July 2019

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by Silviu “Silview” Costinescu

Did you know there’s a weather casino on the global market and each weather report enriches some douchebags? Wouldn’t that incentivize the said douchebags to rig the casino, let’s say through geoengineering, insider info, or simply by faking the reports?

I eventually turned the post into video format, updated as to July 2023:
How to get rich betting on climate and rigging it: Weather derivatives


HERE’S HOW YOU CAN BET ON WEATHER AND TEMPERATURES

” Weather derivatives are financial products that are closely linked to weather conditions. This product was created with the aim of reducing the variability of margins due to adverse weather events. Weather derivatives are customizable products: for example, if the temperature recorded in Milan in the winter period negatively affects revenues, through weather derivatives conditions can be managed more efficiently and risks reduced. Moreover, unlike other products, this solution allows to have a clear knowledge of economic exposure: the occurrence of certain weather conditions leads to a cash flow defined previously and limited to a maximum and a minimum. Weather derivatives, with a lower expenditure compared to traditional solutions, allow to protect oneself from risks that cannot be managed with other products.” This is how sellers like Enel advertise for their products. As always, the advertising is false.
If the dealers’ claims were true, the main outcome of this business would be protection and the main beneficiary would be agriculture. The reality sits at the opposite pole of the spectrum: agriculture is one of the least involved in this market, and the main application for this instrument has been financial speculation and gain for the traders.
Speculative trading is also encouraged by the main difference between insurances and weather derivatives: it’s not damage that requires retribution, but unforeseen weather developments. Like a spike in temperatures or a hurricane. Well, hurricanes not so much, since Sandy, they dumped products covering for such events and now it’s almost entirely a temperature-based casino.

“Since the contract is index-based, buyers of weather derivatives do not need to demonstrate a loss. In order to collect insurance, on the other hand, damage must be shown.”

– Investopedia

JOIN THE DOTS: WEATHER MANIPULATION + WEATHER BETS = ?

Weather modification and meteorological warfare have been a preoccupation for governments around the world since quite a while now, there’s recorded meetings of the US Congress debating these topics since 1950’s. But recently it’s become a private business too. You can even buy the perfect weather for your wedding nowadays. I also know directly from the crew that worked on the Cold Mountain movie that they had weather modification on emergency call because they were losing production money waiting for a rain that was predicted by meteorologists and never came naturally.
So the question in the headline above is a no-brainer, I’m not going to insult your intelligence by answering it.
Instead I’m going to quote an witty anonymous comment on Internet:

“So all we have to do is check the CME on weather derivatives to see if there is a spike in purchases & we’ll know if we have a major weather event about to happen?”

IT GETS BETTER… I MEAN WORSE!

There’s a video below with a muppet “expert” from the weather casino claiming you can’t abuse the system with “superior information” because meteorologists can only predict accurately a few weeks ahead. Right. I thought we have computer models that tell us beyond any doubt what’s up in 2030 and we only have 18 months to live on the planet due to Global Warming, blah blah… Is that BS then? If so, no probs buddy, that’s not the only way to predict things, best way is to fulfill your own prophecies. As suggested above. And you can get help from your partners in politics.
Barack Obama announced in 2013 that he had signed S. 716, which repealed a requirement of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act requiring high-ranking federal employees to disclose their financial information online.
“Versions of the STOCK Act had been introduced for several years, but it was fast-tracked at the Capitol following media reports that suggested members of Congress might have profited from private information obtained during their legislative work. Members singled out in the reports maintained their innocence, but the spotlight spurred quick action on enacting legislation emphasizing that members of Congress be subject to insider trading laws among their disclosure enhancements”, according to media reports.
So if you have access to intelligence on weather manipulation and geophysical warfare, as conducted by your own government, you’re in for a new nice villa on some tropical island. And that won’t be unprecedented.

WE HAVE THE MOTIVES, THE WEAPONS AND THE SUSPECTS. HOW BIG IS THE HEIST?



The expert in the video below says that no less than 1/3 of the US GDP is weather dependent. I say pretty much every walk of life is weather-dependent and I got back-up:

Weather is not just an environmental issue, it is a major economic factor. At least $1 trillion of our economy is weather-sensitive.

– Investopedia

“Weather conditions tend to affect volume and usage more than they directly affect the price. An exceptionally warm winter, for example, can leave utility and energy companies with excess supplies of oil or natural gas (because people need less to heat their homes). Or an exceptionally cold summer can leave hotel and airline seats empty. Although the prices may change somewhat as a consequence of unusually high or low demand, price adjustments don’t necessarily compensate for lost revenues resulting from unseasonable temperatures” – from the same Investopedia article.
Bottom line: weather is business and the sky is no limit to how much money you can make.

Monte Carlo Simulation of Temperature for Weather Derivative Pricing
Don Cyr, Associate Professor of Finance & Dean, Goodman School of Business, Brock University, looks at the use of weather derivatives in managing weather related risks tied to Hurricane Sandy. Video by: Business News Network Original video has been removed from the internet

2023 epilogue: they are doing my memes

Also this:

US Air Force to fully control the weather by 2025 – Dr. Perligieri @Massachusetts School of Law 2010

To be continued?
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by Silviu Costinescu

A version of this article was originally published on my arts and music blog on Synkretic Network, but since the issue and the angle here are much broader than music, reaching into free speech and economy, I think it has a place on this page too.

How many social protest songs have you seen in the charts this last decade? What does that mean?

There’s a new generation now that hasn’t really experienced the great raw energy of a large mass of people united in chanting a chorus that expresses protest and discontent towards the establishment. “F You, I won’t do what you tell me!” has been replaced with “F you, I will do what this other establishment shill tells me!”. I’m an artist and a promoter in my 40’s and I contemplate the strong possibility that I will never again witness something like the early Rage Against The Machine, or even Lenon’s “Imagine”, becoming largely popular. Social lyricism in hip-hop is in a coma too. And this is how we got here:

Streaming services demonetized protesters

Internet and streaming services are being used to take away underground’s income sources and self-sustainability. You keep hearing Spotify or Soundcloud are not profitable and you keep wondering how do they survive then? They’ll always find financing, because they deliver all the music to the audiences without making the artists’ lives self-sustainable. Sales are a joke now. This way, independent artists become starving artists, and it’s legal, unlike piracy.
Only selected (or fabricated) establishment minions are allowed to thrive. That means only establishment’s messages get through. To the people running the show, this is worth much more money than it costs! A perfect assassination of artistic integrity and social protest. If you hear anything, it’s sponsored. The 2019 RATM, if they re-unite as rumored, won’t be anything like the early RATM because now they need Google and Twitter and Vice and corporate festivals on their side to succeed, not the other way around. The tables have been switched under our noses while we were getting high on Facebook likes.

Of course this new paradigm generated some independent success stories, but what do they all have in common? They fall in line with what’s acceptable for the establishment. And when you zoom out and look at the big picture, which includes all artists, what do you see? I see a huge mass of talented yet starving artists and a bunch of lottery winners, a few new happy faces in the media every year keep the scam going. The middle class in music is dead too.

Social media hijacked the audiences

“Bring your fans aboard so we can disconnect them from you and connect them to our establishment-sponsored BS!”. This has been the plan from the beginning for the mainstream social media. They weren’t here to help artists, unsurprisingly. They’ve just used artists and popular figures to attract the masses and fill up their boat, and then they sailed their own course. Only 5% of your Facebook artist page subscribers see your posts now, but I bet they all are exposed to a ton of Coca Cola, CNN or The Guardian posts even without subscribing to those pages. Perfect heist!

How do we bounce back?

I’ll get massive hate from corporate slaves for saying this, but there’s only one way I can think of and I’m already working on what I preach:

More direct contact with more implication and mutual support from both sides: artists and audiences. If we don’t act now, tomorrow might be harder or even too late.

What does that, technically, mean? Cut off the gatekeepers and middlemen as much as possible, stay in touch directly, support each other directly. This is coming from a guy who partly works as a middleman too; but only because there’s still a need for that, I’ll be happy to focus 100% on my own art when I’m not meeting any needs anymore!  It’s not more simple or more complicated than building and maintaining a little dedicated fanbase without letting it get leached and drained out by gatekeepers and middlemen. That means you can’t use their tools, you have to circumvent them. So now’s the best time to get creative, I await your ideas while I work on mine!

It breaks down to:
Artists need to invest more in their direct contact with the fans than in traditional marketing and media plans. Time to get personal, the industry and corporate media are not doing the job of putting us in touch anymore, they only disconnect us. I spent a good bunch of time and money to create a social network just so that artists and fans of all sorts can freely talk and support each other directly, without interference. I’ll create more tools and options for that, but Synkretic Network already offers all the tools you need for this purpose at no cost. Maybe it’s time to populate it. Or start your own.

Fans need to invest more in the artists that make their lives better, and do it more directly. If you buy an $1 song from Apple or Amazon, there’s at least 3-4 entities that will snatch 50-75% of that money before the artist has a chance to see his share. If you see a donation button, chances are that the artist will be able to spend about 80-90% of the sum you send, so drop your dollar there instead of iTunes and such. Avoid rips and leaches. If you don’t have money to spend, please help spread awareness, it’s just as helpful.  Or help the artists get booked in your city. Just re-invest back in the scene some of the good energy you’re getting from your favorite artists and we’ll be cool again! Only if you want and find it necessary to have a healthy artistic life, for yourself and the whole society as well.

As a personal example, the last couple of years I started to make most of my work, past and present, available for free, because art shouldn’t be for sale in the first place, this is how the whole problem started. Art thrives from honest crowd support. Low sales don’t mean people don’t care about artists anymore, it’s just that they’ve been reprogrammed to care differently and they lost the habit of paying; older folks aren’t aware that paying for listening music is a strange concept to most teenagers in 2019.
I know I’ll get even less donations than sales for a while, but I’ll receive double or triple the percentage and they’ll be available instantly, not 5-6 months later, as per usual with the industry. Also fans can’t ever feel cheated as they conveniently donate whatever they can afford, whenever they can afford it, typically after enjoying artist’s work; and their conscience is the only one to arbiter how much they should invest in this. Win-win situation, that’s what alien pimping is about! Use your money and shares wisely, my friends!

Hopefully I’ll also do a good job at persuading people they need to act as soon as yesterday, and dropping a coin in our digital hats when available can make a difference; so can a few good clicks. I’m becoming a digital busker, as I’ve said before, since I don’t have what it takes to be a good street busker. It’s yet way too early to say how it will work, but I doubt there’s any other way out of this swamp.

So here’s my digital busker hat, I’m already working to thank you: DONATE 
I mean, for consistence, besides other projects, I already have my next protest song in the works, it will be available for free download as soon as possible, whether you drop me a coin or not.

UPDATE + CLOSURE:

from Daily Bonnet

It took about half a year for life to deliver a final closure to this case.
“In response to the outrageous ticket prices a new activist group has emerged called Rage Against Rage Against the Machine”, jokes the satirical site Daily Bonnet, after they found out that the ticket prices for the new 2020 RATM tour are soaring from $190 way up.

THE END

To be continued?
Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production.
Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!

! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them

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by Silviu Costinescu

Actual headline, not a frame from “Idiocracy”

Most (if not all) ground-breaking discoveries came from people who defied consensus, otherwise you would still spray DDT on kids and have nurses selling you cigarettes to smoke in hospital rooms. Consensus is the ground in “ground-breaking”.
Scientific consensus is a logical fallacy that you need to avoid in order to achieve science.

Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

— Michael Crichton.

The scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming is likely to have passed 99%, according to the lead author of the most authoritative study on the subject, and could rise further after separate research that clears up some of the remaining doubts.

The Guardian

Is your info on issues like “global warming” coming from people who can believe 99% consensus is possible among scientists (or any large groups of people), and that’s a good thing for science?
Are all arguments for global warming as imbecile as consensus = truth?
As fake as 99% consensus? That would make Stalin proud…
You know the only other “thing” on the planet that gets 99% consensus? Kim Jong Un.
As far as I dug, these have been the only two methods for reaching 99% consensus in all human experience:
1. Tyrannically silencing anyone who disagrees.
2. Polling an insignificantly small group that you control.

What is the difference between how the global warming “consensus” is obtained and how Kim obtains his?
You can’t even poll 100% of scientists, you can’t merely determine accurately who are all the people who deserve to be polled, are you kidding yourself?!!
The only claim that has obtained 99% consensus in science so far appears to be “we have to please our financiers!”. Do you know who finances this stuff?

Besides, bandwagoning and appealing to authority are not arguments, they are basic logical fallacies.
If you can’t spot obvious traps like these, you have no hope or chance to avoid being duped by people who have a long experience in trapping the ignoramus.


Functional literates be like:

“I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. (…)
Let’s be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.” –
Michael Crichton

“Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory.” – Stephen Hawking

“It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period.” – Richard Feynman

Braindead NPCs be like: “Meh, check these presstitutes out!”




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