Happy New Year everyone! Please consider supporting Raul Diego’s year-end fundraiser for Silicon Icarus and help keep independent journalism off blockchain! You can donate here. Thanks in advance! While the information that follows about the Spanish Inquisition, early US synagogues, Sumerian tablets, Philadelphia financiers, cyberpunk, and blockchain government may seem out of place in a series […]
Monthly Archives: December 2021
29
Dec
Dec
Brazil is the sixth-largest country in the world by population size. Its high percentage of residents living in concentrated urban poverty makes it an attractive target for social entrepreneurs, microfinance peddlers, and impact investors. Data surveillance comes with all of that – it’s a package deal. Data is a commodity, and investors under the guise […]
28
Dec
Dec
To all the children of parents fighting the New World Order / Agenda 2030 / Build Back Better / Techno-Fascism / Bio-Tyranny / Transhumanism, You are not alone. Remember, your parents love you very much, and most likely you love them right back. Sadly, the world we knew is gone. Perhaps the parents, the way […]
Blog
Pay For Success Finance: How the Dorseys of the World Could Use Wearables to Profit from Poor Kids’ Prescribed “Wellness Behaviors”
27
Dec
Dec
In 2019 I gave a presentation with Cheri Honkala and The Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign at the Left Forum in Brooklyn on pay for success finance, and how it preys upon the poor. If you don’t have time to read the linked post, the steps below outline how it works. This is how […]
26
Dec
Dec
This is a follow up to my previous post about a donation Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter and co-founder of Square, made to pay for the construction of recreation centers in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. If you haven’t seen that one yet, I suggest you read it here before diving into […]
22
Dec
Dec
I’m working on a longer piece about the social impact investing landscape in Brazil, but I wanted to quickly share my response to a clip I pulled from an interview on Derrick Broze’s “The Conscious Resistance Network” page. It’s short, only 90 seconds. In it Broze touches on what he considers problematic uses of blockchain […]
Blog
How Privately Funded Recreation Centers Could Harm Children – Human Capital Finance In Brazil, Part One
15
Dec
Dec
In a December 2 tweet, Glenn Greenwald questions how a donation for the construction of a recreation center for poor children in Brazil could possibly enrich the donor. With that door left wide open, how could I resist? This is going to take a while to unpack, but if I were to try and boil […]
08
Dec
Dec
My intentions were good. I started this project a few days ago on my birthday. I told myself I’d keep it simple. Write for a few hours in the morning and then work on sewing and get out in nature, but I’ve been a horrible failure. The past two days I ended up staring at the […]
04
Dec
Dec
You may have noticed it’s been quiet on the blog since the summer. I prepared a couple of in-depth presentations, one on gamified smart cities for a conference in Tucson in June and another on nanotechnology, defense contracting, and programmable matter the following month in Utica. Then I hit a wall. I’m in the process […]