An environmentalist, who worked in advising on carbon credits, told me basically the same thing, that it doesn't matter if the CO2 issue isn't really a problem, because by cutting CO2 you will force everyone to cut production and so you force everyone to cut consumption, and she added with emphasis, "it's about reducing greed".
That was a good ten years ago. It shapes my opinion that people are here using "science" as a narrative, to wrap their entical and moral ideas in a science theory so as to give it objective validity, whereas moral and ethical issues are inter-subjective, social, cultural issues, not objective issues.
By all means, people can and should debate the ethical issues around co-habiting on a planet, where a child born in Somalia faces entirely different opportunities and hardships to a child born in Norway. We as a humanity should be talking about that ethical issue.
But leave science to the objective study and testing of objective phenomena. Don't corrupt science for the sake of propaganda.
Most of the world's population is not ethically developed enough to start viewing the world as a common humanity. We are barely growing out of the ethical dogmas of the traditional religions, as it is.
Trying to convince everyone that they "must act" because of imagined disasters, will NOT end well, because existential threats cause people to RETREAT and go back to earlier more primitive moralities.
Making everyone fearful for existence does NOT make them more globally compassionate people.
It is kinda sad how they are damaging the reputation of science, and damaging the ethical development of humanity, at the same time.
The best one can hope for is that they just get generally ignored.
I gather that at one time, China had the technology to sail the world, but they figured the rest of the world was just primitive barbarians, so they didn't bother.
From a Chinese perspective, China is the world.
To paraphrase the old soviet joke, in Chinese world, world is cut off by China.
If you lookup low carb high fat (LCHF), ketogenic, and carnivore proponents and experimenters, they're the ones getting the long lasting results.
I call myself "semi-keto". Greatly reduced carbs (was eating rice probably 3-4 times a week and potatoes 2-3 times a week), but also trying to stay away from really high fat (cook mostly with olive oil, not butter). Pretty sure I haven't gone into ketosis but still down about 15 lbs since Aug 1 and it's still a pretty filling diet.
Yes, I gather the point at which people go into ketosis will be different for different people. As the other person said, that's not what keto looks like on paper, but then, if you are eating few enough carbs that you can manage to go into a fasting state overnight, whilst asleep, you might find you are in ketosis by the time you wake up, especially if it has been over 12 or maybe 16 hours since last eating.
Unfortunately the testing strips are expensive, but they're interesting to use. I do full fat, lots of fat, and fat fat fat, and pretty much almost no carb most days, and whenever I try testing my blood, I'm in ketosis. But I slid into that over many years.
Robert Graham of Errata Security said in a blog post. "The key to dieting is not eating more but eating less."
As so many people who are talking about "dieting" they are both wrong, and have a very short-sighted view.
"Eating less" seems to be the answer, but results in hunger pangs, leading to the person not being able to think about anything else than food, and thus stress himself out. And guess what that tends to lead to...
So, start with eathing three good, full meals. That definitily helps to quench the snack attacks.
But foremost, try to figure out why you are eating all that stuff (did I already mention stress ? I think I did), and try to get it clear in your mind.
Being aware of what makes you eat definitly helps in breaking the habit. Ofcourse, as you now aware of what bothers you you also have a chance to eliminate the cause of that stress.
If you lookup low carb high fat (LCHF), ketogenic, and carnivore proponents and experimenters, they're the ones getting the long lasting results.
Gary Taubes did his now famous investigation into the history of nutritional science and found how it went all to pot when it shifted to USA and ignored the earlier, actually good scientists, in Germany and Austria, and what they had already been discovering.
In essence, yeah, there are things which cause people to gain weight, and meanwhile, the meme of advising people to "eat less" is really terrible and counterproductive advice. And don't worry, no laws of thermodynamics are ever broken. It is just that the body is complex and "eat less" does not focus on the right stuff.
If your body, regulated by hormones, enters a mode where it is working to store fat, you WILL store fat no matter what you think you are doing to "eat less" and "exercise more". I gather in animal studies, the animal can even cannibalise its own muscle in order to store fat whilst being on a calorie restricted diet.
So the key is to choose foods (and even times of day when you eat) which don't set your body into this mode where it is driving to store fat all the time.
I gather the key thing is if a person realises that their perceptions are constructs, albeit very useful and productive constructs, but constructs nonetheless, and so you start to see the utility and also the problems, created by the constructs/perceptions.
Introspection shows you what you are thinking, whereas construct-awareness shows you that what you are thinking is just a model and you might adopt other models in other situations.
And then, as designers, they also seem to be using the notch as an identifier so you can recognise an iPhone. Which is, I guess, why it then gets copied.
I wonder how much time they spent trying to shape the notch, to find the least annoying shape. There’s probably a lot of pictures of plants and curves and women on their design boards.
Ah, much as like religion makes sense if you practice the religion, then. Not at all from an objective perspective, because it must be a subjective experience. In other words: BS
It is true what you are saying, in that there is a big difference between objective data and subjective expression. And we should not pretend that this is like measuring something objective. Having said that, subjective experience is not BS. If your partner says "I love you and want to have babies and start a family and grow old together", that is all subjective, yet, people have to base the biggest decisions in their lives on whether they intuit that their partner is being sincere, or whether they think their partner is lying, either to them or to themselves.
Objective science is amazing, and there is the rest of life where no, you cannot be objective, but you cannot just ignore subjectivity and intuition and interpretation and sincerity either, because you'd not be able to function.
And if you go to a doctor and complain that it hurts, but the doc says they can't find anything wrong with you, too often there are cases where yes there really is something wrong with you, but all you know is how you feel. Ie. "subjective BS".
But yes, pretty much all of "mindfulness" is a phenomenology, not an objective science. Which is why trying to correlate it with brain activity is interesting.
What the earlier poster refers to though is something that tends to be heard in mindfulness and meditation circles. And yes it is subjective, but "suffering" is a subjective experience, and we can't tell people who are suffering, because they just lost their job, that they should quit whining because it is "all in their head". As humans we are similar and there are phenomenological experiences which most of us would agree are "suffering". Likewise, as a collection of humans who practice mindfulness, we can compare and talk about whether it seems to reduce suffering.
And of course a group of people can delude themselves just as a group of scientists peer reviewing each others' clique of speciality can all delude themselves with group think.
So by all means take that study with a large pinch of salt.
Mindfulness is simply about noticing that when a bad feeling or bad situation comes up, those events are a bit like a drama on a TV show and you are watching the TV show. The TV is like your consciousness, a screen on which or within which, the image is manifesting, and the TV does not get upset about the drama, the drama is merely a function of what the TV is supposed to be doing naturally.
So there is a sort of "feeling lighter" and from there you then participate in, and accept more, the drama, and out of that, you probably find answers better. Mindfulness is like, the opposite of running away from problems.
In Buddhism I gather there is the story of a guy who is shot by an arrow and is obviously in pain, but rather that accept the situation and deal with it, he is very upset that he is shot by an arrow, ie. he is mentally in a state of rejection of the situation, he hates it, and that adds another layer of upset and suffering, in that he just hates the situation, and so he experiences even more pain. "I can't stand it!!" Subjectively he has added additional layers of suffering and pain, to the original "arrow stuck in leg" pain.
So maybe there is something about whether a stimulus in one part of the brain gets relayed or not, to other parts of the brain, and as your brain is the physical side of your mind, if you alter your mind with a practice of accepting, maybe your brain does rewire, given the material assumption that everything you experience is created by the brain, or could not happen unless the brain itself was doing it.
If in your mind you have loosened the connections between phenomena so that a pain is more in isolation, more localised, then maybe the brain is also loosening the connections between centres and allowing that is happening in one centre to have less influence on the other centres.
Oh I dunno. There may be an issue with particular nutrients in particular crops in particular climates and soils. Meanwhile, greenhouses increase co2 to 1000 ppm to increase photosynthesis. Trouble is there are so many soft areas where research is not of the highest gold standard, but I am all for science being respected and well funded in general. But that doesn't mean it is all useful, and we have seen the news about how this or that science journal editor has concluded that you just can't believe at face value most of what is published.
The PC era (one personal computer) is over and we can all afford multiple devices and cloud services. These questions around, “is device X a real computer” died like all the arguments about whether iPads were or weren’t for real serious work, also died.
Every device is potentially useful and it is just a question of one’s life and work habits. For example, I have no interest in wearables. But I do love my little projects in high-end-ish 3D modelling software (and these days a decent desktop with large screen is fine for my small projects). I also sit on the sofa a lot and the desktop is in another room, so a tablet is essential, but I never take it out of the house as, essentially, I do not commute on trains, but if I did, I would take it out a lot. And all work is on a laptop, again, because various reasons.
IOW, lots of little lifestyle quirks. Every device has potential, and we are way past the day when a computer has to do everything in order to succeed in the market.
Oh the justice and inequality thing. True. But I see a simple starting point. Humans are innately cooperative and competitive. Love and War.
Any proposed solution is inherently these two things together. Like, the current system is bad so let’s compete against it with a new system. It’s the cycle of violence. Often in pursuit of love and justice.
Logic often can’t handle this “two things together” pattern. Debating gets polarised.
Plus there may be reasons why capitalism works which are nothing to do with the theoretical explanations for why it works. It’s not a clean-room science.
For myself I assume it is about individuals and creativity, in that, you can be as capitalist as you like but without a creative population you just have a pile of nuts and bolts coming off factory lines.
And the great sins of capitalism, like crashes, and super-rich, are just accidents in complex systems, in that you cannot foresee who or what is going to go off the charts and thus regulate in advance to stop them.
When the world only needs five computers, why would you regulate an industry to prevent billions getting hoovered up by key players, for example?
Life is risky. And managing risk is risky. And things are always “obvious” in hindsight especially when you can’t verify your insight because now the event is already history. But people can get qualifications and respect for their unverified theories.
Anyway, I think everyone agrees that, on the love side of our natures, we don’t want desperately poor people. And meanwhile, creative power is often competitive and has winners and losers. Plus even if society is very encouraging of creativity, things just go wrong for many individuals, like addiction or bad parenting or malnourishment (cheap sugary foods don’t count) and emotional and psychological stresses, and so on.
On the whole I am very lucky to have been born in a Western country which is already very developed. How or why the West developed is debatable, but ideologies don’t seem to be a way forward here. They might be useful in third world countries though, kinda like how traditional religions may be useful in giving people dreams of an ideal or pure life.
No, it’s that with cardiac arrests, the brain may still work, and create hallucinations. Whereas Amexander’s illness was attacking his brain directly. The TV can’t produce a picture if the TV is busted. But he says he did experience pictures, visions, detailed and well organised experiences. But the TV was busted, so it should not have been possible. It’s like seeing pictures on a TV that’s not plugged in.
There’s Eben Alexander, an academic neurosurgeon, who would have said NDEs are just the product of a sick brain, until he had a long NDE. The problem with saying it was his brain creating a hallucination, is that due to the severe bacterial meningitis he’d gotten sick with, as far as he knows as a neurosurgeon, his brain was in no shape to do anything other than highly delirious confused dreamstates, if even that. But he recalled a very detailed, well ordered, long, set of clear experience in his “dream”, which led him to conclude that it was real, ie. sentience is not created by the brain, rather, the brain is a receiver of sentience. He wrote a couple of book about it. Although I wish he or his publisher hadn’t used words like “heaven” as there was nothing particularly Christian or religious in his descriptions (if anything it was more Eastern, alluding to emptiness and pure presence).
This is so sweetly false-confident, it's hilarious. Let's pick up on one small piece to demonstrate: "Pomo always wants to label victims and perpetrators. It is never women themselves making choices. Like how nurses are mostly women, and engineers are so often men. Nobody says women are oppressing men out of nursing."
Quite right, nobody says woman are oppressing men out of nursing. Why could that be, I wonder? Is there another, possibly more prestigious clinical profession which men have greater access to than women, and which may explain why men don't become nurses? Tough one, I can't think of any such profession. I mean, it's not like doctors are paid shit loads more than nurses, have greater prestige, and are a profession to which men have demonstrably better access, etc etc. Of course not.
It is a good point, but then why is almost every garbage collector I see a male? Men are supposed to be oppressing women into taking the worst jobs? Those garbage collectors can easily have female bosses at the city council.
Look, I don't mean to claim that there is no patriarchy. We know from history that there was a matriarchy for a loooong time, then power switched to men in charge. And apparently it had something to do with how food was produced. But that aside, the issue is, what things are just historical accidents (men in charge) and what things are ongoing biological differences?
The big problem is that, science has been used in the past as an "objective" way to bolster hierarchy and oppression. The very term "holistic" was coined by Jan Smuts, in South Africa, who used it as part of a colonial view that the white man's "natural" place in nature was at the top, and the natives were "below". That was "holistic". So that's the kind of fucked up pseudo-science which we must all fight against.
That does not mean that properly done, properly researched, stuff does not exist. And that is always the debate. If there is a claim that women, on average, gravitate to people, and men, on average, gravitate to stuff, and that women have no problem "feeding to the lions" the men, when it is a job they don't care about, and likewise, vice-versa, then in the interests of a better society, we better damn well understand what those traits are and whether jobs have to be polarised along those traits, or whether jobs can be changed to make them work better for both sexes, so that more jobs are done better, and not just done to a quota.
A key point is that people's cognition, their worldview, grows and develops, just as a small child can't form certain concepts, as adults grow, they can develop wider, more sophisticated ways of viewing the world. And this is key, because it applies to everyone. And we don't really know why it happens differently in different people, but it is something about the individual and their experiences.
So as you say, diversity of thought, or rather, people whose thinking is more sophisticated, yeah, it helps to have those people running things.
Where things seem to go wrong is when we take what is a cognitive stage, which could appear in anyone, and start mandating that we should mix a certain proportion of labels (woman, black, chinese, tarns, indian, whatever), and that by mixing those labels, you will generate that higher level of cognition and worldviews. It is not so simple. You cannot force people to grow. What difference if the woman on the board has the same male traits of obsession with ruthless cuts as any other male? (Usually, men have greater focus, and narrower outlook.)
The pomo current adds yet another problem in that, it want this better world, but it disavows making value judgements about people, yet it makes value judgements about people. So, if women are no different to men, and the very notion of gender is a social construct, and yet women are supposed to have all these wonderful qualities which men don't. If men and women were no different, then there is no reason why we should include women more. If men and women were no different then there is no reason why men would be oppressing women any more than women would oppress women. Basically in pomo world, nothing makes sense.
But if they allowed clear value judgements, like saying that certain traits are being more highly valued and so we need to look at why women don't seem to value those traits, and why those traits are valued in business, and whether those traits make sense for the goals of the work, then you can start to have a debate about, what is it about corporate culture which is needlessly making it incompatible with other traits, and making itself unattractive to women? Is it just the long hours? Is it too much travel? Is it just too f***ing depressing that most women don't want to do it?
Pomo always wants to label victims and perpetrators. It is never women themselves making choices. Like how nurses are mostly women, and engineers are so often men. Nobody says women are oppressing men out of nursing. The question should be, why is a particular kind of work done in a way which promotes certain traits and not others? COULD that work be done in more effective way, if some of those other traits were valued more?
But if you merely mandate quotas out of some notion of justice, you just don't even touch that problem. It is like your code crashing all over the place but always returning "ok!" You have simply erased the warning light, not handled the underlying problem.
Anyway, that's just a couple of examples of how these issues need to be seen with value judgements and with discernment about making distinctions about things. It ain't just labels. The tricky part is to do it without introducing bias, but pomo is already so magtastically biased that you could only improve things at this point.
I saw mention somewhere, ages ago, that they wanted to present files which are not actually downloaded. So maybe they do need to mess with the filesystem.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, nice quotes.
An environmentalist, who worked in advising on carbon credits, told me basically the same thing, that it doesn't matter if the CO2 issue isn't really a problem, because by cutting CO2 you will force everyone to cut production and so you force everyone to cut consumption, and she added with emphasis, "it's about reducing greed".
That was a good ten years ago. It shapes my opinion that people are here using "science" as a narrative, to wrap their entical and moral ideas in a science theory so as to give it objective validity, whereas moral and ethical issues are inter-subjective, social, cultural issues, not objective issues.
By all means, people can and should debate the ethical issues around co-habiting on a planet, where a child born in Somalia faces entirely different opportunities and hardships to a child born in Norway. We as a humanity should be talking about that ethical issue.
But leave science to the objective study and testing of objective phenomena. Don't corrupt science for the sake of propaganda.
Most of the world's population is not ethically developed enough to start viewing the world as a common humanity. We are barely growing out of the ethical dogmas of the traditional religions, as it is.
Trying to convince everyone that they "must act" because of imagined disasters, will NOT end well, because existential threats cause people to RETREAT and go back to earlier more primitive moralities.
Making everyone fearful for existence does NOT make them more globally compassionate people.
It is kinda sad how they are damaging the reputation of science, and damaging the ethical development of humanity, at the same time.
The best one can hope for is that they just get generally ignored.
Interesting. Do you suppose it's something to do with animals being able to learn on the fly?
Well, true, like how docs talk about a treatment "saving" lives when actually they just delayed death.
However, such... pedantic issues... don't mean much when an old person is lying on the floor with a broken hip for three days unable to call for help.
I gather that at one time, China had the technology to sail the world, but they figured the rest of the world was just primitive barbarians, so they didn't bother.
From a Chinese perspective, China is the world.
To paraphrase the old soviet joke, in Chinese world, world is cut off by China.
If you lookup low carb high fat (LCHF), ketogenic, and carnivore proponents and experimenters, they're the ones getting the long lasting results.
I call myself "semi-keto". Greatly reduced carbs (was eating rice probably 3-4 times a week and potatoes 2-3 times a week), but also trying to stay away from really high fat (cook mostly with olive oil, not butter). Pretty sure I haven't gone into ketosis but still down about 15 lbs since Aug 1 and it's still a pretty filling diet.
Yes, I gather the point at which people go into ketosis will be different for different people. As the other person said, that's not what keto looks like on paper, but then, if you are eating few enough carbs that you can manage to go into a fasting state overnight, whilst asleep, you might find you are in ketosis by the time you wake up, especially if it has been over 12 or maybe 16 hours since last eating.
Unfortunately the testing strips are expensive, but they're interesting to use. I do full fat, lots of fat, and fat fat fat, and pretty much almost no carb most days, and whenever I try testing my blood, I'm in ketosis. But I slid into that over many years.
As so many people who are talking about "dieting" they are both wrong, and have a very short-sighted view.
"Eating less" seems to be the answer, but results in hunger pangs, leading to the person not being able to think about anything else than food, and thus stress himself out. And guess what that tends to lead to ...
So, start with eathing three good, full meals. That definitily helps to quench the snack attacks.
But foremost, try to figure out why you are eating all that stuff (did I already mention stress ? I think I did), and try to get it clear in your mind.
Being aware of what makes you eat definitly helps in breaking the habit. Ofcourse, as you now aware of what bothers you you also have a chance to eliminate the cause of that stress.
If you lookup low carb high fat (LCHF), ketogenic, and carnivore proponents and experimenters, they're the ones getting the long lasting results.
Gary Taubes did his now famous investigation into the history of nutritional science and found how it went all to pot when it shifted to USA and ignored the earlier, actually good scientists, in Germany and Austria, and what they had already been discovering.
In essence, yeah, there are things which cause people to gain weight, and meanwhile, the meme of advising people to "eat less" is really terrible and counterproductive advice. And don't worry, no laws of thermodynamics are ever broken. It is just that the body is complex and "eat less" does not focus on the right stuff.
If your body, regulated by hormones, enters a mode where it is working to store fat, you WILL store fat no matter what you think you are doing to "eat less" and "exercise more". I gather in animal studies, the animal can even cannibalise its own muscle in order to store fat whilst being on a calorie restricted diet.
So the key is to choose foods (and even times of day when you eat) which don't set your body into this mode where it is driving to store fat all the time.
I never understood how it should work when the cat is a conscious observer anyway.
There's a lot to be said for washing the dishes rather than worrying about the state of the world and the cultural wars.
Well that’s encouraging; some days I feel like I’ll never get there.
Zeno was on neither team.
Great question.
I gather the key thing is if a person realises that their perceptions are constructs, albeit very useful and productive constructs, but constructs nonetheless, and so you start to see the utility and also the problems, created by the constructs/perceptions.
Introspection shows you what you are thinking, whereas construct-awareness shows you that what you are thinking is just a model and you might adopt other models in other situations.
Never before has Apple made such an annoying peripheral as its TV remote.
Um.
***cough***puckmouse***cough***
Very true. It is a design compromise.
And then, as designers, they also seem to be using the notch as an identifier so you can recognise an iPhone. Which is, I guess, why it then gets copied.
I wonder how much time they spent trying to shape the notch, to find the least annoying shape. There’s probably a lot of pictures of plants and curves and women on their design boards.
Geezuz!!!
I’ll be spending some time making sure EVERYTHING is dowloaded and snapshotted in ZFS. And then backed up.
You will get arrested and imprisoned for sharing works as old as Handel's Messiah or The Ode to Joy.
Ironic. Ode to Joy is the European Anthem.
lah, la la la la la la la lalalala laa lalaah!
They make sense if you practise mindfullness.
Ah, much as like religion makes sense if you practice the religion, then. Not at all from an objective perspective, because it must be a subjective experience. In other words: BS
It is true what you are saying, in that there is a big difference between objective data and subjective expression. And we should not pretend that this is like measuring something objective. Having said that, subjective experience is not BS. If your partner says "I love you and want to have babies and start a family and grow old together", that is all subjective, yet, people have to base the biggest decisions in their lives on whether they intuit that their partner is being sincere, or whether they think their partner is lying, either to them or to themselves.
Objective science is amazing, and there is the rest of life where no, you cannot be objective, but you cannot just ignore subjectivity and intuition and interpretation and sincerity either, because you'd not be able to function.
And if you go to a doctor and complain that it hurts, but the doc says they can't find anything wrong with you, too often there are cases where yes there really is something wrong with you, but all you know is how you feel. Ie. "subjective BS".
But yes, pretty much all of "mindfulness" is a phenomenology, not an objective science. Which is why trying to correlate it with brain activity is interesting.
What the earlier poster refers to though is something that tends to be heard in mindfulness and meditation circles. And yes it is subjective, but "suffering" is a subjective experience, and we can't tell people who are suffering, because they just lost their job, that they should quit whining because it is "all in their head". As humans we are similar and there are phenomenological experiences which most of us would agree are "suffering". Likewise, as a collection of humans who practice mindfulness, we can compare and talk about whether it seems to reduce suffering.
And of course a group of people can delude themselves just as a group of scientists peer reviewing each others' clique of speciality can all delude themselves with group think.
So by all means take that study with a large pinch of salt.
Mindfulness is simply about noticing that when a bad feeling or bad situation comes up, those events are a bit like a drama on a TV show and you are watching the TV show. The TV is like your consciousness, a screen on which or within which, the image is manifesting, and the TV does not get upset about the drama, the drama is merely a function of what the TV is supposed to be doing naturally.
So there is a sort of "feeling lighter" and from there you then participate in, and accept more, the drama, and out of that, you probably find answers better. Mindfulness is like, the opposite of running away from problems.
In Buddhism I gather there is the story of a guy who is shot by an arrow and is obviously in pain, but rather that accept the situation and deal with it, he is very upset that he is shot by an arrow, ie. he is mentally in a state of rejection of the situation, he hates it, and that adds another layer of upset and suffering, in that he just hates the situation, and so he experiences even more pain. "I can't stand it!!" Subjectively he has added additional layers of suffering and pain, to the original "arrow stuck in leg" pain.
So maybe there is something about whether a stimulus in one part of the brain gets relayed or not, to other parts of the brain, and as your brain is the physical side of your mind, if you alter your mind with a practice of accepting, maybe your brain does rewire, given the material assumption that everything you experience is created by the brain, or could not happen unless the brain itself was doing it.
If in your mind you have loosened the connections between phenomena so that a pain is more in isolation, more localised, then maybe the brain is also loosening the connections between centres and allowing that is happening in one centre to have less influence on the other centres.
Nice that they see in brain structure the things we understand by introspective inquiry.
Also nice that, as our wiring is still similar, the philosophies of ancient times can be relevant.
And yes I’m going to go read those.
Oh I dunno. There may be an issue with particular nutrients in particular crops in particular climates and soils. Meanwhile, greenhouses increase co2 to 1000 ppm to increase photosynthesis. Trouble is there are so many soft areas where research is not of the highest gold standard, but I am all for science being respected and well funded in general. But that doesn't mean it is all useful, and we have seen the news about how this or that science journal editor has concluded that you just can't believe at face value most of what is published.
Carbon Dioxide In Greenhouses
The PC era (one personal computer) is over and we can all afford multiple devices and cloud services. These questions around, “is device X a real computer” died like all the arguments about whether iPads were or weren’t for real serious work, also died.
Every device is potentially useful and it is just a question of one’s life and work habits. For example, I have no interest in wearables. But I do love my little projects in high-end-ish 3D modelling software (and these days a decent desktop with large screen is fine for my small projects). I also sit on the sofa a lot and the desktop is in another room, so a tablet is essential, but I never take it out of the house as, essentially, I do not commute on trains, but if I did, I would take it out a lot. And all work is on a laptop, again, because various reasons.
IOW, lots of little lifestyle quirks. Every device has potential, and we are way past the day when a computer has to do everything in order to succeed in the market.
Oh the justice and inequality thing. True. But I see a simple starting point. Humans are innately cooperative and competitive. Love and War.
Any proposed solution is inherently these two things together. Like, the current system is bad so let’s compete against it with a new system. It’s the cycle of violence. Often in pursuit of love and justice.
Logic often can’t handle this “two things together” pattern. Debating gets polarised.
Plus there may be reasons why capitalism works which are nothing to do with the theoretical explanations for why it works. It’s not a clean-room science.
For myself I assume it is about individuals and creativity, in that, you can be as capitalist as you like but without a creative population you just have a pile of nuts and bolts coming off factory lines.
And the great sins of capitalism, like crashes, and super-rich, are just accidents in complex systems, in that you cannot foresee who or what is going to go off the charts and thus regulate in advance to stop them.
When the world only needs five computers, why would you regulate an industry to prevent billions getting hoovered up by key players, for example?
Life is risky. And managing risk is risky. And things are always “obvious” in hindsight especially when you can’t verify your insight because now the event is already history. But people can get qualifications and respect for their unverified theories.
Anyway, I think everyone agrees that, on the love side of our natures, we don’t want desperately poor people. And meanwhile, creative power is often competitive and has winners and losers. Plus even if society is very encouraging of creativity, things just go wrong for many individuals, like addiction or bad parenting or malnourishment (cheap sugary foods don’t count) and emotional and psychological stresses, and so on.
On the whole I am very lucky to have been born in a Western country which is already very developed. How or why the West developed is debatable, but ideologies don’t seem to be a way forward here. They might be useful in third world countries though, kinda like how traditional religions may be useful in giving people dreams of an ideal or pure life.
No, it’s that with cardiac arrests, the brain may still work, and create hallucinations. Whereas Amexander’s illness was attacking his brain directly. The TV can’t produce a picture if the TV is busted. But he says he did experience pictures, visions, detailed and well organised experiences. But the TV was busted, so it should not have been possible. It’s like seeing pictures on a TV that’s not plugged in.
There’s Eben Alexander, an academic neurosurgeon, who would have said NDEs are just the product of a sick brain, until he had a long NDE. The problem with saying it was his brain creating a hallucination, is that due to the severe bacterial meningitis he’d gotten sick with, as far as he knows as a neurosurgeon, his brain was in no shape to do anything other than highly delirious confused dreamstates, if even that. But he recalled a very detailed, well ordered, long, set of clear experience in his “dream”, which led him to conclude that it was real, ie. sentience is not created by the brain, rather, the brain is a receiver of sentience. He wrote a couple of book about it. Although I wish he or his publisher hadn’t used words like “heaven” as there was nothing particularly Christian or religious in his descriptions (if anything it was more Eastern, alluding to emptiness and pure presence).
This is so sweetly false-confident, it's hilarious. Let's pick up on one small piece to demonstrate:
"Pomo always wants to label victims and perpetrators. It is never women themselves making choices. Like how nurses are mostly women, and engineers are so often men. Nobody says women are oppressing men out of nursing."
Quite right, nobody says woman are oppressing men out of nursing. Why could that be, I wonder? Is there another, possibly more prestigious clinical profession which men have greater access to than women, and which may explain why men don't become nurses? Tough one, I can't think of any such profession. I mean, it's not like doctors are paid shit loads more than nurses, have greater prestige, and are a profession to which men have demonstrably better access, etc etc. Of course not.
https://www.theguardian.com/co...
It is a good point, but then why is almost every garbage collector I see a male? Men are supposed to be oppressing women into taking the worst jobs? Those garbage collectors can easily have female bosses at the city council.
Look, I don't mean to claim that there is no patriarchy. We know from history that there was a matriarchy for a loooong time, then power switched to men in charge. And apparently it had something to do with how food was produced. But that aside, the issue is, what things are just historical accidents (men in charge) and what things are ongoing biological differences?
The big problem is that, science has been used in the past as an "objective" way to bolster hierarchy and oppression. The very term "holistic" was coined by Jan Smuts, in South Africa, who used it as part of a colonial view that the white man's "natural" place in nature was at the top, and the natives were "below". That was "holistic". So that's the kind of fucked up pseudo-science which we must all fight against.
That does not mean that properly done, properly researched, stuff does not exist. And that is always the debate. If there is a claim that women, on average, gravitate to people, and men, on average, gravitate to stuff, and that women have no problem "feeding to the lions" the men, when it is a job they don't care about, and likewise, vice-versa, then in the interests of a better society, we better damn well understand what those traits are and whether jobs have to be polarised along those traits, or whether jobs can be changed to make them work better for both sexes, so that more jobs are done better, and not just done to a quota.
A key point is that people's cognition, their worldview, grows and develops, just as a small child can't form certain concepts, as adults grow, they can develop wider, more sophisticated ways of viewing the world. And this is key, because it applies to everyone. And we don't really know why it happens differently in different people, but it is something about the individual and their experiences.
So as you say, diversity of thought, or rather, people whose thinking is more sophisticated, yeah, it helps to have those people running things.
Where things seem to go wrong is when we take what is a cognitive stage, which could appear in anyone, and start mandating that we should mix a certain proportion of labels (woman, black, chinese, tarns, indian, whatever), and that by mixing those labels, you will generate that higher level of cognition and worldviews. It is not so simple. You cannot force people to grow. What difference if the woman on the board has the same male traits of obsession with ruthless cuts as any other male? (Usually, men have greater focus, and narrower outlook.)
The pomo current adds yet another problem in that, it want this better world, but it disavows making value judgements about people, yet it makes value judgements about people. So, if women are no different to men, and the very notion of gender is a social construct, and yet women are supposed to have all these wonderful qualities which men don't. If men and women were no different, then there is no reason why we should include women more. If men and women were no different then there is no reason why men would be oppressing women any more than women would oppress women. Basically in pomo world, nothing makes sense.
But if they allowed clear value judgements, like saying that certain traits are being more highly valued and so we need to look at why women don't seem to value those traits, and why those traits are valued in business, and whether those traits make sense for the goals of the work, then you can start to have a debate about, what is it about corporate culture which is needlessly making it incompatible with other traits, and making itself unattractive to women? Is it just the long hours? Is it too much travel? Is it just too f***ing depressing that most women don't want to do it?
Pomo always wants to label victims and perpetrators. It is never women themselves making choices. Like how nurses are mostly women, and engineers are so often men. Nobody says women are oppressing men out of nursing. The question should be, why is a particular kind of work done in a way which promotes certain traits and not others? COULD that work be done in more effective way, if some of those other traits were valued more?
But if you merely mandate quotas out of some notion of justice, you just don't even touch that problem. It is like your code crashing all over the place but always returning "ok!" You have simply erased the warning light, not handled the underlying problem.
Anyway, that's just a couple of examples of how these issues need to be seen with value judgements and with discernment about making distinctions about things. It ain't just labels. The tricky part is to do it without introducing bias, but pomo is already so magtastically biased that you could only improve things at this point.
I saw mention somewhere, ages ago, that they wanted to present files which are not actually downloaded. So maybe they do need to mess with the filesystem.