What is real and what is manipulation?

As I tie into the solar radiation I experienced 46 years ago (only one more revolution till the age of Aquarius) I keep wondering what is real. It has been almost 40 years since Nixon took the US off of the gold standard and the monies we use today to exchange services indicate more and more that we are using fiat currencies. Without the Canadian dollar as a medium for exchange, what can we do? (Please comment on buzz because it is nice to have a social discussion). To me reality is:

• food, water, air and shelter.
• Gold is real, but not easy obtainable or standardised.
• Land and buildings are real, but not easily transferable.

Having been a contrarian stock investor, the stock markets seem to have taken on the air of a gambling casino, and the pillars of greed and corruption go unchecked, virtually without bounds in our major financial institutions, and within the general fabric of society, but salt is real and more and more important.

Today I teach computers at the church in Hythe hoping more people will adopt open source because proprietary formats tend to lock people in. Even Microsoft's famous manipulation scheme -embrace -extend -extinguish hasn't allowed it to control the instant messaging market. In fact Microsoft 4 days ago adopted Jabber, but they will probably use it like facebook does --only allow instant messaging between their own domains so it is not much different from msn. Gmail with their open federation policy is the best instant messaging platform. I remember 6 years ago when I switch from hotmail to gmail wonder if Google was doing this as a manipulation scheme. I guess maybe because my heart is evil I have a hard time trusting the good people have to offer. So far, Google has been the best, biggest company promoting openness. They even offered up libvpx (webm) which I have been enjoying for it's video chat abilities. Even youtube which is own by Google allows for webm. I guess I want to thank the 100's that have taken the leap of faith with me into open software and open codecs and even those that just use the open encyclopaedia -- wikipedia. I do feel that when people get a taste for openness they will have a a hard time going back to vendor lock-in even with a 60 day trial or like Simply Accounting which now offers 1 year without payment (at least the student version I installed on Friday did) Moving data out of Simply into another accounting program can cost you a lot more. If my life becomes a conduit for truth and not just one companies version of how to manipulate people to make money, then I will die a happy man.  Information is meant to be free. Thanks for commenting / linking!