Bitcoin Adoption and the Path Forward

The world of Bitcoin and alternative cryptocurrencies are shaking up finance, payment services and State institutions around the globe. As a small, but growing community, cryptocurrency advocates recognize the value that this new decentralized, trustless system brings to the table. We can see the community that backs cryptocurrencies putting their real money where their mouth is, such as with the recent Ethereum sale of Ether, raising a minimum of 27 thousand bitcoin or 12+ million USD. This new type of crowdfunding and community support is what backs the crypto community like no other and as time proceeds, it is guaranteed that advocates will find themselves as the new leaders in a world of true freedom and autonomy from our current monopolized and bureaucratic scheme of State infringement. Bitcoin adoption and cryptocurrency advancement will depend upon we the people to push this new technology forward. As with the Internet, early skeptics barraged the concept of email and online shopping as something that only a few people would partake in. Marc Andreessen, American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer, notes in an interview with Vox.com, that skeptics of crypto today put the same criticism against it as they did with the Internet. Andreessen states that these common criticisms against bitcoin adoption are,

• It's for nerds. "Fine, you nerds can do what you want but normal people are never going to use this thing."
• It's completely decentralized, which means you can't trust it. No business is ever going to do anything on it because businesses won't work on an untrusted environment. There won't ever be any e-commerce.
• There will never be any internet payments. No one will put their credit card on the internet.
• It's an open-source kind of thing so there will be no Internet companies.
• It's got all these technical deficiencies. It's slow. It's unreliable. It doesn't work right. When you do a search, sometimes you get an answer back and sometimes you don't. Sometimes when you dial in you get a busy signal.
• What happen if your ISP goes out of business? Then you can't get back online.
• Once you get on the internet, even assuming you get on the internet, there's nothing to do. There's no content. Time magazine isn't online, the New York Times isn't online. It's just a bunch of nerd stuff. (Andreessen, Vox.com)¹

As clearly displayed by Andreessen, these criticisms have been evaporated almost completely since Bitcoin hit the scene in 2009. Initially, all one could do was trade BTC back and forth, with little else available for the "nerds" to do. However, faster than the Internet, bitcoin adoption has soared ahead, giving legitimacy to the "magical online currency" despite all the trials and tribulations. However, that does not mean we are out of the woods yet. As of late, the price of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have been tumbling, although not much indication gives reason to the average person as to why such a fall is occurring. With companies such as Dell.com, Overstock.com, Expedia.com, Newegg.com, Dish.com, Wikipedia.org, OKCupid.com, reddit.com and many more, the adoption rate is certainly picking up, but one must question what "picking up bitcoin" really means. Sadly, only a few of these companies and others are actually keeping bitcoin itself or a portion of it in true holdings, while the majority are simply converting out to fiat. As reddit user junkit33 notes,

The way merchants have adopted bitcoin is doing nothing but driving the price down. They're all immediately cashing out, so at best, it's net neutral for the bitcoin price. Realistically, some percentage of buyers are using bitcoin they already owned, so it's a net sell, and thus a decrease. None of these merchants really care about bitcoin, they just want to win the money of people who are eager to buy things with bitcoin.(junkit33, reddit.com/r/bitcoin)²

Expanding upon this point, we as a community need to push on merchants to truly embrace the crypto sphere for the benefits it offers. Having merchants adopt a platform of instant fiat conversion does not take crypto seriously and only aims to grab market share from BTC consumers, without supporting the system it purports to stand behind. Moreover, merchants need to show BTC users incentives by offering discounts and benefits on purchases, rather than simply allowing for bitcoin to be used. Incentives will drive consumer adoption, but without benefits, users see no real tangible difference in BTC and may in fact be at a loss due to lack of protection, fees from purchasing bitcoin and other variables. Some of the benefits merchant must understand for their own good are:

• You can make and receive payments using the Bitcoin network with almost no fees. In most cases, fees are not strictly required but they are recommended for faster confirmation of your transaction.
• Any business that accepts credit cards or PayPal knows the problem of payments that are later reversed. Chargeback frauds result in limited market reach and increased prices, which in turn penalizes customers. Bitcoin payments are irreversible and secure, meaning that the cost of fraud is no longer pushed onto the shoulders of the merchants.
• Bitcoins can be transferred from Africa to Canada in 10 minutes. In fact, bitcoins never have any real physical location, so it is possible to transfer as many of them anywhere with no limits, delays, or excessive fees. There are no intermediate banks to make you wait three business days.
• Bitcoin is an emerging market of new customers who are searching for ways to spend their bitcoins. Accepting them is a good way to get new customers and give your business some new visibility. Accepting a new payment method has often shown to be a clever practice for online businesses.
• Many organizations are required to produce accounting documents about their activity. Using Bitcoin allows you to offer the highest level of transparency since you can provide information your members can use to verify your balances and transactions. Non-profit organizations can also allow the public to see how much they receive in donations. (Bitcoin.org)³

Finally, we also must consider the fact that at this rate, 3,600 new coins are being introduced into the Bitcoin network everyday, meaning 1.5-3 million dollars worth of new coins are possibly being sold off. As these new coins come in, miners very well may try to offload them onto exchanges to pay for electricity and new mining rigs. While the price had been stable up until this point, meaning that new coins were being met with fresh money, the recent drop may show lack of engagement or fear from new regulations. Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle.com states,

...BitLicense is likely to have the opposite impact—radically limiting those who can participate in this industry, pushing firms offshore and into sometimes shadier jurisdictions. Furthermore, as currently written, it would be technically impossible to comply with the BitLicense proposal. Without some material changes, Circle will have no choice but to block New York customers from accessing our services.(Jeremy Allaire, Circle.com)⁴

With such intrusions by the State and bureaucrats worldwide, the community of crypto needs to take a stand and support efforts that bring Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies back to their initial goal of freedom from coercive, monopolized State enforcement of our most vital lifeline in the economy: money. Please check out some of these projects below to help restore freedom to the people and bring money back to its rightful owners:
Bitcoin
Dark Wallet
Mycelium Entropy
OpenBazaar
Tor
CoinDesk
Liberty.me
FreedomainRadio

1: http://www.vox.com/2014/6/30/5839436/marc-andreessen-on-bitcoin

2: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2dvlq3/lets_have_a_serious_discussion_as_to_wtf_is/cjti4g2

3: https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-for-businesses

4: https://www.circle.com/2014/08/13/thoughts-new-york-bitlicense-proposal/

Harrison Fischberg is a Bitcoin entrepreneur, writer and enthusiast.

Thanks for reading, please share! Sharing is caring!

Bitcoin and The Return to Free Markets

In order to understand how society has arrived at its current state, one must understand its past. Confucious said, “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.” and with this, one can understand how propaganda, through the State apparatus, has skewed and subjectivized everything in society. Orwellian double-speak is in full swing, with words holding contradictory meanings, effectively destroying wisdom, evidence and reason, allowing for the enlargement of our rulers. But with the advent of the Internet and now Bitcoin, the tides are quickly turning, showing these evils for what they truly are. As society has grown, understanding of property ownership and free-markets has allowed for the vast majority of human kind to flourish. A Yale study shows that,

We are in the midst of the fastest period of poverty reduction the world has ever seen. The global poverty rate, which stood at 25 percent in 2005, is ticking downwards at one to two percentage points a year, lifting around 70 million people – the population of Turkey or Thailand – out of destitution annually. Advances in human progress on such a scale are unprecedented, yet remain almost universally unacknowledged.” (Yale Study)¹ 

However, this does not mean we are out of the jungle. Regulation, taxation, inflation, confiscation and war are still in good health and gaining at an ever-faster pace. But, as with everything in life, each action has an equal and opposite reaction, with liberty and markets pushing against the regulation and domination that is so ever present in our lives. Bitcoin is leading the fight for true deregulation and giving back control of one’s money, property and resources at an astonishing rate. Thanks to the Internet, the double-speak that is so prevalent is being hacked away at an increasing pace. Famous Austrian economist Murray Rothbard notes that the,

“Free market is a summary term for an array of exchanges that take place in society.”

Bitcoin is now providing a platform for peaceful and voluntary exchanges to occur outside of the statist paradigm.
To show how Bitcoin is restoring the broken structure of peaceful exchange, it is important to note the difference between control and ownership. Ownership has degrees of control within it, but it does not truly retain the exclusive rights of control in full capacity. Control on the other hand has the complete package of exclusivity when it comes to property and this is where Bitcoin reigns king. For instance, one may claim to “own a house”, but this is more accurately stated as a “permission slip of partial control”, by State privilege. One may be able to occupy, arrange, destroy or discard a house, but in Western countries and others, property taxes exist as a defacto “right to use” grant from State institutions. Legitimate control is never allowed for those outside of the bureaucratic regime. The same intrusive and destructive measures apply to money and value mechanism.

This is best seen in the public/private relationship of central banking, where coercive control is instituted by States and prohibitions are established against all other forms of monies/currencies from competing with State functions. The most notable recent case with Bernard von NotHaus and Liberty Dollar. Control of money has been sized and any legitimate attempt by individual actors to opt-out is quickly snuffed out. Through manipulation of interest rates and legal tender laws, double-speak is seen again where the “Federal Open Market Committee” “goes to market” to “discover prices”. Obviously, this has nothing to do with the market operations of peaceful individuals and voluntary exchange. But now, individuals are taking a stance against such violations and are using Bitcoin to finally regain authentic control again of their resources and life.

With Bitcoin, the mechanism of freedom are finally being reverted back to cooperative market forces. Control of property is the true pinnacle of individual autonomy and with the Internet and Bitcoin shaking the statist world, sovereign peoples are now the sole controllers of their money and resources. Blockchain technology has revolutionized property rights, by allowing for mass disclosure of assets, property, value and resources on a trustless, decentralized, mathematically validated structure, which means individuals have direct control of what is theirs. To further elaborate, Murray Rothbard states that property,

…begins with the basic axiom of the “right to self-ownership.” The right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of each man, by virtue of his (or her) being a human being, to “own” his or her own body; that is, to control that body free of coercive interference. Since each individual must think, learn, value, and choose his or her ends and means in order to survive and flourish, the right to self-ownership gives man the right to perform these vital activities without being hampered and restricted by coercive molestation.” (Rothbard, Ethics of Liberty)²

Because of these inherent characteristics, Bitcoin finally allows for a pipeline out of the coercive State institution and provides a break-point for individuals to truly opt-out of the regressive and detrimental system of fiat and legislative domination.

With these crucial definitions put into place, one can now begin to understand how crypto is giving true control back to the individual and allowing for markets to flourish once again. We have seen a massive boom in the space of Bitcoin and now, with alt-coins, competition is growing at a spectacular rate, testing the market for which features and prospects are in demand and which are not. As these coins test the water for market demand, the crypto-space will expand and grow to satisfy all market participants. Andreas Antonopolous, Bitcoin enthusiast and entrepreneur states,

Once you break the link between a fixed market for these things – like we’ve had with publishing institutions or financial institutions – you allow anyone to use those as a tool of expression, and in response, people will start using them(bitcoin/alt-coins)…Once you look at it from that perspective, the question about how many alt-coins there will be is equivalent to the question of how many bloggers there will be on the Internet.“ (Andreas Antonopoulos)³

With all these points taken into account, one can truly begin to see how the waters are parting when it comes to State monopoly vs. free-market experimentation. For too long, the most crucial parts of society have been defined, occupied and manipulated by institutions such as the State, but with the Internet and the cryptospace finally in full bloom, the rulers are effectively trying to put a stranglehold on sand. As each individual takes charge of their life, property and money, another sand particle slips out and it is only a matter of time until the stranglehold squeezes its own body out of existence.

1: http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/little-notice-globalization-reduced-poverty

2: https://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p45

3: http://www.verymuchwow.com/2014/06/30/vmw-interviews-andreas-antonopoulos-july-2014/

Harrison Fischberg is a Bitcoin entrepreneur, writer and enthusiast.

The Truth about Bitcoin

Great video from a few months ago that is a must watch for anyone interested in Bitcoin. By Stefan Molyneux

m͏̺͓̲̥̪í͇͔̠ś̷͎̹̲̻̻̘̝t̞̖͍͚̤k̥̞à̸͕̮͍͉̹̰͚̰ẹ̶̢̪s͏̨͈̙̹̜͚̲ are everywhere!

More from Vsauce, more m͏̺͓̲̥̪í͇͔̠ś̷͎̹̲̻̻̘̝t̞̖͍͚̤k̥̞à̸͕̮͍͉̹̰͚̰ẹ̶̢̪s͏̨͈̙̹̜͚̲

Illusions, the end of history and perception!

Vsauce once again gives us an amazing video with thought provoking ideas and theories. Enjoy!

Bitcoin vs. Gold: The Future of Money - Peter Schiff Debates Stefan Molyneux

Interesting and fun debate between Peter Schiff of EuroPac and Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio. Enjoy and remain objective!

Information Liberated: Jeffrey Tucker on How Digital Media Subverts Government Power

From Reason.tv.

The Biggest Threat to Minimum Wage Workers Everywhere

From Zerohedge: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-12/biggest-threat-minimum-wage-restaurant-workers-everywhere

Over the past year, unionized restaurant workers across numerous fast-food chains but mostly at McDonalds, expressed their dissatisfaction with compensation levels by striking at increasingly more frequent intervals - a sentiment that has been facilitated by the president himself and his ever more frequent appeals for a raise in the minimum wage. Unfortunately, as we have pointed out previously, in the context of corporations that have given up on growing the top line (as virtually all free cash goes into stock buybacks and dividends and none into growth capex), and in pursuit of a rising bottom line, employee wages are the one variable cost that corporations will touch last of all. But what's worse, these same unionized employees have zero negotiating leverage.

Perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in the recent strategy of smoothie retailer Jamba Juice, which in order to battle a 4% drop in Q3 same store sales has decided to radically transform its entire retailing strategy by getting rid of labor, cheap, part-time or otherwise, altogether. Presenting the biggest threat to minimum-wage restaurant workers everywhere: the JambaGo self-serve machine that just made the vast majority of Jamba's employees obsolete. Coming soon to a fast-food retailer near you.

Why did Jamba just make its retail sales force obsolete? Part of the problem is heightened competition: McDonald’s has entered the smoothie market, and others like Dairy Queen and Panera spent the summer promoting their rival drinks. Which means even less top-line growth potential. It also means that in order to push more of the top line straight to earnings, and bypass variable costs, a problem that will be faced by increasingly more corporations, Jamba's corner office had no choice but to unleash JambaGo.

Bloomberg reports:

The smoothie chain is hoping to see improvement from something it calls “JambaGo,” a self-serve machine that can be installed in cafeterias, schools, and convenience stores. Jamba Juice makes money by selling the prepackaged, pre-blended smoothie ingredients to JambaGo vendors, like a soda maker selling syrup to the owner of a soda fountain. The advantages: Jamba doesn’t need to build a store and the labor costs are much lower compared with hiring staff to concoct made-to-order drinks.

The company expects this model to help expand its brand more quickly and cheaply. Last quarter, however, revenue from the JambaGo program amounted to just about $400,000. But having recently landed a deal with Target (TGT) to put JambaGo machines in 1,000 Target Cafés, the company will soon have installed more than 1,800 machines (up from only 404 at the start of 2013). By contrast, there are currently about 850 Jamba Juice stores.

Based on a goal of $2,000 in annual revenue per JambaGo, the rough math for 1,800 machines is $3.6 million—a decent boost for a company that took in $228.8 million in revenue last year. Another 1,000 are planned for 2014, which would bring in another $2 million in annual revenue.

Here's what happens next: Jamba will do what every other company does to demonstrate that its radical strategy is successful - fudge the numbers and beat EPS for several quarters. This will happen even if JambaGo is ultimately yet another loss leader. However, its peers will watch closely and soon decide to roll out their own version of just this: a self-contained dispenser of a la carte prepared fast-food food, either liquid or solid, and in the process let go tens of thousands of their own minimum-wage employees, also known to shareholders as "costs."

What happens after that should be clear to everyone: more unemployment, lower wages for the remaining employees, worse worker morale, but even higher profits to holders of capital. And so on. Because in a world in which technology makes the unqualified worker utterely irrelevant, this is what is known as "progress."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From Harrison Fischberg:

It is important to note the hypocrisy and more accurately, the fundamental misunderstanding in regards to economics, of the common person. Generally speaking, individuals prefer to have the best quality product, at the lowest quality price. One would be hard pressed to find an individual who would buy the exact same product at a 10 fold price increase, when the option to buy it 10 fold cheaper is available. When shopping, people search for the best deal and this is not only "proven" a priori but can be seen empirically through Cyber Monday, Black Friday and sales in general. However, the issue comes forth when people want to pay the lowest possible prices for goods, but then find it morally repugnant for a person to work below a certain wage. What they are missing however is that, A) wages are prices and B) the action of the consumer is what drives the fundamental structure. If people were happy paying 30 dollars for a meal at Burger King, then those who work for BK most certainly could receive a higher wage. However, this simply isn't the case since there are other options to BK and the competition for best product, at the best price, will force BK to lower its prices as well as the wage they pay out. When the consumer realizes that it is they who form and orient the market, will things sort out. But until then, the call for government intervention will not fix a thing, leading companies to move towards automated machines. This is what the consumer is actually calling for. They just don't realize it.

Your Name!

More Vsauce!

Is Saving Money Bad For The Economy?

Great post from ZeroHedge on frugality and the value of thrift. Enjoy!


Submitted by Gregory Bresinger via the Ludwig von Mises Institute,

Our grandparents believed in the value of thrift, but many of their grandchildren don’t.

That’s because cultural and economic values have changed dramatically over the last generations as political and media elites have convinced many Americans that saving is passé. So today, under the influence of Keynesian economists who champion government spending and high levels of consumption, thrift has been devalued.

“The growth in wealth, so far from being dependent on the abstinence [savings] of the rich, as is commonly supposed, is more likely to be impeded by it,” according to John Maynard Keynes’sThe General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

“The more virtuous we are, the more determinedly thrifty, the more obstinately orthodox in our national and personal finance, the more incomes will have to fall,” he writes. “Saving,” Keynes wrote in his Treatise on Money, “is the act of the individual consumer and consists in the negative act of refraining from spending the whole of his current income on consumption.”

But saving, pace Keynes, isn’t “negative.” It is deferred consumption. “The great producing countries are the great consuming countries,” writes Benjamin Anderson in Economics and the Public Welfare. More importantly, high rates of savings will lead to higher productivity, which would benefit our children and grandchildren, classical and Austrian economists have explained.

“We are the lucky heirs of our fathers and forefathers whose saving has accumulated the capital goods with the aid of which we are working today,” wrote Ludwig von Mises inHuman Action. Saving, ultimately, is consumption, writes Detley S. Schlichter in Paper Money Collapse. “By setting aside some resources for meeting financial consumption needs, we invest them.”

Nevertheless, Keynesian ideas dominate the Obama administration and mass media. Most politicians, including Republicans who often pretend to be friends of thrift and self-improvement, are tacit or overt Keynesians. That’s because politicians, whether they have studied Keynes or not, generally love the idea of cheap money. Most delight in spending taxpayer dollars. They believe this is the way elections are won.

This Keynesian dominance has led to dramatic economic and cultural changes. These changes have been going on in America for over a half century. For instance, the United States has gone from a nation with one of the highest rates of savings during the 20s to having one of the lowest rates among major industrial nations today.

Yet penalizing thrift, the lifeblood of job creation and better tools that make current workers more efficient, has hurt the nation’s ability to grow and employ millions of young people looking for jobs. That’s because Keynesianism, according to its modern interpreters, amounts to a celebration of consumption. It is a belief that government spending combined with low savings rates lead to permanent booms.

It is the government’s role, Keynes’s followers believe, to keep the boom going through spending. So it is consumption, not supply, that makes a successful economy, they say.

Mainstream media rehashes the message that the consumer, not the producer, is the biggest part of the economy. Politicians agree.

As the economy started to slow down in 2006, President Bush urged Americans to “go shopping more.” Newsweek, in a headline story several years ago, told Americans to “Stop Saving Now.”

This anti-saving philosophy is more than just bad macro-economics. It is the doctrine that has come to take over economic thinking, now dominated in the popular media by Keynesian economists such as Paul Krugman. In his latest book, End This Depression Now, he explains why growth rates are low. The administration hasn’t been sufficiently Keynesian enough. Obama’s stimulus, he complains, was on a “wholly inadequate scale.”

Keynesians of all stripes have constantly urged Americans, especially the government, to spend. The effect of this change has been more than numbers. It also changed how many Americans see the path to self-improvement. Joe Sixpack, the average American who once believed that through thrift, hard work and discipline he could save his way to a better life for his family, is the victim. Keynesian economists and mainstream media commentators often depict savers as selfish people.

Even the average person with his savings account, living in a Brooklyn tenement (I’m speaking of bus driver Ralph Kramden from the iconic television series The Honeymooners) must pay taxes on his measly $75 savings account. This anti-savings mentality has amazed some from nations where savings are viewed positively.

A former U.S. Commerce Secretary was asked by his Japanese counterpart in the 1970s in Pete Peterson’s book Facing Up, “please explain putting the highest taxes on what you call unearned income. We have always assumed that income from savings was the most earned of all. It is hard work to save, don’t you think?”

Tens of millions of baby boomers aren’t doing the hard work. They have little or no savings. How will Keynes and his scions’ misguided policies provide a decent standard of living for them?

America’s personal savings rate declined some 56 percent over the past 50 years from 1963-2012, according to the 2013 Economic Report of the President. The personal savings rate averaged just 3.8 percent in the decade between 2003 and 2012. That’s a big drop compared to the 1963-1972 period when it was 8.7 percent.

However, it’s worse than that. Since the end of last year, the personal savings rate has declined some more, dipping to 2.5 percent in March and April, according to the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Even President Obama’s economic report, in documenting that savings rates are low, concedes that the recovery that began some four years ago is weak. The recovery, according to the president’s report, trails previous ones.

“From 1960 to 2007, the U.S. economy had seven recessions, and the annual rate of growth of real GDP during the 12 quarters following these recessions was 4.2 percent,” the presidential report said. “In contrast, during the 12 quarters following the trough in the second quarter of 2009, the average annual rate of growth of real GDP was 2.2 percent. After three years of recovery, the cumulative growth of real GDP was 6.3 percentage points lower than the average value for the earlier post-1960 recessions.”

Meanwhile, savers are penalized for their thrift. The Fed’s policies mean they receive almost nothing in interest.

Remarkably, President Obama, in the same report, in a move Keynes would have likely applauded, proposes to put a cap on qualified retirement plan balances. Apparently, the president agrees saving is “a negative act.”

These anti-saving policies should change, some say. A better tax code, one that promotes and doesn’t tax savings to death, will “mean more innovation, job creation and higher wages,” U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp noted when I interviewed him for an article in the New York Post.

“When workers see paychecks start to rise again,” Camp adds, “they will be better able to make decisions that best serve the financial needs of their family — including building up their savings.”

But that doesn’t necessarily mean Camp and others will now reject Keynes. Plenty of Republicans— consciously or unconsciously — have shown themselves to be philosophical followers of Keynes. And Camp, working on an overhaul of the tax code, might consider a logical measure: Why not drop all taxes on a savings and investment as a way to reverse decades of destructive economic policy?

That could be the most important decision for a generation of young people without work because doesn’t generate enough capital. It could also be critical for their parents who approach a retirement with a falling standard of living.

Despite the Keynesian sentiments of much of our political and media elites, we owe it to our grandparents to re-learn the lessons of thrift.

What Color is A Mirror?

Another awesome video by Vsauce

Who owns the Moon and Property Rights

As usual, Vsauce brings us another awesome video about who owns the moon, interesting facts about ownership in space and the absurdity that lies at the heart of the UN and governments around the world, dictating intergalactic law... Maybe these folks should focus on getting planet Earth in shape before worrying about who can own what outside of our pale blue dot.

Alan Moore on the current state of being a celebrity

Time to get Bored

Drop Culture

A great clip by Tragedy and Hope, with message taken from Terence McKenna speech. Enjoy and be.

I Loved It... I Loved it All

Essay by Edward Abbey "I Loved it...I Loved it All" from Ned Judge on Vimeo.

A fantastic short film that shows the Arches National Park through the eyes of Ed Abbey, a thoughtful and curious man, all with a beautiful life lesson tied in. Enjoy it.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An eight minute film essay that I co-produced and directed with Ed Abbey in 1985. At the time I was working for a network magazine show. The executive producer took me to lunch one day. He told me that he was having trouble with his son who was 18. The son thought his dad was a corporate whore. He had told his father if he had any balls at all he’d put Ed Abbey on his show. That’s why the EP was talking to me. Would I see if it was possible? I had an acquaintance who knew Ed and he passed the request along. Ed responded that he’d give it a try. He signed the contract and wrote a script. We met in Moab and went out to Arches National Park to shoot some practice sessions with a home video camera. We would review them at the motel in the evening. After a day or two, Ed was feeling pretty comfortable on camera so we scheduled the shoot. We were all happy with the way it went. But then we ran head-on into network reality. Roger Mudd, the show’s host, was extremely negative about putting an “eco-terrorist” on the show. The executive producer caved (his son was right about him apparently). So this Abbey essay was put on the shelf and never aired. Abbey died 3 years later in March 1989.

The Power of Conformity

The Elevator Experiment from Miguel Paulo Flores on Vimeo.
A group conformity experiment that relates to Solomon Asch's experiment.

While many of us (and the laughing audience too) believe that "I would never do such a thing!", the reality of conformity and standardization is obvious. With too wide a variation, productivity and efficiency become an issue and hampers growth (economically and socially). Because of this, we as a species have evolved within degree to conform for survival and "social" reasons. Conformity enables the human mind  to construct easy to understand concepts, from very complex and complicated realities. But with this comes the loss of spirit, the loss of individuality. So next time, when out shopping or with friends, think about this clip and ask yourself, "Are you turning around because everyone else is?"

A short film about love, the male brain and boobies.

FLAGPOLE from Matt Kazman on Vimeo.
A serious short film.
About boners and salami nipples.

* FINALIST - 38th Student Academy Awards
* OFFICIAL SELECTION - 2011 Palm Springs International ShortFest
* OFFICIAL SELECTION - 37th Seattle International Film Festival [SIFF]
* OFFICIAL SELECTION - 2011 Austin Film Festival

written & directed by MATT KAZMAN
starring DAVID THOMPSON

Entrapenureship and Coffee

Tellason Stories: Meet Jeremy from Vertical Online on Vimeo.
In the second film for our Tellason series we're featuring Jeremy Tooker. Jeremy is a coffee craftsman and the owner of Four Barrel Coffee in San Francisco. He is dedicated to sourcing the best seasonal single-farm-origin beans from around the world and coupling that with impeccable roasting. We also learned that he is a tireless entrepreneur who regularly works 60-80 hours a week in pursuit of the perfect cup of coffee.

Jeremy Tooker
http://fourbarrelcoffee.com/
http://themillsf.com

Director: Logan Kelsey
http://www.verticalonline.com

--
Stories by
http://www.tellason.com

I know Jeffery Tucker will certainly enjoy this! (http://lfb.org/)

The future will liberate

Peter Diamandis is an engineer, entrepreneur visionary and all around inspiring person. As the founder of the X-PRIZE Foundation and Singularity University, he stands at the forefront for the new wave of technological advancement coming our way. Check out the video above to catch a glimpse at our bright and abundant future.