Money As A Tool To Manipulate The Masses Into Indentured Servitude

Most people spend most of their waking hours working. Why?

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The carrot that drives most people to get up and go to work everyday is money. Money is great, you can use it to buy things to eat or use or experiences. What is money really?

Money essentially is a system of agreement for barter. It’s very difficult to function under a system of solely trade as the perceived value of the items you are trading are often wildly different. The value of an item can also change wildly from one person to the next. With money we have a system of agreement and everyone agrees that $1 has more or less the same value from one person to the next.

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How Transcendental Meditation Can Ease A Troubled Mind (aka How I Kept $2500 In My Pockets)

When I first met Thilde Jensen she encouraged me to try TM to help with my obsession and depressive nature. We have been together for 2 years now and committed to each other last summer. Meditation has become a daily habit for both of us, one that I hope we will carry with us to the end of our days. This is not a sales pitch for TM, honestly I feel like it’s a total scam, I am promoting the medical benefits of any meditation not just a single ‘brand’. Although Thilde and I have settled quite comfortably into doing TM, there are a lot of different styles of meditation each with their benefits and drawbacks. This is a story of my personal path.

enlighhtenment-maharishi

The TM style of meditation has been around since 1955 and seems to have changed very little throughout the years. The biggest change to the movement has been the price of the training. It has gone from being free to several thousand dollars for private instruction. So then the question becomes, why should I pay $2,500 for something that I can teach myself for free?

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How Suicide Leaves A Deep Rift Where Once There Was Love

Dez, Matt, Jops. It’s hard for me to even type those names without starting to cry. Three people I has so much love for made the same choice, to end their own lives. This article is not about their choices, but about the rift that it leaves in its wake.

dez2
Dez

 

Matt
Matt
Jops
Jops

 

What do I say about those that are gone? Why did you leave? Why didn’t you ask for help? What more could I have done. The questions haunt me year after year. As someone who has struggled with severe depression for most of my life, I know what it’s like to feel overwhelmed and lost in the world. Somehow I never gave up. Somehow I just put my head down and kept pushing on. For those that chose to give up, it is the emptiness in the ones they love behind that is so moving to me.

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The Confessions Of A Teenage Alcoholic

For the last 20 years I’ve been sober. Strangely enough I look back and I don’t even know how I got here. My teenage years were a blur of drugs, alcohol and almost constant partying. As my friends from high school stayed on track and got accepted to Ivy League schools I went on a downward spiral into a nihilistic existence. And I loved every minute of it.

My completely wasted youth. Jae Brim was one of my closest friends during those years.
My completely wasted youth. Jae Brim was one of my closest friends during those years.

I loved eating out of dumpsters and living in abandoned buildings. I loved getting chased by cops night after night. I loved being totally lit out of my gourd and doing the stupid possible things night after night. Whether is was doing donuts in the front yard of a fraternity in a Volvo with no doors or dumpster diving an easy chair from the Starvation Army and keeping it in the bed of a pickup and launching it into the air while driving at high speeds over the jump going down Buffalo St hill. I remember spending all my time exploring rooftops and abandoned buildings and doing whatever I liked. We took trips to NYC and got into riots with the cops when our car got stolen. It was pure insanity.

Many of my friends from that era died from overdoses, suicide or literally drinking themselves to death. One of my closest friends, Mike Spike, dropped dead at 25 in the  County Jail. When they did the autopsy they said his arteries were 99% blocked. I never saw him eat or drink anything but alcohol.

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How Creating A Standup Computer Desk Saved My Ass

Riding my bike everyday and not washing my padded biking shorts (think adult male diaper for bikers) was giving me a serious case of baboon butt. Sitting at the computer for hours a day only compounded the problem. One day when I found myself squirming from the pain but still needing to get work done on the computer I threw up my hands and started looking for something to put my monitor on so I could stand. Little did I know that it would completely change my life. For the better.

The best 5 minutes I ever spent was getting my screen up off that desk and my ass out of that seat.
The best 5 minutes I ever spent was getting my screen up off that desk and my ass out of that seat.

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250 Man Hours And $3000 And A Whole Lot Of Concrete And We Now Have The Best Masonry Heater I’ve Ever Experienced

Thilde and I decided last winter that we wanted to do something about her crappy wood-stove. Due to her chemical sensitivities we basically had to burn wood with the flue open so all the heat went right up the chimney. Because we didn’t have an outside air intake the air that whooshed up the chimney was usually the air right around the wood-stove that had heated up a little bit. The house was always freezing and we burned through a ton of wood.

All that hard work was worth it.
All that hard work was worth it.

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Cut Your Cellphone Bills Down To <$10 Month With Google Voice And A Little Ingenuity

For the past 3 years I’ve managed to keep my cellphone bill at around $8/mth and I’ve used the cellphone whenever I’ve needed it. My sister called last night lamenting at the fact she was paying $240/mth to Verizon. It’s easy to switch.

Cellphone companies will become a thing of the past...
Cellphone companies will become a thing of the past…

 

Basically what I did was to port my existing phone number to Google voice for a one time $20 fee. This guarantees that you’ll always have control over that number and no cellpone company can hold you hostage. Once your number is ported to google voice you can do whatever you want with it. I forward it to 3 different places, my landline, my pay-per use Page Plus Cellular phone and my google chat account which is linked to my Groove IP account. Google chat/groove IP gives me a wifi phone that works great whenever I’m in wifi range. I can call and receive calls anywhere in the US or Canada for free on my ancient Droid Incredible 2. The Droid I carry with me and use it only for wifi connections as it has no ability to connect to the internet otherwise.

I have a 2nd dumb phone I bought for $50 from Pagepluscellular  a Verizon service reseller. Most of their plans are around $.05 a minute and about $.05 a txt msg. This dumb phone is used to receive calls no matter when and where I am. The dumb phone is great because while the incredible needs to be charged every day the dumb flip-phone can live for about a week without charging.

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Can a piece of art really change your life?

I was asked by my good friend Dr Pamela Moss to submit my vision board that I created under her supervision  to a transformational art show. Two long years ago myself and a dozen other people spread out a bunch of old magazines on a table and after a deep soulful meditation we looked through them and ripped out any pictures that called to us. We then spent another hour cutting out the pictures and gluing them on a posterboard. That ‘vision board’ has hung in my kitchen and I’ve looked at it every day for the the last two years. I mounted color changing LED lights around it and I setup a LED spotlight above it so it could have the brightest light in the room. This simple collection of pictures pasted together from magazines that people threw in the trash has completely transformed my life.

The center of my vision board
The center of my vision board

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Fatbikes + Snow = Awesome

Every winter is the same scene played out again and again. The first snow falls and I head to Shingadin with my Mountain bike in tow to give the snow a whirl. I hike up to the top of Yellow 2 and start to ride. Everything is fine until I hit the snow. The tires bog down and get stuck and I’m left spinning the back wheel out trying to get any traction. Then I head back down the hill skidding all over the place, mostly out of control and pack my bike up and go home. I hang it up for the winter and just keep my XC skis in the car and do that for the 4 wintery blistery months of hell that is winter in Ithaca, NY.

35lbs of awesomeness
35lbs of awesomeness

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The Best Time You Can Have In The Woods With Your Pants Still On – My Ebiking Addiction

Travelling to China about 10 years ago I was surprised and overwhelmed by the proliferation of electric bikes. It seemed like everyone everywhere owned an ebike. Hundreds of them would be lined up inside the super markets for consumers to impulse buy a new bike while they were busy with their morning grocery shopping. They were attractive looking and cheap, but most of them ran off lead acid batteries and in general were heavy and not that powerful. I toyed with the idea of importing them to the US to try to sell them here, but once I started to research the shipping costs and the weights I realized it was pretty impractical.

Over the last 10 years batteries have gotten much, much cheaper and far more powerful. There is a new explosion of interest in electric bikes in the US as people look towards reasonable solutions to deal with the escalating costs of owning a car as well as all the time wasted stuck in city traffic. The traffic in Ithaca has gotten particularly bad on Rt 13 and often seems backed up for miles all the way to Stewart Park. The traffic and lack of parking in town was starting to drive me totally batty.

A new store opened up in town called Boxy Bikes owned by my friend Larry Clarkburg that specialized in selling ebikes. I swung by and tried out a used Giant Twist ebike he had for sale and I instantly fell in love. It was a love affair that would interfere dramatically will my sex life and anything else I would want to do for the next several months. I jokingly thanked Larry for destroying my life every time I saw him. The first time I used my electric bike in town I was amazed at how quickly I could get from one place to another. No more waiting for traffic, no more driving around looking for free parking, I could arrive right at the doorstep of the customer site and had a lot of extra time to spare. The best part was that I was no longer isolated in my car in an artificial environment that separated me from people on the street. People I knew would wave hello, I felt like part of the community instead of an outsider just driving through.

This was just the beginning, I had bought one ebike from Larry, but I started spending countless hours on the online ebike forums reading mods people had made and crazy ebikes that would use tens or hundreds of thousands of watts. An entire community of people were on the cutting edge of ebike development, and they were all doing it in their garage. I had stumbled on the golden age of ebikes and I was hooked. I would stay up till odd hours in the morning trying to learn everything I could and then I would wakeup at 5:00 AM and start in again on the forums. It became a complete and all-consuming obsession.

The 8.5 lb motor that changed my life
The 8.5 lb motor that changed my life

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