really a political movement and that its metaphysics, among other things, is largely engaged in an effort to bring about a weird sort of government in the United States.

The Pelley organization, as a matter of fact, supplied the pattern for some of the Ballard work, and evidence supporting this will soon be given. The Ballards, however, kept out of their movement the Silver Shirts' well-known hatred of the Jew, and have denounced other "enemies" instead.

There is so much similarity between the two organizations, it is well from the standpoint of psychological study and history to bring this out.

Pelley was a writer, a most clever wielder of the pen. Back in 1917 he was in the Orient on what he states to have been Christian missionary work; and after varied experiences there, he returned in 1919 to the United States to resume his writings and newspaper career. Around this time he became interested, he says, in "Secret Service investigations," and claimed to have had "contacts with some of the biggest men in the Hoover administration."

Ballard in his later years became also a writer, claims to have spent a couple of years in the Orient, and his "Secret Service connections" and his "Government contacts" are most remarkable, as we shall find.

In 1929 Pelley wrote the article which publicized his name throughout the nation. It was the story of a personal psychic experience entitled "Seven Minutes in Eternity," in which he related how, while residing at a lonely bungalow in the Sierra Madre Mountains near Pasadena California, he suddenly one night left his physical body lying on the bed and consciously soared away into that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler is supposed to return. But Pelley did return, and he told a graphic story of his sojourn there. Later he published messages purporting to come from "Masters," who began to direct and influence his new life work.

Similarly, Messenger Ballard, shortly after the appearance of the Pelley article, wrote up his own psychic experiences, which came to him in 1930, he said, while living at a lodge at the foot of a California mountain. He, too, left his body, and great and mighty "Ascended" Masters dictated marvelous discourses to him.

The American Magazine, which had published the Pelley story, was almost swamped, we understand, with mail in regard to it. It appears that the whole country at that time was having psychic experiences, and overnight almost Pelley had a tremendous following. All the letter-writing psychics in the land, it seems, wrote in giving their own personal experiences--and called for more from the fluent and graphic Pelley.

Obligingly, the new metaphysical leader gave his readers plenty of them, as indeed has the leader of the Mighty I AM cult which followed so soon after the start of Pelleyism.

Pelley's magazine, then named "The New Liberator," was started--an artistic but rather lurid creation--and he filled it with occult articles by himself and psychic messages from great "Masters." But never were they as numerous and as notorious as the Ballard "Ascended Masters."

Gradually, Pelley's psychism took on a political coloring and flavor, and it wasn't long before he was publishing stirring ideas and plans about a "New Government" in America--as did Ballard shortly afterwards.

Political headquarters were established at Asheville, N.C. in 1932, and his "Foundation for Christian Economics" was started at about the time Ballard was assertedly receiving his religio-patriotic messages over the marvelous "Light and Sound Ray" at his home in Chicago.

At the beginning of 1933, Pelley started his now famous Silver Legion, and felt the egoic thrill of fascist rule over his legionnaires or "storm troops" organized in many parts of the country. In much the same way have the fascistic-minded leaders of the Mighty I AM cult organized their patriotic bands of Minute Men --the "storm troops" of the movement.

In the fall of 1936, after Pelley had recovered from certain adverse court decisions and indictments at Asheville, N.C., he organized his "Christian Party" and announced his candidacy for the President of the United States--an office to which it will be seen Ballard himself has felt himself peculiarly fitted!

Three and a half years later, after many vicissitudes of fortune and after some months of search for him by the Dies committee, Pelley in the early part of 1940 appeared before that committee to answer certain charges allegedly to the effect that "he is a racketeer engaged in mulcting thousands of dollars annually from his fanatical and misled followers and credulous people all over the United States and Canada and certain foreign countries." (Associated Press Dispatch , Jan. 3, 1940.)

It is not within the scope of this book to consider whether the Dies committee was or was not justified in making the above allegations concerning Pelley. We desire merely to point out the startling parallel between these two movements and to show by actual evidence that so far as the Ballard movement is concerned the Dies committee, if it had gone into the matter, could have brought out justifiably, we believe, similar charges against Saint Germain's "Mighty I AM" movement.

We shall complete the parallel between the two movements by quoting Associated Press Dispatch of February 8, 1940, giving an account of Pelley's appearance before the Dies committee:

"With a trace of wistfulness, William Dudley Pelley, leader of the Silver Shirts, told the Dies committee today that if his organization had succeeded in its purposes, he 'probably' would be in charge of the government now.

"And in that case, he continued, he 'probably' would have put into effect something resembling Adolf Hitler's policies with respect to the Jews, although he said he does not endorse Hitler's exact methods."

It is this Pelley Silver Shirt movement which Guy and Edna Ballard were particularly interested in previous to the publication of Unveiled Mysteries, and, as will be shown, they tried to build a foundation upon Pelley's organization in an effort to launch their own Mighty I AM movement.

In order to show this Silver Shirt background of the Ballard movement we shall now have to refer to a certain meeting which was held in the summer of 1934 at the Ballard home on 84th Place, Chicago.

To this meeting was invited the treasurer of the Pelley organization, some additional Pelleyites, and others interested in metaphysical and patriotic movements. It was the first regular ten-day class ever held by the Ballards, and it is important because what transpired there indicates clearly the early efforts of their invisible "Saint Germain" to lay plans for a "New Government" in America which was to be formed more of less along the line previously described by Pelley in his writings.

Pill City

vice |  When the Baltimore riots erupted in April 2015 after Freddie Gray's death in police custody, James "Brick" Feeney and Willie "Wax" Harris*, two tech-savvy teenagers with ties to Maryland's Black Guerrilla Family (BGF), saw opportunity. Using the chaos as cover, they managed to steal at least a million doses of prescription drugs and heroin from city pharmacies and rival dealers. But even if their caper was essentially an old-school, smash-and-grab-style theft, the teens had plans to sell the drugs in a more sophisticated manner: via the Dark Web, where pills went for upward of $100 each.

Leaning on location-based technology and encrypted messaging software, Brick envisioned their operation as an "Uber of drug dealing."

As the looted drugs were shipped up and down the East Coast, a spike in opiate overdoses in African American communities raised eyebrows, and the DEA and FBI eventually took notice. In his forthcoming book Pill City: How Two Honor Roll Students Foiled the Feds and Built a Drug Empire, veteran crime reporter Kevin Deutsch profiles the the teens' massively profitable scheme, which he contends had (distant) ties to El Chapo's Sinaloa cartel. 

Deutsch enjoyed incredible access to the two teens and some 300 other dealers, addicts, gang bangers, police, and drug-treatment specialists for the book. A reporter who prefers to work with his "feet on the ground," Deutsch saw the vicious effects of America's opioid epidemic in an urban setting. VICE talked to the journalist about how he wrapped his head around the technology in play, how opiates were never just a middle-class white problem, and where Brick and Wax are at now.

Unpaywall

filmsforaction  |  Getting blocked by a paywall can be irritating, especially if you’re trying to access peer-reviewed scientific research. Open access advocates would certainly think so. To paraphrase Richard from HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” who doesn’t want free information? Well, there may now be a way to get scientific publications for free — and it’s completely legal.

Open-source nonprofit Impactstory, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has developed a web browser plug-in called Unpaywall, and as the name suggests, it’s a way to get through to paywalled research papers for free.

“Now more than ever, humanity needs to access our collective knowledge, not hoard it behind paywalls,” according to Unpaywall’s website. “Lots of researchers feel the same; that’s why they upload their papers to free, legal servers online. We want to help bring that open access content to the masses.”

SUPER LEGAL

Unlike similar services that rely on means like automated web scraping, Unpaywall’s method of getting full-text access to scientific journals is totally legal. It scans a database of more than 90 million digital object identifiers (DOIs) for copies of papers that the researchers themselves have uploaded, whether on some pre-press servers or university websites. Unpaywall is also completely secure, as it doesn’t ask you for any personal information.

Best of all, to use the service, you just need to install the plug-in on your Chrome or Firefox desktop browser. A little lock symbol will appear every time you visit a journal article’s landing page. If the lock is green, you have access to a full-text copy of the article. A gold lock means an article already has open license access from the publisher.

“We’re able to deliver an OA copy to users more than half the time,” Jason Priem, one of Unpaywall’s creators, told The Chronicle of Higher Education. He’s excited for the service to hit critical mass: “That’s when people start thinking, ‘Hey, why are we paying millions of dollars to subscribe to tens of thousands of journals when our researchers have about a better-than-even chance of reading an article with no subscription at all?'”

Continuing High Strangeness in an Engineered Failed State

Newsweek |  Like many villages in Venezuela, Tocorón is being crushed by a national economic crisis. The government blames the collapse of oil prices and companies allegedly trying to sabotage President Nicolás Maduro. Others, however, blame a dependence on oil and years of socialist-inspired policies by Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez. Either way, the country is now plagued by chronic shortages, rampant crime and waves of looting.

Yet the villagers of Tocorón are lucky. They have an ally in their desperate daily scramble for food: the local prison. This facility has all the products big cities don’t: sugar and shampoo, diapers and deodorant, toothpaste and toilet paper—all of it for sale in a bizarre black market behind bars, which has citizens—at least those who can afford it—trying to enter prison for food.

“Locals come here to do their shopping,” says Julio, an inmate at Tocorón, who like most inmates Newsweek interviewed asked only to be identified by his first name because of security reasons. “Sometimes we can’t even buy products because visitors always come first.”

Whereas most other prisons in Venezuela are on the verge of collapse, many inmates feel fortunate to have ended up in Tocorón. According to Carlos Nieto, the director of A Window to Liberty, a local nongovernmental organization, Venezuela’s prisons have close to 95,000 inmates—nine times more than the system can hold. The miserable conditions inmates face—poor sanitation, overpopulation and violence—have been exacerbated by the economic crisis. In some cases, inmates have been forced to eat stray dogs to avoid starvation.

Compared with such dire conditions, Tocorón seems like a country club. It has a gym, a pool, a nightclub, restaurants, small convenience stores and even a zoo. Sure, there’s violence, but there’s also plenty of food and no long lines. To pay for these amenities, the prison kingpin charges a monthly tax to every inmate: 1,500 bolivars—roughly 53 cents. 

the future of ethereum?

ethdev |  To research, design and build software that, as best as possible, facilitates, in a secure, decentralised and fair manner, the communication and automatically-enforced agreement between parties.

The facilitation will necessitate the building of tools to aid users and developers alike to utilise the back-end systems and make them as effective as possible in their facilities. It is anticipated that these tools will include the development of consumer-grade end-user components (the so-called Ethereum Browser) together with IDE-like components and associated tools. It will also mean the provision of certain high-level (on-the-system) functions, modules, examples, templates, standards and live services without which development and interoperation would suffer.

Security will likely entail use of strong cryptographic technologies, but could also use various other technologies including, but not limited to verifiable computation, computational steganography, complex-systems modelling and formal proof systems.

Fairness must be absolutely guaranteed throughout. We agree that this is pure technology and must make no affordances to the beliefs of any single actor against any other. The system must never even have the possibility of disadvantaging a single user or organisation over any other. We accept that full decentralisation is pivotal in accomplishing this.

Forward-enforceable agreement between arbitrary sets of parties is a core goal, however to achieve this goal, parties must be able to determine the existence and volition of the other. Communication methods must be provided, on the same technological basis, to facilitate this.

It is anticipated that the use of consensus-based blockchain technology using a Turing-complete VM within its transaction resolver and an arbitrarily large state space, such as that first proposed by Buterin (2013) and an evolution of which was formalised by Wood (2014) will be pivotal in the initial delivery.

It is also anticipated that additional research will need to be conducted, both internally and externally in order to deliver solutions of increasing concordance with these broad goals.

urban density applied intensity: future time orientation exemplified

Ed Dunn's Global Urban Collective

coopetition...,

wikipedia | Coopetition or Co-opetition (sometimes spelled "coopertition" or "co-opertition") is a neologism coined to describe cooperative competition. Coopetition is a portmanteau of cooperation and competition.

Basic principles of co-opetitive structures have been described in game theory, a scientific field that received more attention with the book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944 and the works of John Forbes Nash on non-cooperative games. It is also applied in the fields of political science and economics and even universally [works of V. Frank Asaro, J.D.: Universal Co-opetition,2011, and The Tortoise Shell Code, novel, 2012].

Coopetition occurs when companies interact with partial congruence of interests. They cooperate with each other to reach a higher value creation if compared to the value created without interaction, and struggle to achieve competitive advantage.

Often coopetition takes place when companies that are in the same market work together in the exploration of knowledge and research of new products, at the same time that they compete for market-share of their products and in the exploitation of the knowledge created. In this case, the interactions occur simultaneously and in different levels in the value chain. This is the case of the arrangement between PSA Peugeot Citroën and Toyota to share components for a new city car - simultaneously sold as the Peugeot 107, the Toyota Aygo, and the Citroën C1, where companies save money on shared costs while remaining fiercely competitive in other areas. Several advantages can be foreseen, as cost reductions, resources complementarity and technological transfer. Some difficulties also exist, as distribution of control, equity in risk, complementary needs and trust. Not only two companies can interact within a coopetitive environment, but several partnerships among competitors are possible.

why black market entrepreneurs matter to the global economy

Wired | Not many people think of shantytowns, illegal street vendors, and unlicensed roadside hawkers as major economic players. But according to journalist Robert Neuwirth, that’s exactly what they’ve become. In his new book, Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, Neuwirth points out that small, illegal, off-the-books businesses collectively account for trillions of dollars in commerce and employ fully half the world’s workers. Further, he says, these enterprises are critical sources of entrepreneurialism, innovation, and self-reliance. And the globe’s gray and black markets have grown during the international recession, adding jobs, increasing sales, and improving the lives of hundreds of millions. It’s time, Neuwirth says, for the developed world to wake up to what those who are working in the shadows of globalization have to offer. We asked him how these tiny enterprises got to be such big business.

Wired: You refer to the untaxed, unlicensed, and unregulated economies of the world as System D. What does that mean?

Robert Neuwirth:There’s a French word for someone who’s self-reliant or ingenious: débrouillard. This got sort of mutated in the postcolonial areas of Africa and the Caribbean to refer to the street economy, which is called l’économie de la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy, if you will. I decided to use this term myself—shortening it to System D—because it’s a less pejorative way of referring to what has traditionally been called the informal economy or black market or even underground economy. I’m basically using the term to refer to all the economic activity that flies under the radar of government. So, unregistered, unregulated, untaxed, but not outright criminal—I don’t include gun-running, drugs, human trafficking, or things like that.
“There are the guys who sneak stuff out of the port. The guys who get it across the border. The truck loaders and unloaders. All working under the table.”

Wired: Certainly the people who make their living from illegal street stalls don’t see themselves as criminals.

Neuwirth: Not at all. They see themselves as supporting their family, hiring people, and putting their relatives through school—all without any help from the government or aid networks.

Wired: The sheer scale of System D is mind-blowing.

Neuwirth: Yeah. If you think of System D as having a collective GDP, it would be on the order of $10 trillion a year. That’s a very rough calculation, which is almost certainly on the low side. If System D were a country, it would have the second-largest economy on earth, after the United States.

Wired: And it’s growing?

Neuwirth: Absolutely. In most developing countries, it’s the only part of the economy that is growing. It has been growing every year for the past two decades while the legal economy has kind of stagnated.

Wired: Why?

Neuwirth: Because it’s based purely on unfettered entrepreneurialism. Law-abiding companies in the developing world often have to work through all sorts of red tape and corruption. The System D enterprises avoid all that. It’s also an economy based on providing things that the mass of people can afford—not on high prices and large profit margins. It grows simply because people have to keep consuming—they have to keep eating, they have to keep clothing themselves. And that’s unaffected by global downturns and upturns.

Wired: Why should we care?

Neuwirth: Half the workers of the world are part of System D. By 2020, that will be up to two-thirds. So, we’re talking about the majority of the people on the planet. In simple pragmatic terms, we’ve got to care about that. Fist tap Dale.

The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network

ArsTechnica | A group of Internet activists gathered last week in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel to begin planning an ambitious project—they hope to overcome electronic surveillance and censorship by creating a whole new Internet. The group, which coordinates its efforts through the Reddit social networking site, calls its endeavor The Darknet Project (TDP).

The goal behind the project is to create a global darknet, a decentralized web of interconnected wireless mesh networks that operate independently of each other and the conventional internet. In a wireless mesh network, individual nodes can relay data for other nodes, ensuring that the routing of data remains robust as nodes on the network are added and removed. The idea behind TDP is that such a network would be resistant to censorship and shutdown because there would be no central point of control over the infrastructure.

"Basically, the goal of the darknet plan project is to create an alternative, more free internet through a global mesh network," explained a TDP organizer who goes by the Internet handle 'Wolfeater.' "To accomplish this, we will establish local meshes and connect them via current infrastructure until our infrastructure begins to reach other meshes."

TDP seems to have been influenced in part by an earlier unofficial effort launched by the Internet group Anonymous called Operation Mesh. The short-lived operation, which was conceived as a response to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and its potential impact on Internet infrastructure, called for supporters to create a parallel Internet of wireless mesh networks.

The idea is intriguing, but it poses major technical and logistical challenges, and it's hard to imagine that TDP will ever move beyond the conceptual stage. The group behind the effort is big on ideas but short on technical solutions for rolling out a practical implementation. During the IRC meeting, they struggled to coordinate a simple discussion about how to proceed with their agenda.

Still, despite TDP's dysfunctional organizational structure and lack of concrete strategy, their message seems to resonate with an audience on the Internet. And enthusiasm for mesh networks and decentralized Internet isn't isolated to the tinfoil hat crowd; serious government programs aim at producing similar technology. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported on a US government-funded program to create wireless mesh networks that could help dissidents circumvent political censorship in authoritarian countries.

As repressive governments continue to get better at thwarting circumvention of their censorship tools, dissidents will need more robust tools of their own to continue propagating information. The US State Department seems to view decentralized darknets as an important area of research for empowering free expression abroad.

A growing number of independent open source software projects have also emerged to fill the need for darknet technology. Many of these projects are backed by credible non-profit organizations and segments of the security research community. Such projects could find a useful ally in the TDP if they were to engage with the growing community and help mobilize its members in a constructive direction.

Unlike TDP, the original Operation Mesh coordinators had specific technologies in mind: they highlighted the I2P anonymous network layer software and the BATMAN ad-hoc wireless routing protocol as the best prospective candidates. Both projects are actively maintained and have modest communities, though the I2P website is currently down. Promising projects like Freenet develop software for building darknets on top of existing Internet infrastructure.

Another group that might benefit from broader community support is Serval, a project to create ad-hoc wireless mesh networks using regular smartphones. The group has recently developed a software prototype that runs on Android handsets. They are actively looking for volunteers to help test the software and participate in a number of other ways.

TDP members who are serious about fostering decentralized Internet infrastructure could meaningfully advance their goals by assisting any of the previously mentioned projects. The growing amount of popular grassroots support for Internet decentralization suggests that the momentum behind darknets is increasing. Fist tap Dale.

open-source online banking software

Cyclos | Cyclos is a project of the Dutch non profit organization STRO. Cyclos offers a complete on-line banking system with additional modules such as e-commerce and communication tools. Cyclos is currently available in ten languages and used worldwide by many organizations and communities. The Cyclos platform permits a de-centralization of banking services that can stimulate local trade and development. With the latest version it is possible to roll out mobile banking services using mobile channels such as SMS. Cyclos is published under the GPL (open source) license meaning that it can be downloaded for free and used at no cost.

The objective of the project is to develop open source complementary currency software that is easy to use and maintain, flexible, secure, and highly customizable. The Cyclos structure is entirely dynamic. This means that it is possible to 'build' a monetary system from scratch. Organizations that want a standard system can use the default database that comes with basic configurations and can be easily enhanced. Cyclos is used for mutual credit systems like LETS, Barter systems, administration of Micro credits, Time banks and backed currency systems such as a C3 (consumer and commerce circuit). Cyclos just started to be used as a back-end for mobile banking services in Africa, and various Universities are studying the possibility to use Cyclos as a campus payment system. Fist tap Dale.

web search by the people for the people...,

FSCONS: YaCy Demo from Michael Christen on Vimeo.

YaCy | YaCy is a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world's users.

Decentralization
Imagine if, rather than relying on the proprietary software of a large professional search engine operator, your search engine was run by many private computers which aren't under the control of any one company or individual. Well, that's what YaCy does! The resulting decentralized web search currently has about 1.4 billion documents in its index (and growing - download and install YaCy to help out!) and more than 600 peer operators contribute each month. About 130,000 search queries are performed with this network each day.

There are already several search networks based on YaCy: the two major networks are the 'freeworld' network (which is the default public network that you join when you load the standard installation of YaCy) and the Sciencenet of the Karlsruhe Institut of Technology which focuses on scientific content. Other YaCy networks exist as TOR hidden services, local intranet services and on WiFi networks too.
Installation is easy!

The installation takes only three minutes. Just download the release, decompress the package and run the start script. On linux you need OpenJDK6. You don't need to install external databases or a web server, everything is already included in YaCy. Fist tap Dale.