No, they haven't been abusing anything for a century. That's the point. The ARC agreed to not use the red cross trademark on medical goods for sale - that is, not to start selling gauze and whatnot with a red cross logo.
Now they're selling gauze and whatnot with a red cross logo. From the information I've got, it seems that J&J has an open-and-shut case of breach of contract. The fact that the ARC is a charitable organization doesn't mean that they get to do whatever they want; it's not unreasonable to expect them to hold to the agreements they've signed.
Sounds to me like the problem is people assuming that anything they read must be safe.
Perhaps if people didn't abdicate responsibility for the actions ahead of time, we wouldn't have to worry about this. What part of "posted on slashdot" rationally translates to "must be safe to do?"
Obviously, no part of it. "I was just following orders" was deemed to not be an excuse a long time ago. "It's not my fault, the internet told me to do it" is no better.
One advantage of gold is that it's stable, mostly useless...
Being mostly useless is an advantage gold has in terms of being a medium of exchange. My point, however, was specifically that it is useless, and therefore only has value if people agree that it has value. This was intended to be by way of contrast to the other items listed, that have an inherent utility unrelated to their value (or inversely related, if you prefer) as a medium of exchange.
Legal tender is NOTHING to do with transactions per se. I can demand that I am paid in anything. Quite often US transactions are conducted in Pounds Sterling, or Euros, particularly if there is some forex issue in the bargain.
If you specify a different medium of exchange beforehand, yes. As I admitted in another post, I was being overly simplistic. You may not retroactively elect to not accept dollars as payment.
Now, debts here are usually valued in dollars. If I owe you $100, I might offer you a gold bracelet worth more, and you would be within your rights to refuse. I might offer you my daughter. You might accept. But if I offered you 100 greenbacks, you would not be within your rights to refuse. They are Legal Tender, and must be accepted.
What kind of distinction between "debt" and "debt" are you trying to draw? If you owe me $100 because I served you dinner at a restaurant, I may not suddenly demand payment in the form of your daughter's services. This is not in any real sense different than if you owe me $100 because I loaned you $75 at 33% interest. Either way, you owe me $100; what transaction incurred that debt is irrelevant - all that matters is that we did not agree beforehand on a different method of payment.
And the idea that money is valuable because the government says it is... Blockhead!!!
At the moment the Zimbabwean government is saying that the Zimbabwean dollar is worth 1/250 of a US dollar. Try getting that!
Value is what it's always been - a feature of a comodity which has utility and is scarce.
What an interesting point you've made. Where, exactly, do you suppose the "utility" of the dollar comes from? Its caloric value? Its insulating properties? Its ideal shape for snorting coke? Oh, right, it has utility because the US government says it does.
And since you need utility and scarcity for a commodity to have value - as you so soberly indicate - the dollar has value because the US government says it does. The fact that you have conflated "has value" with "has a specific market value" in your head does not mean that's what I said or what I meant. The US government can't dictate a market value for the dollar any more than Zimbabwe can. It does not follow that, therefore, the value of the dollar is not based on the US government.
You're right, I was (perhaps over-) simplifying. Obviously, both parties can agree beforehand to perform a transaction in some medium of exchange that isn't dollars. In cases where such is not stipulated ahead of time, however, dollars need to be accepted as payment. That is, dollars are the default form of payment: it isn't legal to provide a commodity and demand after the fact that you will only accept payment in gold.
Yes, debt is a commodity of sorts, I suppose. But debt, like Linden dollars, is still virtual, right? If not, post a link to a picture of debt. Point is, there's no physical commodity backing dollars at all. It used to be back by gold, but it's not anymore.
That's a bit disingenuous - I challenge to post a link to a picture of "value." The very notion of value is virtual, since the universe certainly doesn't care whether there's gold in them thar hills.
And don't fall into the trap of thinking that gold is somehow magical in its ability to have value. Gold is only valuable because people say it is, just like the US dollar. The only difference is that the scarcity of gold is based on physics and the relative difficulty of building a supercollider, while the scarcity of US dollars is based on the desire of the US to have a functioning economy.
If you don't believe me, think about how you'd value the following if modern civilization were to collapse - potable water, food, matches, ammunition, tobacco, liquor, coffee, paper, gold. Now imagine everyone else thinking the same thing (because civilization has collapsed).
The GP was right for the question he was answering: why do the unbacked, limited-supply US dollars have value? Among other things, because you can pay taxes with them. I would add further, that so many debts are denominated in US dollars. This cascades into a sort of network effect: X people accept dollars, because they can pay debts with them, so MOST people accept dollars because they will be buying from someone, somehow connected to those X people.
All of which boils down to the starting point, the the US government mandates that debts within the US can be settled by exchange of US dollars. This causes the cascade which you - accurately - describe. Which is why the worldwide value of the dollar is so closely related to the strength/productivity of the US economy, since that determines exactly what debts are mandatorily satisfiable with US dollars.
An interesting question to ponder is what might happen if the US government removed the legal requirement of accepting US currency to settle US debts, even if the government itself continued to accept it and pay its debts with it. On the one hand, the dollar is so well-established as a currency that it's tempting to suspect that it would go right on, much as it currently does. On the other, there would have to be a follow-on effect to such a vote of no confidence from the government which theoretically backs the value of the currency.
Um. Nope. The US dollar is worth something because it has a limited supply.
Only if the something in question has some objective value. I can print off a few hundred CGMUs (Control Group Monetary Units), making a very limited supply, but I don't imagine that would make them worth money to anyone else*.
Unlike the other commodities you mention, US dollars have no inherent utility. The "full faith and credit" of the US government determines their utility. Their scarcity determines their market value. You need both for a given good to be worth something.
*If I'm wrong about this, I invite you to invest in my CGMU-printing business.
Yes and no. That's a subset of the reason. The larger reason is that it's illegal in general to demand payment in some other form of currency in preference to the US dollar. That's what the phrase "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" means. It means that, if you're going to do business in the US, and if you're going to engage in a financial transaction, you may not refuse the US dollar as a currency to complete the transaction.
It is not legal to require payment in pounds sterling, gold bars, or years of indentured servitude.
Basically, the US dollar is worth anything because the government says it is...which is, ultimately, a function of the citizens of the US saying that it is. Which, ultimately, makes it no different than gold (except, of course, that the finite supply of gold is imposed by the universe, while the finite supply of dollars is imposed by the Fed).
Truth be told, I trot that image out on any occasion it might be vaguely appropriate for just that reason. It's the most humbling thing I can think of, seeing the field lit up with points of light more numerous than visible stars in the night sky...then realizing that each one of them is a galaxy.
I quite honestly can give myself shivers if I think about it for a few seconds.
Interesting. Admittedly, I wasn't checking the numbers myself; I was just trying to come up with an explanation for how that figure could possibly be reached given what I know my local and state government spend per student K-12.
Thanks for running it down. If it's not orbital mechanics, I often can't be arsed to do the research.
The electoral college is not, in itself, a problem. The fact that (almost?) all states are winner-take-all is a problem. If the states split their electoral votes according to the split of votes within the state, you would avoid the "few hundred votes swinging 55 electoral votes" problem (and give NorCal some representation in the presidential election), while still protecting the influence of Montana. Which, regardless of your opinion of Montana, is important in preventing a second Civil War (just see what happens if you effectively disenfranchise "flyover country" in favor of NY, LA, and Chicago).
It's telling, of course, that the winner-take-all system of deciding electoral votes was specifically put in place to keep a third party (TR's Bull Moose Party) from having a realistic chance at election.
Well, that's what I was getting at when I mentioned time to equalization. But it's not the final volume that's the problem to you, it's the force exerted by it trying to reach that volume.
Second, no one thinks it isn't cold enough. Of course it's cold enough to freeze stuff. It's just a question of how long it takes for that to happen. With no conduction or convection possible, you only lose heat through radiation, which is a slow process.
This is the reason that space suits have air conditioners, not heaters.
What are you on about? The parent asked a perfectly reasonable question about keeping the suit sealed but exposing the hands for greater manual dexterity, and you come back with some kind of prose cannonade about people dying within 2 minutes?
If you think it's a bad idea, feel free to explain why. But it doesn't seem immediately stupid to me - maintain air pressure and temperature inside the suit, use thin gloves to cover the hands, providing an insulation layer against touching cold/hot surfaces and maintaining the suit seal.
In fact, it seems kind of like the skintight space suit concept that actual NASA scientists are working on to solve exactly the problem the GP talks about.
No. The pressure differential is all that matters. It makes no difference if the pressure differential is 30 PSI -> 15 PSI or 15 PSI -> 0 PSI. This is why depth charges work. The medium will affect how long it takes to equalize pressure, but not prevent the bursting in the first place (assuming the pressure differential is enough to cause the bursting).
Exactly - which is why a better approach is to explain to people how their personal decisions lead to someone else being screwed. Attacking the desire is silly; arguing for a more responsible desire is appropriate.
My problem with the statement was that it implies that I'm somehow ethically bankrupt because I'm an American who wants his MP3 player to work. I don't buy into that; it's crap. If the AC wants to explain how my working MP3 player causes harm to society, the economy, the rule of law, whatever, that's dandy; I'll be happy to listen. But don't criticize me for wanting the MP3 player I spent good money on to just work. He ought to explain his priorities, and maybe I'll change mine.
That's why I bought a 60 GB PS3 last weekend. I never owned a PS2, and I wanted maximum backwards compatibility when I finally decided to pull the trigger (Planet Earth being available on Blu-Ray did the trick; had it been HD-DVD only, I would have bought the add-on for my 360). So now I'm playing through Katamari Damacy, Shadow Of the Collossus, and God of War. And I have to say, God of War is a damn good looking game, considering it's PS2 tech.
$500 was just low enough that the combination of Blu-Ray and PS2 compatibility pushed me over the edge (though needing to buy a separate cable for HD really pissed me off - and almost was enough to prevent me from buying...which means not quite enough for Sony to care). So far, I'm moderately glad I picked it up. Whether I later consider it a really good idea will depend, of course, on how many really good games become available for it.
The point, of course, is that they've created demand by dropping the price on the 60 GB version and taking away the Emotion Engine in its higher-priced replacement. But that's a temporary sort of thing, at best - if the supply of 60 GB consoles had dried up before I bought one, I wouldn't have made the purchase. $600 is too much money (and I say this as someone who owns all three current consoles and just built a gaming PC) for what you're getting, Motorstorm be damned. If that $600 included a second controller and freaking component cables*, I might have thought about it.
*While I went with HDMI + optical audio instead, I could have put off that purchase for a little bit if they had bundled components. As it is, the console is crippled out of the box, so it had to be a same-day purchase.
I gotta get outta here, I think I'm gonna lose it.
on
80 Gig PS3 Arrives in US
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· Score: 4, Funny
Along with 20 more gigs of memory...
GAH!! This is the sort of thing I expect from talking to average people about computers; I can grin and bear it when it shows up on non-technical news sources - but this is Slashdot, for fuck's sake. You know, "news for nerds?" What's next, we start seeing stories referring to the whole box as a "CPU" or "hard drive?"
It doesn't have 20 more gigs of memory, it's got a 20 GB larger hard drive. Is this so difficult to get right?
OK, I've been thinking about this setup for at least five minutes now, and I admit, it seems like a genuinely good idea (the OIN bit, not just the Google going for it bit). Companies using their patent portfolios to shut down patent trolling is this =>= close to giving me a warm fuzzy right under the cockles of my heart.
So what's the catch? What am I missing, here, that turns this from an actual Good Thing for the software community (with concomitant benefits to the involved organizations, of course) into an attempt to rape the commons for short-term profit? Or is my cynicism, for possibly the first time ever, completely unwarranted?
If the cost is annoying big business, top polluters, and some people on web forums, I have no problem paying that price
And, if the cost is making brkello start living a pre-industrial lifestyle, I have no problem paying that price.
Which is to say - it's easy for you to be willing to have other people pay the price for change. You are claiming no moral high ground (or even ethically defensible ground) by making such a statement. Your dismissive claims about having no problem making people you've unilaterally deemed to be less than worthwhile bear the burdens is precisely the problem that was earlier being referred to. Oddly, people get defensive when you start talking about how they need to sacrifice. Perhaps if you were less flip about assigning costs, you'd run into fewer people who instinctively dig in their heels and try to fight you on everything you say.
Before you start throwing accusations around, incidentally, I agree that climate change needs to be addressed. The climate is warming up, glacial ice is melting, the repercussions of unchecked climate change are likely to be catastrophic.
Your generalization skills are, truly, impressive.
Moreover, what else are we supposed to think? As long as you get what you want, I'm OK with ____?
Self-interest is not only a fundamental feature of human nature, it's a perfectly rational way of approaching the world. If you don't like the fact that someone (in this case, not an American, as it turns out) is OK with this because his MP3 player will be protected, rather than complaining that he shouldn't want an MP3 player, maybe you should try to explain why he should want something else.
Bitching that someone wants something isn't helpful. Maybe if you explained why his MP3 player isn't worth the price that's being paid, it would be helpful. Most people are open to new information.
One must base one's opinions on something, and personal satisfaction is a good start. I fail to see why there's some moral imperative for me to be miserable, absent evidence that my personal satisfaction is harmful to someone else (or, even, my own longer-term satisfaction).
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding is that ARC signed an agreement with J&J in the late 19th century to not use the red cross logo on goods competing with J&J.
If that's correct, then it's perfectly clear which way the infringement goes.
Nice.
Very, very nice. Kudos to you, sir.
No, they haven't been abusing anything for a century. That's the point. The ARC agreed to not use the red cross trademark on medical goods for sale - that is, not to start selling gauze and whatnot with a red cross logo.
Now they're selling gauze and whatnot with a red cross logo. From the information I've got, it seems that J&J has an open-and-shut case of breach of contract. The fact that the ARC is a charitable organization doesn't mean that they get to do whatever they want; it's not unreasonable to expect them to hold to the agreements they've signed.
Sounds to me like the problem is people assuming that anything they read must be safe.
Perhaps if people didn't abdicate responsibility for the actions ahead of time, we wouldn't have to worry about this. What part of "posted on slashdot" rationally translates to "must be safe to do?"
Obviously, no part of it. "I was just following orders" was deemed to not be an excuse a long time ago. "It's not my fault, the internet told me to do it" is no better.
Being mostly useless is an advantage gold has in terms of being a medium of exchange. My point, however, was specifically that it is useless, and therefore only has value if people agree that it has value. This was intended to be by way of contrast to the other items listed, that have an inherent utility unrelated to their value (or inversely related, if you prefer) as a medium of exchange.
Good start.
If you specify a different medium of exchange beforehand, yes. As I admitted in another post, I was being overly simplistic. You may not retroactively elect to not accept dollars as payment.
What kind of distinction between "debt" and "debt" are you trying to draw? If you owe me $100 because I served you dinner at a restaurant, I may not suddenly demand payment in the form of your daughter's services. This is not in any real sense different than if you owe me $100 because I loaned you $75 at 33% interest. Either way, you owe me $100; what transaction incurred that debt is irrelevant - all that matters is that we did not agree beforehand on a different method of payment.
What an interesting point you've made. Where, exactly, do you suppose the "utility" of the dollar comes from? Its caloric value? Its insulating properties? Its ideal shape for snorting coke? Oh, right, it has utility because the US government says it does.
And since you need utility and scarcity for a commodity to have value - as you so soberly indicate - the dollar has value because the US government says it does. The fact that you have conflated "has value" with "has a specific market value" in your head does not mean that's what I said or what I meant. The US government can't dictate a market value for the dollar any more than Zimbabwe can. It does not follow that, therefore, the value of the dollar is not based on the US government.
Oh, and - you're a stupid poopyhead garbageface.
You're right, I was (perhaps over-) simplifying. Obviously, both parties can agree beforehand to perform a transaction in some medium of exchange that isn't dollars. In cases where such is not stipulated ahead of time, however, dollars need to be accepted as payment. That is, dollars are the default form of payment: it isn't legal to provide a commodity and demand after the fact that you will only accept payment in gold.
That's a bit disingenuous - I challenge to post a link to a picture of "value." The very notion of value is virtual, since the universe certainly doesn't care whether there's gold in them thar hills.
And don't fall into the trap of thinking that gold is somehow magical in its ability to have value. Gold is only valuable because people say it is, just like the US dollar. The only difference is that the scarcity of gold is based on physics and the relative difficulty of building a supercollider, while the scarcity of US dollars is based on the desire of the US to have a functioning economy.
If you don't believe me, think about how you'd value the following if modern civilization were to collapse - potable water, food, matches, ammunition, tobacco, liquor, coffee, paper, gold. Now imagine everyone else thinking the same thing (because civilization has collapsed).
All of which boils down to the starting point, the the US government mandates that debts within the US can be settled by exchange of US dollars. This causes the cascade which you - accurately - describe. Which is why the worldwide value of the dollar is so closely related to the strength/productivity of the US economy, since that determines exactly what debts are mandatorily satisfiable with US dollars.
An interesting question to ponder is what might happen if the US government removed the legal requirement of accepting US currency to settle US debts, even if the government itself continued to accept it and pay its debts with it. On the one hand, the dollar is so well-established as a currency that it's tempting to suspect that it would go right on, much as it currently does. On the other, there would have to be a follow-on effect to such a vote of no confidence from the government which theoretically backs the value of the currency.
Only if the something in question has some objective value. I can print off a few hundred CGMUs (Control Group Monetary Units), making a very limited supply, but I don't imagine that would make them worth money to anyone else*.
Unlike the other commodities you mention, US dollars have no inherent utility. The "full faith and credit" of the US government determines their utility. Their scarcity determines their market value. You need both for a given good to be worth something.
*If I'm wrong about this, I invite you to invest in my CGMU-printing business.
Yes and no. That's a subset of the reason. The larger reason is that it's illegal in general to demand payment in some other form of currency in preference to the US dollar. That's what the phrase "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" means. It means that, if you're going to do business in the US, and if you're going to engage in a financial transaction, you may not refuse the US dollar as a currency to complete the transaction.
It is not legal to require payment in pounds sterling, gold bars, or years of indentured servitude.
Basically, the US dollar is worth anything because the government says it is...which is, ultimately, a function of the citizens of the US saying that it is. Which, ultimately, makes it no different than gold (except, of course, that the finite supply of gold is imposed by the universe, while the finite supply of dollars is imposed by the Fed).
Truth be told, I trot that image out on any occasion it might be vaguely appropriate for just that reason. It's the most humbling thing I can think of, seeing the field lit up with points of light more numerous than visible stars in the night sky...then realizing that each one of them is a galaxy.
I quite honestly can give myself shivers if I think about it for a few seconds.
Interesting. Admittedly, I wasn't checking the numbers myself; I was just trying to come up with an explanation for how that figure could possibly be reached given what I know my local and state government spend per student K-12.
Thanks for running it down. If it's not orbital mechanics, I often can't be arsed to do the research.
The electoral college is not, in itself, a problem. The fact that (almost?) all states are winner-take-all is a problem. If the states split their electoral votes according to the split of votes within the state, you would avoid the "few hundred votes swinging 55 electoral votes" problem (and give NorCal some representation in the presidential election), while still protecting the influence of Montana. Which, regardless of your opinion of Montana, is important in preventing a second Civil War (just see what happens if you effectively disenfranchise "flyover country" in favor of NY, LA, and Chicago).
It's telling, of course, that the winner-take-all system of deciding electoral votes was specifically put in place to keep a third party (TR's Bull Moose Party) from having a realistic chance at election.
My guess is he's taking total money spent on education and dividing across the current population of the US.
Well, that's what I was getting at when I mentioned time to equalization. But it's not the final volume that's the problem to you, it's the force exerted by it trying to reach that volume.
First off, it isn't absolute zero.
Second, no one thinks it isn't cold enough. Of course it's cold enough to freeze stuff. It's just a question of how long it takes for that to happen. With no conduction or convection possible, you only lose heat through radiation, which is a slow process.
This is the reason that space suits have air conditioners, not heaters.
What are you on about? The parent asked a perfectly reasonable question about keeping the suit sealed but exposing the hands for greater manual dexterity, and you come back with some kind of prose cannonade about people dying within 2 minutes?
If you think it's a bad idea, feel free to explain why. But it doesn't seem immediately stupid to me - maintain air pressure and temperature inside the suit, use thin gloves to cover the hands, providing an insulation layer against touching cold/hot surfaces and maintaining the suit seal.
In fact, it seems kind of like the skintight space suit concept that actual NASA scientists are working on to solve exactly the problem the GP talks about.
No. The pressure differential is all that matters. It makes no difference if the pressure differential is 30 PSI -> 15 PSI or 15 PSI -> 0 PSI. This is why depth charges work. The medium will affect how long it takes to equalize pressure, but not prevent the bursting in the first place (assuming the pressure differential is enough to cause the bursting).
Exactly - which is why a better approach is to explain to people how their personal decisions lead to someone else being screwed. Attacking the desire is silly; arguing for a more responsible desire is appropriate.
My problem with the statement was that it implies that I'm somehow ethically bankrupt because I'm an American who wants his MP3 player to work. I don't buy into that; it's crap. If the AC wants to explain how my working MP3 player causes harm to society, the economy, the rule of law, whatever, that's dandy; I'll be happy to listen. But don't criticize me for wanting the MP3 player I spent good money on to just work. He ought to explain his priorities, and maybe I'll change mine.
That's why I bought a 60 GB PS3 last weekend. I never owned a PS2, and I wanted maximum backwards compatibility when I finally decided to pull the trigger (Planet Earth being available on Blu-Ray did the trick; had it been HD-DVD only, I would have bought the add-on for my 360). So now I'm playing through Katamari Damacy, Shadow Of the Collossus, and God of War. And I have to say, God of War is a damn good looking game, considering it's PS2 tech.
$500 was just low enough that the combination of Blu-Ray and PS2 compatibility pushed me over the edge (though needing to buy a separate cable for HD really pissed me off - and almost was enough to prevent me from buying...which means not quite enough for Sony to care). So far, I'm moderately glad I picked it up. Whether I later consider it a really good idea will depend, of course, on how many really good games become available for it.
The point, of course, is that they've created demand by dropping the price on the 60 GB version and taking away the Emotion Engine in its higher-priced replacement. But that's a temporary sort of thing, at best - if the supply of 60 GB consoles had dried up before I bought one, I wouldn't have made the purchase. $600 is too much money (and I say this as someone who owns all three current consoles and just built a gaming PC) for what you're getting, Motorstorm be damned. If that $600 included a second controller and freaking component cables*, I might have thought about it.
*While I went with HDMI + optical audio instead, I could have put off that purchase for a little bit if they had bundled components. As it is, the console is crippled out of the box, so it had to be a same-day purchase.
GAH!! This is the sort of thing I expect from talking to average people about computers; I can grin and bear it when it shows up on non-technical news sources - but this is Slashdot, for fuck's sake. You know, "news for nerds?" What's next, we start seeing stories referring to the whole box as a "CPU" or "hard drive?"
It doesn't have 20 more gigs of memory, it's got a 20 GB larger hard drive. Is this so difficult to get right?
OK, I've been thinking about this setup for at least five minutes now, and I admit, it seems like a genuinely good idea (the OIN bit, not just the Google going for it bit). Companies using their patent portfolios to shut down patent trolling is this =>= close to giving me a warm fuzzy right under the cockles of my heart.
So what's the catch? What am I missing, here, that turns this from an actual Good Thing for the software community (with concomitant benefits to the involved organizations, of course) into an attempt to rape the commons for short-term profit? Or is my cynicism, for possibly the first time ever, completely unwarranted?
And, if the cost is making brkello start living a pre-industrial lifestyle, I have no problem paying that price.
Which is to say - it's easy for you to be willing to have other people pay the price for change. You are claiming no moral high ground (or even ethically defensible ground) by making such a statement. Your dismissive claims about having no problem making people you've unilaterally deemed to be less than worthwhile bear the burdens is precisely the problem that was earlier being referred to. Oddly, people get defensive when you start talking about how they need to sacrifice. Perhaps if you were less flip about assigning costs, you'd run into fewer people who instinctively dig in their heels and try to fight you on everything you say.
Before you start throwing accusations around, incidentally, I agree that climate change needs to be addressed. The climate is warming up, glacial ice is melting, the repercussions of unchecked climate change are likely to be catastrophic.
Your generalization skills are, truly, impressive.
Moreover, what else are we supposed to think? As long as you get what you want, I'm OK with ____?
Self-interest is not only a fundamental feature of human nature, it's a perfectly rational way of approaching the world. If you don't like the fact that someone (in this case, not an American, as it turns out) is OK with this because his MP3 player will be protected, rather than complaining that he shouldn't want an MP3 player, maybe you should try to explain why he should want something else.
Bitching that someone wants something isn't helpful. Maybe if you explained why his MP3 player isn't worth the price that's being paid, it would be helpful. Most people are open to new information.
One must base one's opinions on something, and personal satisfaction is a good start. I fail to see why there's some moral imperative for me to be miserable, absent evidence that my personal satisfaction is harmful to someone else (or, even, my own longer-term satisfaction).