To CHANGE or Not to Change - That is the question.

in #life7 years ago (edited)


source: appreciatinglife.org

"If you want to change the world,
start with yourself."

and

"Be the Change you want to see in the world."

-Mahatma Gandhi

These are such deep words from someone who really made a positive difference. His conviction and perseverance is an example that many, including myself, look up to and admire. In many ways what the world needs now more than ever are people like him.


source: wikipedia.org

Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi was an Indian activist who was the leader of the Indian independence movement against British rule. Utilizing nonviolent civil disobedience, Gandhi led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the globe. He lived a modest life in a self-sufficient residential community and wore the traditional Indian dhoti and shawl, woven with yarn hand-spun on a charkha. He ate simple vegetarian food and also did long fasts as a means of self-purification and on political protests.

With his book Hind Swaraj in 1909, Gandhi declared that British rule was established in India with the co-operation of Indians and had survived only because of this co-operation. If Indians refused to co-operate, British rule would collapse. In February 1919, Gandhi cautioned the Viceroy of India with a cable communication that if the British were to pass the Rowlatt Act, he will appeal Indians to start civil disobedience.

Gandhi gained the leadership of the Congress in 1920 and began making demands, until on January 26th, 1930, the Indian National Congress declared independence for India. The British Empire did not recognize that declaration, but began negotiations. Gandhi was famous for leading Indians to challenge the British-imposed salt tax with the 250 mile Dandi Salt March that year.

The Congress took more a role in provincial government in the late 1930s. Both Gandhi and the Congress withdrew their support of the Raj when the Viceroy declared war on Germany in September 1939 without consultation. Tensions escalated until Gandhi demanded immediate independence in 1942 and the British responded by imprisoning him and tens of thousands of Congress leaders. He called for Britain to Quit India in 1942. He was imprisoned for many years on many occasions in both South Africa and India. After decades of Gandhi's persistence, finally in August 1947 Britain granted India their independence.

source: appreciatinglife.org

Solutions for Change

Gandhi battled the status quo in his day both politically and peacefully to help win independence for India. We can follow his example in new ways by collectively using Blockchain technology, along with AI (Artificial Intelligence), to enable more independence and freedom for all humanity.

These new disruptive technologies offer solutions to the existing financial system, which can achieve the change we dream of in many ways that benefit everyone. It provides the capability of evolving the entire global financial system into a new distributed storage and exchange of value that humanity has never seen before. More specifically, it could be used to flip things around from the current debt based system of scarcity into a resourced based system of abundance, where the new paradigm becomes giving to one another in ways that fosters real freedom, peace, brotherly love and respect. The question is are we ready for this change? To CHANGE or Not to Change - That is the question.

Please share any thoughts and ideas you may have.

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A few other relative posts I've shared on steemit:

TO REGULATE OR NOT TO REGULATE? That is the question.
Why Stellar Lumens (XLM/STR) is One of My Favorite Crypto Currencies

Have an awesome week :)

Follow Me: @positivesynergy

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Hang on to your Shorts @positivesynergy. I just gave you .14 cents!! Great article. Resteeming. I'll bring it to the attention of some curator sites tomorrow. Running out of time today. Blessings.

Thank you, Christopher!

You bet. Many blessings.

I agree. Indeed that was such a good article.

Hi @positivesynergy. You asked me to take at a look at this blog in one of your comments. I don’t usually do that because it is frowned upon to advertise yourself in someone elses comments if the blog is not directly related to the topic of discussion. But hey, I like you, so I came anyway.

Here’s the construtive criticism.

I think this blog is really two blogs. One about Ghandi (very good), and the other... well I’m not sure. Is it a rant?. Is it a political statement? I think part 2 needs a re-write to get your points across. Maybe break it into smaller paragraphs and add a heading or two.

Lastly all those pictures, links and larger letter statements at the end spoil the tidiness of the blog. I guess you put the same thing at the end of every blog? I wouldn’t do that.

Sorry to be a bit critical, but that’s what you requested. Good luck in your future blogs which I will follow.

BY the way, in the comments you mentioned FATCA. FATCA is indeed a piece of world destroying legislation. It imposes US laws on those who have nothing to do with the USA, and uses the witch-burning principal of “you are guilty till you prove your innocence”. I would love to see a rant on that!

@swissclive thx for sharing your thoughts with us mate.

Ive a little bit similar feeling of confusion reading @positivesynergy post. But overall I think I know what message author wanted to pass to us.

At the same time question "to change or not to change" is a bit pointless since world never stop changing.

ps. Ive never heard about FATCA. Wow. I just read about it. I hope europe will not be capable of introducing similar shit.

Sorry to say, but Europe and the rest of the world has a vaguely similar version to FATCA.

It is called CRS. Unlike FATCA it does not have the US principal of “You and your bank are both guilty till you prove you are innocent”. CRS merely requires financial institutions to report a tax payer’s income back to his home country, but doe not make the bank “guilty” for doing so. FATCA requires non-US banks to report the US person’s income to the USA, AND to prove he declared that income. It is the latter which makes the bank guilty as it is difficult to prove such a thing.

For obvious reasons banks outside the USA now refuse to bank for Americans in their country. If you are French, living in France, but your passport says you were born in the USA, then good luck in finding a French bank to open your account.

Banks don’t like billion dollar fines because they are considered guilty just because they are too disorganised to prove otherwise. (The “guilty” crime is that of assisting an American who did not declare his income.) It’s hard for the global banks to prove which American paid his tax and which didn’t. In the absence of that evidence the bank is “guilty”.

The USA has on the other hand refused to be recipricol on either FATCA or CRS meaning that it is now the number 1 place in the world for tax-evaders, criminals, drug-dealers, despots (except the Russian ones), and Mafia to hide their ill-gotten gains. Neither FATCA nor CRS apply to US banks in the USA.

Many Americans living overseas are understandably trying to renounce their US citizenship. A particularly difficult thing to do, even if you are American by accident. (Your mum was on holiday in the USA when you were born).

You make some excellent points, @swissclive. I really appreciate your giving such great insight into the bank's point of view in it all that helps to balance some of my own perspective. I love learning new aspects to things. There is so much more to all of this too. I've accumulated a huge digital library on this subject and so many areas this connects into. I started writing a book here practically and then realized I might as well go ahead and write a full post on it. So I'll hold my rant for there. LOL. Stay tuned for the next exciting adventure... :)

It’s worth mentioning that banks in North Korea, Iran and China have all agreed to comply with the US FATCA law, i.e. to verify if any of their clients have US “indicia”, such as a US mobile number or making regular payments to the USA etc, and then to investigate those clients, and also reporting them to the US IRS and DOJ if evidence of not being American is not obtained. “Prove you are not American!”

Wow, you really know your stuff on this subject. That's interesting on the banks in N. Korea and Iran. That might explain why things seems to be simmering down with both of them. And I suppose Syria is not cooperating. Thus, the war there.

I found some good banking data on this, which does verify it. I want to speak to some bankers and American friends too. It's really insane the whole thing and shows the level of bankruptcy the US really is in. The world should be a lot more alarmed by this situation and almost no body speaks of it. I guess that's because its so overbearing and over stepping beyond what seems logical. Which leads to the question of do I really want to poke a stick at this beast. Probably many Protestants go wild with calling it the beast of Revelations and I'm not too sure they're wrong either. My angle on the past history leading up to it all and the cover of the Economist magazine in 1988 stating, "Get ready for a new world currency" with the date of 2018 on the coin seems far more possible than ever now.

Indeed Im amazed by @swissclive knowledge ....

Actually, I am not sure if made a mistake about the banks in Iran and North Korea. I just looked on the FATCA website and Korea and Iran as countries aren’t listed. I am abolutely certain that some of their banks were on the list 2 or 3 years ago - there were a number of North Korean banks listed, it was 3 then, I think, but, perhaps the list was of banks which promised so participate, and maybe it never happened. The trouble is the latest list of banks from the website is crashing on me, so I can’t check if the banks are there, even if the country itself is not.

You can try and download the list of financial institutions who have already agreed to cooperate with the US FATCA law here: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/corporations/fatca-foreign-financial-institution-ffi-prior-months-lists

Haven’t checked for Syrian banks or the country.

Was that really a 1988 Economist cover about a new world currency? I seem to remember seeing an economist cover with something like that a few days ago. I forget where, but from memory it was next to an article about Warren Buffett no longer excluding bitcoin on the grounds of “I don’t understand it”, so I assumed, without looking at the date, that it was either a “mock-up” or something more recent than 1988.

If it was indeed 1988, then maybe they were talking about ECUs or SDRs. Interesting that they put 2018 on the coin.... maybe it was a bit of Nostrodamas forecasting which can be proven correct. I.e. In the randomness of hundreds of “so-called” forecasts and trillions of events, there will always be a few matches.

Anyway, if the coin was meant to be the future Euro, they should have put a hole in the middle.

Wait to you see some of the other data I have on that 1988 Economist cover... It ties so much together. I guess I'll do the story at some point. I just gotta edit it... :) There are many ways I could run with it, given the breadth and depth of it all. I'm just struggling with such poor results on these last 2 posts.

The current system all seems to be running it's course sometime in the next few years. I truly believe they will replace this system sometime in the near future. Who knows exactly when. There are a lot of variables, especially blockchain technology and AI together. It's my view that the right side of politics is doing everything they can to keep things going positive at least for the next 2 years to try and reelect Trump, and are planning to utilize these new technologies for the new system. Probably more eyes are on China now to play a key role in it all, especially given they have already said they are working to create their own cryptocurrency backed by gold and oil.

One of the many interesting altcoins to me is Stellar. IBM, who is probably their largest partner, released just in the last month that among many big projects about to come into play, that the chances are very strong that central banks are coming out with their own digital currencies on the Stellar network soon. Stellar said they will become known to most everyone sometime this year, as they roll out their projects and joint ventures. And so the plot thickens... :)

Here are the details on the 1988 article:

COVER: “GET READY FOR A WORLD CURRENCY”
Title of article: Get Ready for the Phoenix
Source: Economist; 01/9/88, Vol. 306, pp 9-10
A full copy of the text can be found here

They did mention the SRDs when they said:

The phoenix would probably start as a cocktail of national currencies, just as the Special Drawing Right is today.

The phoenix, of course was just used as a metaphor, but it sounds much like the Euro experiment, which seems challenged these days.

In many ways they missed it with:

..national economic boundaries are slowly dissolving

FATCA and CRS seem to have gone backwards, making things worse than ever in so many ways.

They closing paragraph said:

The alternative – to preserve policymaking autonomy- would involve a new proliferation of truly draconian controls on trade and capital flows. This course offers governments a splendid time. They could manage exchange-rate movements, deploy monetary and fiscal policy without inhibition, and tackle the resulting bursts of inflation with prices and incomes polices. It is a growth-crippling prospect. Pencil in the phoenix for around 2018, and welcome it when it comes.

Thank you @swissclive for such an informative reply. I never knew about it.

Such a valuable comment.

Neither FATCA nor CRS apply to US banks in the USA.

This is just so confusing.

Thank you, @swissclive. Doing a fresh reread/rewrite, I see exactly what you are talking about and how I must really be experiencing sleep deprivation to have ranted like that... I don't know if I told you that I haven't been able to get more than 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night the last week or so now and I'm realizing it's taking a toll. I'll see what I can do here to tweak it good enough at least until tomorrow morning, drink a chamomile tea and hit the sack.

And man on the FATCA, you are so right, even if I mixed up the spelling on that too... :) I will certainly take that into consideration too, as I have dug deep into it from many angles over the last 4 years since it rolled out. It actually does tie into what I kind of tried to say above... and got a bit lost... LOL.

Ok, looking better to me now... Time to call it a day... Thank you again.

Agreed. It looks better now.

Always be opened to change. Just like a tree changes it's leaves and the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, we too should be so willing. xx
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Yes, exactly... Beautifully said. Thank you for your comment :)

"If you want to change the world, start with yourself.""

It reminded me of my fav sentence: Think globaly, act locally! :)

Great article mate

May I ask you a question?

You wrote"Be the Change you want to see in the world": what change would you want to see in the world? (please just dont write back 30 sentences :P make it shorter haha)

Actually, those are Gandhi's words... Ok, I'll make it 29 then... Hahaha

Seriously, though... Great Question, Piotr!

  • I'd like to see real Freedom, Peace, Respect, Love and Harmony reign for all life on Earth.
  • I'd like to see the entire financial system with it's ponzi scheme flipped up-side-down, in that greed is flipped into giving to one another of limitless resources, which really are possible.

I think I'll stop there, as I believe all others would fall under those just in more detail...

Hi buddy,
thx for reply

"I'd like to see real Freedom, Peace, Respect, Love and Harmony reign for all life on Earth."

Im asking about some realistic changes :) Or at least share one or two dreams, not 5 :)

"I'd like to see the entire financial system with it's ponzi scheme flipped up-side-down, in that greed is flipped into giving to one another of limitless resources, which really are possible."

That would be against your first wish. That would cause huge chaos, global crisis, poverty, human trafficing, wars and millions would be killed and even more displaced.

Why so many people want this system to crash without having ANY alternative at all.

Take care :)

Those two harmonize perfectly together, at least as I see it; and the first one is one, not 5.

Why so many people want this system to crash without having ANY alternative at all.

I don't know anyone who wishes that really. Maybe you refer to brokers, traders, bankers, etc, talking the market lower. When they speak of "crash", they typically are short the market and just want to get back in at far lower prices for another run up in profits. That's a traders game. I think anyone who speaks of crash in the sense I get from you (i.e. without having ANY alternative), has some sort of alternative in mind. Many want them to bring back the gold backed dollar. But I really can't think of anyone wanting to crash the system without ANY alternative at all. It must be your own interpretation of other's views on it.

"I don't know anyone who wishes that really."

I see people all around us with similar wishes. Hoping that goverments and current system will collapse. I thought for a brief moment that you're also sharing same approach.

Im sorry if you found my reply challenging or negative or agressive. That's surely not my intention.

I do hope for change and know that to some degree it is highly likely that some sort of crash will be the catalyst, but that a better solution rolls out in it's stead and that the transition will be as smooth as possible in such as way as for my first dream above to be reinforced vs. being smothered, as it is today by the dying system we have now. And one could say it is collapsing and the new one rising already, as I see it. The new one being intricately tied into blockchain and AI technologies. The big question is will those who are so addicted to "controlling" and ruining the current system screw up the new one too or will we the people of the world (not just some individual "nation") step up to the plate and not allow the same mistakes to happen again.

Appreciate your comment. I also hope for smooth transition.

Cheers,
Piotr

Oddly enough...I'm not interested in diverting the direction that the world is changing.
it's all to the good.

Hi @everittmickey. That's certainly one way to see it. Can you clarify better when you say:

not interested in diverting the direction that the world is changing.
it's all to the good.

Are you referring to my words, "what the world needs now more than ever"?

While there is a case that much of the world has been getting better economically and in other ways, certainly the world is worse off in many aspects than say the 90's, especially in the west. Where in many cases the middle class has fallen into the bottom rung of the ladder and near extinction in many places. Obama's FACTA law removed the right to banking from the majority of the 20 million living abroad (mostly Vets). That one is an absolute killer too that too few even know or care about. That's all tied into how the National Debt of most countries and poverty, especially in the west, has skyrocketed, while politicians go on spending like there's no tomorrow and making stupid laws to hold the population responsible for their own corrupt self aggrandizing interests. As much as I liked many much of Trump and many other newly elected officials, especially in the west, they continue the same stupid mistakes of their predecessors, doing in many cases near opposite to their campaign promises and/or making it worse in so many ways.

The media, my area of expertise, has collapsed into by far the worst it's ever been around the world and this has both a direct and indirect effect on the masses in very negative ways. The amount of corrupt money that moves behind the scenes to manipulate and control the mindset and narrative of the masses is literally mind boggling. These are just some of the larger areas things that have gotten worse. But if you have some input on how and why it is getting better, please share. I could use some good real news about now... :)

my mistake...I was speaking technologically.
you're referring to politics.
government(s) is insane...they continue to get worse and worse until they collapse (Venezuela, Nicaragua, SAfrica, Zimbabwe...etc for example.. and oh yeah..the US.)

I'm totally with you on the tech, @everittmickey. I guess it's my bad too, in that I could have gone much deeper into that in this piece. Thank you for helping to bring this to my attention. Please note my edits above in consideration of an upvote.

The new blockchain technology will play a key role in the liberation of humanity from the system of enslavement of humanity by overriding and saving us all from the current ponzi schemed monetary system, if those of us on the front lines of development properly make it so. Gandhi battled the tyrant imperialists politically and peacefully to help win independence for India to a large degree. We can too, using the focus of our minds with these new technologies on a collective purpose.

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