When I watched the videos of Russian soldiers having their heads cut off, Jews being burned in furnaces, cats being set on fire "for fun", and a Ukranian man having his face bashed in by two teen boys, it taught me the world is a violent and disgusting place filled with dark, deranged people.
Had these videos been censored, I'd still naively think everyone is good.
Thinking that the world is fundamentally characterized by violence and sadism is just as simplistic as thinking that it's all sunshine and roses. Though both perspectives have some truth to them, neither one represents the whole truth, and it's simply (and demonstrably) false to say the world "is" one or another of those things.
You also need to keep in mind that there are market and political forces that want you to look at the world that way, because it suits their ends. Politicians with an authoritarian worldview, or business interests who profit from fear and anxiety, all nod approvingly at shows like:
CSI (message: all crimes will inevitably be caught and punished, no matter how carefully planned)
24 (message: we're under severe threat from irredeemably evil terrorists; any restraint on the heroes who pursue them undermines our national security, since weapons like torture and extrajudicial killing are a crucial part of their toolkit)
Criminal Minds (message: every place in the world is full of serial killers who perpetrate unimaginable cruelty on their victims, and the only way to avoid that fate is to trust no one and be hypervigilant)
I don't think many people realize the extent to which they internalize the vision of the world communicated by mass media. There's a lot of money to be made -- and power to be consolidated -- by making people feel anxious and threatened.
From TFA: With all this drama happening 640 light-years away in the constellation of Orion
"With so much drama in the one-OB
It's kinda hard bein' Betel-g-e-u-s-e
But I, somehow, some way
Keep freakin' out the eschatologists like every single day..."
Re:behavioral problems have virtually disappeared
on
The Wi-Fi On the Bus
·
· Score: 1
And they are outcasts because...?
Yes, a lack of social skills will help to make someone an outcast in middle/high school. But there are plenty of kids out there who have great social skills and still get shat on nonetheless, because human beings have a seemingly hardwired antipathy towards difference.
You can do everything right: be funny and quick-witted, able to relate, and whatever else. But if you're different from other kids in a way that codes negatively, they won't accept you, and rest assured, they will fuck with you if they can. If you're an effeminate boy or a butch girl growing up in a place like the deep South, you will be harassed. If your family is the wrong race or religion, and you live in an intolerant place, you will be harassed. If your family can't afford to buy you attractive or fashionable clothing, you will be harassed. If you're a guy and you're bad at sports -- weak, uncoordinated, clumsy, fat -- you will be harassed. If you're a girl and you're dumpy, awkward, and poor, you will be harassed.
Whenever bullying comes up, there's this recurring Slashdot fantasy that all this will stop if you just "stand up to them" -- that if you present yourself as a potentially violent actor, the bad guys will eave you alone, or even accept you. Yet for many kids, that's not realistic: no matter how much you exhort them to lift weights and take martial arts classes, they'll never, ever be able to competently handle themselves in a fight. (Being physically and socially clumsy is an Asperger's trait by definition.)
And even if they can improve somewhat, do you really think some skinny-ass, asthmatic, glass-jawed nerd can hold his own against a thicknecked fuck who's been getting in fistfights with his dad since he was six years old? People have been reading way too much Ender's Game. Not every nerd can be turned into a hyperefficient killing machine (unless you're planning to give them a gun, and we know how that ends).
Also, while there are a lot of good things about "social skills", let's not forget that a big component of that package is the ability to lie, be glib, and generally manipulate people. Read How to Win Friends and Influence People sometime -- it's a great book, but it's also two steps away from being a blueprint for manipulative sociopathy. One of the refreshing things about many mentally disabled people is how honest and forthright they are -- they say what they think, and don't try to tailor it to their audience. Sometimes "not being able to relate to people" is code for "isn't willing or able to tell the little lies that lubricate our daily social interactions".
I'm all for developing social skills and teaching people to stand up for themselves. But the rest of us also have a responsibility to protect the vulnerable, and to crush bullies whenever we encounter them, with every means at our disposal. Blaming the victim is a chickenshit way of shirking that responsibility. If some dude is a pompous, charmless, obese nerd with zero social skills, his peers aren't obligated to like him. But no matter how annoying or unattractive he may be, as long as he minds his own business and doesn't mess with anyone, no one should mess with him. At the risk of getting too polemical (as if it's not too late for that!) -- a society that doesn't enforce "live and let live", on a personal and institutional level, is a society that endangers its own right to exist.
Everyone's beating their chest and saying how "if you just hit them once, they'll never bother you again". Sometimes that's true, but sometimes they go get their gun -- and you can never be sure who will back down, and who will escalate. Fistfights between adults escalate all the time into gun violence. Why is it hard to understand that the same thing can and does happen between kids? This isn't the '50s, and even in the '90s I knew bullies who brought guns to school in their cars.
Humiliate a bully, and you might have a shining moment basking in the sun of your newfound manhood. But no one can promise you that they won't look for revenge -- and if they've got access to a gun, there's a quick and easy way to get that revenge. The consequences may suck, but rage has a way of making even normal people not give a shit, let alone people who are already inclined towards violence.
Calvin used words like "arboreal" not to shun the status quo and illustrate the richness of experience but because it's funny for a kid in a comic strip to use words like that. The Peanuts kids also spoke in a way that was above their age level for the same reason.
Well, I don't think that Schulz or Watterson ever thought "I'm going to have my child characters use big words so that I can shun the status quo and illustrate the richness of experience", per se. If they had, the results probably would've been crap!
Fortunately, we don't need them to have had that thought, nor to have planned all the different layers and resonances in their work. A lot of what we love in great art (and Schulz and Watterson are great artists) comes not from an artist's intellect, but from his intuition. In other words, the thing that makes it great is often something the artist can't even articulate to himself, at least not in words -- instead, he articulates it in his work. There's no way to fully paraphrase the combination of humor, incongruity, and poignancy we get from C&H at their best; if words could fully do it justice, we wouldn't need C&H.
So, yeah -- I don't think Watterson needs to know what he's up to, or to fully understand his own work. If anything, I think it would've ruined it if he were too self-aware. Think of all the bands who have great first albums, but then hit the "sophomore slump" with their second album: whereas the first one was spontaneous, raw, and overflowing with ideas, the second effort feels self-conscious, labored, and forced. Artists who have a long, strong career, and never jump the shark, often live in a bit of a bubble -- never thinking too hard about the meaning of what they do, and often privileging their intuition above their intellect. Credit to Watterson for finding a way to do that.
"Aven" is a French loanword, though it doesn't show up in my little French dictionary, or in the Oxford English Dictionary for that matter. But I found a French-language online dictionary that basically says it's a natural well ("puits") found in limestone. Apparently it's a loanword in French as well, taken from the Rouergat (?) dialect of the Occitan language.
I glanced at a few English-language caving publications which translate "aven" as "big cavern", "cathedral", "sinkhole", "shaft", or "abyss". (That last one seems a little suspect, since there's already a French word for "abyss", abîme.)
Confusingly, a lot of these words have water-related cognates. "Aven" apparently also means "river" in Breton, and in English a "puit" can be a well or a stream.
A few years ago, I ordered an escolar entree on a whim from an upscale seafood restaurant. I'd never heard of it and asked the waitress what it was, and she spoke highly of it, so I figured, what the hell. It turned out to be one of the most delicious pieces of fish I've ever had: moist, succulent, and rich.
It also very nearly made me shit my pants, about 2-3 hours later, when I was driving home and had nowhere to stop. (Once I did get to a toilet, the results were distinctive, to say the least.) I generally have a very strong stomach, and if this fish did that to me, I can't imagine what it would do to someone who had IBS or something comparable.
I don't think the fish should be banned, and calling it "toxic" seems strong. But I do think it's totally irresponsible of a restaurant to serve something like that without informing their customers, and serving it under a potentially deceptive name is even worse). In my case, the waitress didn't utter a peep about any possible ill effects, though maybe she just didn't know.
The chain of events I depicted was deliberately cartoonish, but is no more unrealistic than the oft-repeated idea that "if you just stand up to a bully, he'll turn tail and run."
Sometimes that's true, and sometimes it's the right thing to do. But sometimes the bad guy has more firepower, and cathartic macho fantasies tend to wither rapidly when one is confronted with a loaded gun. Middle-schoolers used to be safe from that sort of thing, but these days I'm not so sure. Even when I was in high school, there were students reputed to keep pistols in their cars.
Also, when exactly was the last time you gave a beatdown to a gangbanger, or a member of organized crime, or even a well-connected and malevolent politician? Where's your bravery then? Or do "bully ass whoopings" only count when you already know that the other person isn't a real threat to your existence?
We've been trained by movies and other propaganda to think that bravery is confronting the bad guy, mano-a-mano, and giving him a beatdown; anything else is being a pussy. Sometimes that's the right approach, especially if taking a stand in public will potentially galvanize a community. But sometimes that approach is just plain stupid, and the best thing to do is either to retreat, to defuse the situation through diplomacy, or if necessary, to take clandestine measures to neutralize your opponent.
That may not earn awards for bravery, but often the important thing isn't to be popular, or to enjoy the pleasant catharsis of macho chest-beating, but simply to win. You should read Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, to name but two authors who offer excellent advice on how to achieve victory, and who will tell you that a frontal assault is often a great way to look good and die young.
I'm willing to agree to respectfully disagree as well, but I still think it's overly facile to equate "not feeling bad" with "feeling good", as they're biologically and philosophically distinct phenomena. Grouping them under the same rubric doesn't really work (and carries with it weird moral implications that I find problematic), in part because people will knowingly forsake a tremendous pleasure in order to avoid having to confront a comparatively small anxiety.
The asymmetrical experience of those kinds of conflicts isn't really addressed by your equation, unless you insist that the avoidance of anxiety is a form of pleasure/satisfaction, and if so I simply must disagree. Because of anxiety, people are driven to pathological behaviors they find intensely painful, and it seems incorrect to me to use terms that connote pleasure to describe their struggles to minimize that pain. You might find it illuminating in this regard to read Clifford Simak's short story "The Huddling Place".
That said, there is a simple solution. I call it growing a backbone! Tried, tested and true.
Step 1, Grow a backbone.
Step 2, Walk up to Bully and look them square in the eye.
Step 3, Break Bully's freaking nose!
Step 4, Profit.
You left out a few steps: Step 5, As you're walking away, hear a bullet whistle past your ear. Step 6, Break into a trot while suddenly realizing that the Bully is a sociopath who's willing to escalate things as far as necessary in order to win, including killing you, your family, and anyone you're close to. Step 7, After the second bullet misses you by a whisker, also realize that many Bullies have a hell of a lot less to lose than you do; a lot more experience with fighting dirty; and no scruples about using any possible tactic, fair or foul, to win. Step 8, In the course of these revelations, find yourself questioning the wisdom of assuming that people will always back down when confronted with a show of force. Step 9, Turn around and attempt to plug the Bully with the weapon of your choice, knowing that either you're about to die (if the Bully shoots you first) or spend the next couple years of your life dealing with the legal, psychological, and financial aftermath of having killed someone: something that will bother you since -- unlike many Bullies -- you have a conscience, inconveniently enough.
People never do anything for anything other than personal satisfaction.
There are several major problems with this philosophy, including the implication that every altruistic act in the world is somehow tainted by personal satisfaction.
But the biggest, IMHO, is this: have you taken a look around and noticed how many people are doing things that are totally self-destructive and making them miserable, and yet they can't stop?
I'm not talking about things like cigarettes, booze, or drugs, by the way. I'm talking about people who see a golden opportunity -- for a dream job, a dream date, or whatever -- and who freeze up and find some way to sabotage themselves. Or people who are trapped in loveless marriages, who loathe their spouse, and who have ample opportunities to get out, and yet don't.
So I think your personal philosophy vastly underestimates the percentage of human actions that are motivated not by pleasure-seeking, but by anxiety. People will do anything to avoid having to feel anxiety, and that includes not doing things that would give them tremendous pleasure, if only they had the courage to experience a little fear to get there.
I guess you could call the avoidance of anxiety a form of "personal satisfaction", but to me, that's a bit like saying "It's pleasurable to not be doused with gasoline and set on fire." True in one sense (direct comparison) -- but rather deceptive in another.
"Gee, why is everyone complaining that they destroyed some old picture of a lady that wasn't realy smiling while comparing the materials available to Michaelangelo to today's?":(
Your question assumes that "one of the women in [his] life" would have sufficient expertise to speak about Disney's copyright tactics. Yet there's no evidence that that's the case, given that most people lack that expertise.
It also assumes that only rape victims have the moral standing and experience necessary to compare things to rape. If the analogy were murder, rather than rape, would you argue that only murder victims should be allowed to speak?
I suppose one could argue that the only person who could evaluate the comparison would be a person (most likely female) who's both a copyright lawyer and a rape victim. No doubt, several of those people exist. Yet even so, this hypothetical person can't speak for all of us, since in forcing the Sonny Bono act et al. upon us, Disney's actions victimize the collective, not just the individual.
No one person can directly articulate the effect those actions have had on public discourse. OTOH, I'm guessing a decent number of people have landed in jail or prison, at least in part because of those laws. Given the state of the U.S. penal system, a few of those inmates have probably been raped, in the most literal sense. Would you speak for them as well?
In other words, you're being every bit as reductive and offensive as the OP (if not more so), and your righteous indignation is both misplaced and of no real help to rape victims, real or hypothetical.
Actually, I said that 25ms (not 25 seconds, as you incorrectly wrote) of latency was basically acceptable, but that 75ms of latency wasn't. As someone else pointed out, 20ms of latency is equivalent to having the musician and the sound-source be 22ft apart. If you're a guitarist, that means being about 22' away from your amp. That's a fair distance, but it's doable.
75ms of latency is the equivalent of being about 84' away from your amp. Most guitarists would find that disconcerting, and it makes it hard to keep a steady tempo even in simple music, since you would need to play well ahead of the beat. At 120bpm, i.e. a medium tempo, 75ms of latency means that you need to play 15% ahead of the beat to stay in time. At a faster tempo of 180bpm, that approaches 25%, or the equivalent of a full sixteenth note in 4/4 time.
This is also why musicians really need stage monitors pointed at them, especially people who don't necessarily use their own amps (singers, keyboard players, etc.). Even if the PA mix is great, there's still enough physical distance and propagation delay that it'll throw off someone who's solely relying on the house system.
It may be that console gamers have learned to expect around 100-150ms of input latency, perhaps thanks to visual cues that help to justify the latency on some level. (If I decide to jump, it takes a certain amount of time to react to my thought and make that happen; if I tell Mario to jump, maybe he takes about the same amount of time to react to the stimulus. It makes a certain kind of sense.)
But I assure you that musicians find that level of latency unacceptable. When you're playing a software synth live, performing with other musicians, even 75ms of latency is very noticeable and makes you feel like you're playing through molasses. Same thing with recording -- if it takes longer than 25-30ms to hear my own sound coming back at me, I definitely notice it. Virtuosic music regularly exceeds an input density of 50ms per event!
I've thought for a while that, sometime within the next 20-30 years, we'll see a reality show where convicted pedophiles were offered a chance at redemption via a one-way trip to Mars or another celestial body. (Ganymede would be appropriate.) Call it a mixture between "2001: A Space Odyssey", "To Catch a Predator", and "The Running Man".
(So basically, take the premise of Acceptable.tv's brilliant Pedophile Gladiators -- featuring Drew Carey! -- and put it in space instead.)
The blog of Anthony Wesley, an Australian amateur astronomer, has what may be the first photos of a recent comet or asteroid impact on Jupiter, near the south pole.
July 2009 Jupiter impact, I dub thee...the Wesley Crusher.
I'm the kind of person who usually does a fair amount of research before he leaps, and so when I first started burning CD-Rs, I did everything more or less by the book. I used quality media (Mitsui and Taiyo Yuden), quality burners (Plextor), always verified my burns, and never used any crazy high speeds. My CD-Rs have held up well in many aspects, and I've only had a few physically intact discs that went bad for no apparent reason (most of which are from what may have been a problem batch of Mitsui Silvers, burned around 2000/2001).
But no one really made it clear how physically fragile the damn things were, especially in comparison to pressed silver CDs. I kept my backups in a booklet-style binder. Yes, I know that's considered less than ideal, but these discs weren't burned solely for archival purposes -- I needed to be able to page through them efficiently. Most of them were taken out and used every so often -- say, four times a year on average, sometimes more -- and never knowingly abused.
Over time, the foil on quite a few of them started to flake off. Unbranded Taiyo Yudens, which are so often acclaimed, seem to be the most vulnerable -- I've had quite a few that developed holes in the foil, especially near the edge. It's a shame, because the discs read beautifully otherwise, and seem to ace most media tests. But the foil seems all too easy to damage.
(I've also lost a handful of Mitsui Silvers that way, whereas Mitsui Golds seem to have a more robust armoring on top, as do some of the 2nd tier discs I've tried -- Sony, Maxell, TDK, Memorex. Meanwhile, I've seen no evident physical damage to my DVD-Rs so far; fingers crossed.)
Slashdot Mirror
At the least, there's a good reason it's called "Chinese" Water Torture.
...because unlike regular water torture, after a couple hours you don't feel full anymore?
(Thanks, everyone, you've been a great audience. Be sure to try the veal!)
When I watched the videos of Russian soldiers having their heads cut off, Jews being burned in furnaces, cats being set on fire "for fun", and a Ukranian man having his face bashed in by two teen boys, it taught me the world is a violent and disgusting place filled with dark, deranged people.
Had these videos been censored, I'd still naively think everyone is good.
Thinking that the world is fundamentally characterized by violence and sadism is just as simplistic as thinking that it's all sunshine and roses. Though both perspectives have some truth to them, neither one represents the whole truth, and it's simply (and demonstrably) false to say the world "is" one or another of those things.
You also need to keep in mind that there are market and political forces that want you to look at the world that way, because it suits their ends. Politicians with an authoritarian worldview, or business interests who profit from fear and anxiety, all nod approvingly at shows like:
I don't think many people realize the extent to which they internalize the vision of the world communicated by mass media. There's a lot of money to be made -- and power to be consolidated -- by making people feel anxious and threatened.
From TFA: With all this drama happening 640 light-years away in the constellation of Orion
"With so much drama in the one-OB
It's kinda hard bein' Betel-g-e-u-s-e
But I, somehow, some way
Keep freakin' out the eschatologists like every single day..."
Mr. O. B. Lada of Chicago
So wait, this changes everything: not only is Paul McCartney alive and the head of Al-Qaeda, but he's living in freakin' Chicago? Crazy world...
{{facepalm needed}}
And they are outcasts because...?
Yes, a lack of social skills will help to make someone an outcast in middle/high school. But there are plenty of kids out there who have great social skills and still get shat on nonetheless, because human beings have a seemingly hardwired antipathy towards difference.
You can do everything right: be funny and quick-witted, able to relate, and whatever else. But if you're different from other kids in a way that codes negatively, they won't accept you, and rest assured, they will fuck with you if they can. If you're an effeminate boy or a butch girl growing up in a place like the deep South, you will be harassed. If your family is the wrong race or religion, and you live in an intolerant place, you will be harassed. If your family can't afford to buy you attractive or fashionable clothing, you will be harassed. If you're a guy and you're bad at sports -- weak, uncoordinated, clumsy, fat -- you will be harassed. If you're a girl and you're dumpy, awkward, and poor, you will be harassed.
Whenever bullying comes up, there's this recurring Slashdot fantasy that all this will stop if you just "stand up to them" -- that if you present yourself as a potentially violent actor, the bad guys will eave you alone, or even accept you. Yet for many kids, that's not realistic: no matter how much you exhort them to lift weights and take martial arts classes, they'll never, ever be able to competently handle themselves in a fight. (Being physically and socially clumsy is an Asperger's trait by definition.)
And even if they can improve somewhat, do you really think some skinny-ass, asthmatic, glass-jawed nerd can hold his own against a thicknecked fuck who's been getting in fistfights with his dad since he was six years old? People have been reading way too much Ender's Game. Not every nerd can be turned into a hyperefficient killing machine (unless you're planning to give them a gun, and we know how that ends).
Also, while there are a lot of good things about "social skills", let's not forget that a big component of that package is the ability to lie, be glib, and generally manipulate people. Read How to Win Friends and Influence People sometime -- it's a great book, but it's also two steps away from being a blueprint for manipulative sociopathy. One of the refreshing things about many mentally disabled people is how honest and forthright they are -- they say what they think, and don't try to tailor it to their audience. Sometimes "not being able to relate to people" is code for "isn't willing or able to tell the little lies that lubricate our daily social interactions".
I'm all for developing social skills and teaching people to stand up for themselves. But the rest of us also have a responsibility to protect the vulnerable, and to crush bullies whenever we encounter them, with every means at our disposal. Blaming the victim is a chickenshit way of shirking that responsibility. If some dude is a pompous, charmless, obese nerd with zero social skills, his peers aren't obligated to like him. But no matter how annoying or unattractive he may be, as long as he minds his own business and doesn't mess with anyone, no one should mess with him. At the risk of getting too polemical (as if it's not too late for that!) -- a society that doesn't enforce "live and let live", on a personal and institutional level, is a society that endangers its own right to exist.
(such as my balls)
Assuming they are in your pants, they are probably quite safe. It's your eyeballs you should be really worried about.
For some reason, this exchange made me think of:
A Dying Tiger—moaned for Drink—
I hunted all the Sand—
I caught the Dripping of a Rock
And bore it in my Hand—
His Mighty Balls—in death were thick—
But searching—I could see
A Vision on the Retina
Of Water—and of me—
'Twas not my blame—who sped too slow—
'Twas not his blame—who died
While I was reaching him—
But 'twas—the fact that He was dead—
(Emily Dickinson)
Everyone's beating their chest and saying how "if you just hit them once, they'll never bother you again". Sometimes that's true, but sometimes they go get their gun -- and you can never be sure who will back down, and who will escalate. Fistfights between adults escalate all the time into gun violence. Why is it hard to understand that the same thing can and does happen between kids? This isn't the '50s, and even in the '90s I knew bullies who brought guns to school in their cars.
Humiliate a bully, and you might have a shining moment basking in the sun of your newfound manhood. But no one can promise you that they won't look for revenge -- and if they've got access to a gun, there's a quick and easy way to get that revenge. The consequences may suck, but rage has a way of making even normal people not give a shit, let alone people who are already inclined towards violence.
Calvin used words like "arboreal" not to shun the status quo and illustrate the richness of experience but because it's funny for a kid in a comic strip to use words like that. The Peanuts kids also spoke in a way that was above their age level for the same reason.
Well, I don't think that Schulz or Watterson ever thought "I'm going to have my child characters use big words so that I can shun the status quo and illustrate the richness of experience", per se. If they had, the results probably would've been crap!
Fortunately, we don't need them to have had that thought, nor to have planned all the different layers and resonances in their work. A lot of what we love in great art (and Schulz and Watterson are great artists) comes not from an artist's intellect, but from his intuition. In other words, the thing that makes it great is often something the artist can't even articulate to himself, at least not in words -- instead, he articulates it in his work. There's no way to fully paraphrase the combination of humor, incongruity, and poignancy we get from C&H at their best; if words could fully do it justice, we wouldn't need C&H.
So, yeah -- I don't think Watterson needs to know what he's up to, or to fully understand his own work. If anything, I think it would've ruined it if he were too self-aware. Think of all the bands who have great first albums, but then hit the "sophomore slump" with their second album: whereas the first one was spontaneous, raw, and overflowing with ideas, the second effort feels self-conscious, labored, and forced. Artists who have a long, strong career, and never jump the shark, often live in a bit of a bubble -- never thinking too hard about the meaning of what they do, and often privileging their intuition above their intellect. Credit to Watterson for finding a way to do that.
I was curious too, so:
"Aven" is a French loanword, though it doesn't show up in my little French dictionary, or in the Oxford English Dictionary for that matter. But I found a French-language online dictionary that basically says it's a natural well ("puits") found in limestone. Apparently it's a loanword in French as well, taken from the Rouergat (?) dialect of the Occitan language.
I glanced at a few English-language caving publications which translate "aven" as "big cavern", "cathedral", "sinkhole", "shaft", or "abyss". (That last one seems a little suspect, since there's already a French word for "abyss", abîme.)
Confusingly, a lot of these words have water-related cognates. "Aven" apparently also means "river" in Breton, and in English a "puit" can be a well or a stream.
(Disclaimer: IANA linguist.)
Indeed, and you should meet her -- perfect figure, great listener, up for anything. She's a real doll.
A few years ago, I ordered an escolar entree on a whim from an upscale seafood restaurant. I'd never heard of it and asked the waitress what it was, and she spoke highly of it, so I figured, what the hell. It turned out to be one of the most delicious pieces of fish I've ever had: moist, succulent, and rich.
It also very nearly made me shit my pants, about 2-3 hours later, when I was driving home and had nowhere to stop. (Once I did get to a toilet, the results were distinctive, to say the least.) I generally have a very strong stomach, and if this fish did that to me, I can't imagine what it would do to someone who had IBS or something comparable.
I don't think the fish should be banned, and calling it "toxic" seems strong. But I do think it's totally irresponsible of a restaurant to serve something like that without informing their customers, and serving it under a potentially deceptive name is even worse). In my case, the waitress didn't utter a peep about any possible ill effects, though maybe she just didn't know.
The chain of events I depicted was deliberately cartoonish, but is no more unrealistic than the oft-repeated idea that "if you just stand up to a bully, he'll turn tail and run."
Sometimes that's true, and sometimes it's the right thing to do. But sometimes the bad guy has more firepower, and cathartic macho fantasies tend to wither rapidly when one is confronted with a loaded gun. Middle-schoolers used to be safe from that sort of thing, but these days I'm not so sure. Even when I was in high school, there were students reputed to keep pistols in their cars.
Also, when exactly was the last time you gave a beatdown to a gangbanger, or a member of organized crime, or even a well-connected and malevolent politician? Where's your bravery then? Or do "bully ass whoopings" only count when you already know that the other person isn't a real threat to your existence?
We've been trained by movies and other propaganda to think that bravery is confronting the bad guy, mano-a-mano, and giving him a beatdown; anything else is being a pussy. Sometimes that's the right approach, especially if taking a stand in public will potentially galvanize a community. But sometimes that approach is just plain stupid, and the best thing to do is either to retreat, to defuse the situation through diplomacy, or if necessary, to take clandestine measures to neutralize your opponent.
That may not earn awards for bravery, but often the important thing isn't to be popular, or to enjoy the pleasant catharsis of macho chest-beating, but simply to win. You should read Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, to name but two authors who offer excellent advice on how to achieve victory, and who will tell you that a frontal assault is often a great way to look good and die young.
I'm willing to agree to respectfully disagree as well, but I still think it's overly facile to equate "not feeling bad" with "feeling good", as they're biologically and philosophically distinct phenomena. Grouping them under the same rubric doesn't really work (and carries with it weird moral implications that I find problematic), in part because people will knowingly forsake a tremendous pleasure in order to avoid having to confront a comparatively small anxiety.
The asymmetrical experience of those kinds of conflicts isn't really addressed by your equation, unless you insist that the avoidance of anxiety is a form of pleasure/satisfaction, and if so I simply must disagree. Because of anxiety, people are driven to pathological behaviors they find intensely painful, and it seems incorrect to me to use terms that connote pleasure to describe their struggles to minimize that pain. You might find it illuminating in this regard to read Clifford Simak's short story "The Huddling Place".
That said, there is a simple solution. I call it growing a backbone! Tried, tested and true.
Step 1, Grow a backbone.
Step 2, Walk up to Bully and look them square in the eye.
Step 3, Break Bully's freaking nose!
Step 4, Profit.
You left out a few steps:
Step 5, As you're walking away, hear a bullet whistle past your ear.
Step 6, Break into a trot while suddenly realizing that the Bully is a sociopath who's willing to escalate things as far as necessary in order to win, including killing you, your family, and anyone you're close to.
Step 7, After the second bullet misses you by a whisker, also realize that many Bullies have a hell of a lot less to lose than you do; a lot more experience with fighting dirty; and no scruples about using any possible tactic, fair or foul, to win.
Step 8, In the course of these revelations, find yourself questioning the wisdom of assuming that people will always back down when confronted with a show of force.
Step 9, Turn around and attempt to plug the Bully with the weapon of your choice, knowing that either you're about to die (if the Bully shoots you first) or spend the next couple years of your life dealing with the legal, psychological, and financial aftermath of having killed someone: something that will bother you since -- unlike many Bullies -- you have a conscience, inconveniently enough.
People never do anything for anything other than personal satisfaction.
There are several major problems with this philosophy, including the implication that every altruistic act in the world is somehow tainted by personal satisfaction.
But the biggest, IMHO, is this: have you taken a look around and noticed how many people are doing things that are totally self-destructive and making them miserable, and yet they can't stop?
I'm not talking about things like cigarettes, booze, or drugs, by the way. I'm talking about people who see a golden opportunity -- for a dream job, a dream date, or whatever -- and who freeze up and find some way to sabotage themselves. Or people who are trapped in loveless marriages, who loathe their spouse, and who have ample opportunities to get out, and yet don't.
So I think your personal philosophy vastly underestimates the percentage of human actions that are motivated not by pleasure-seeking, but by anxiety. People will do anything to avoid having to feel anxiety, and that includes not doing things that would give them tremendous pleasure, if only they had the courage to experience a little fear to get there.
I guess you could call the avoidance of anxiety a form of "personal satisfaction", but to me, that's a bit like saying "It's pleasurable to not be doused with gasoline and set on fire." True in one sense (direct comparison) -- but rather deceptive in another.
"Gee, why is everyone complaining that they destroyed some old picture of a lady that wasn't realy smiling while comparing the materials available to Michaelangelo to today's?" :(
I think you've mixed up your Ninja Turtles.
Your question assumes that "one of the women in [his] life" would have sufficient expertise to speak about Disney's copyright tactics. Yet there's no evidence that that's the case, given that most people lack that expertise.
It also assumes that only rape victims have the moral standing and experience necessary to compare things to rape. If the analogy were murder, rather than rape, would you argue that only murder victims should be allowed to speak?
I suppose one could argue that the only person who could evaluate the comparison would be a person (most likely female) who's both a copyright lawyer and a rape victim. No doubt, several of those people exist. Yet even so, this hypothetical person can't speak for all of us, since in forcing the Sonny Bono act et al. upon us, Disney's actions victimize the collective, not just the individual.
No one person can directly articulate the effect those actions have had on public discourse. OTOH, I'm guessing a decent number of people have landed in jail or prison, at least in part because of those laws. Given the state of the U.S. penal system, a few of those inmates have probably been raped, in the most literal sense. Would you speak for them as well?
In other words, you're being every bit as reductive and offensive as the OP (if not more so), and your righteous indignation is both misplaced and of no real help to rape victims, real or hypothetical.
Actually, I said that 25ms (not 25 seconds, as you incorrectly wrote) of latency was basically acceptable, but that 75ms of latency wasn't. As someone else pointed out, 20ms of latency is equivalent to having the musician and the sound-source be 22ft apart. If you're a guitarist, that means being about 22' away from your amp. That's a fair distance, but it's doable.
75ms of latency is the equivalent of being about 84' away from your amp. Most guitarists would find that disconcerting, and it makes it hard to keep a steady tempo even in simple music, since you would need to play well ahead of the beat. At 120bpm, i.e. a medium tempo, 75ms of latency means that you need to play 15% ahead of the beat to stay in time. At a faster tempo of 180bpm, that approaches 25%, or the equivalent of a full sixteenth note in 4/4 time.
This is also why musicians really need stage monitors pointed at them, especially people who don't necessarily use their own amps (singers, keyboard players, etc.). Even if the PA mix is great, there's still enough physical distance and propagation delay that it'll throw off someone who's solely relying on the house system.
It may be that console gamers have learned to expect around 100-150ms of input latency, perhaps thanks to visual cues that help to justify the latency on some level. (If I decide to jump, it takes a certain amount of time to react to my thought and make that happen; if I tell Mario to jump, maybe he takes about the same amount of time to react to the stimulus. It makes a certain kind of sense.)
But I assure you that musicians find that level of latency unacceptable. When you're playing a software synth live, performing with other musicians, even 75ms of latency is very noticeable and makes you feel like you're playing through molasses. Same thing with recording -- if it takes longer than 25-30ms to hear my own sound coming back at me, I definitely notice it. Virtuosic music regularly exceeds an input density of 50ms per event!
I've thought for a while that, sometime within the next 20-30 years, we'll see a reality show where convicted pedophiles were offered a chance at redemption via a one-way trip to Mars or another celestial body. (Ganymede would be appropriate.) Call it a mixture between "2001: A Space Odyssey", "To Catch a Predator", and "The Running Man".
(So basically, take the premise of Acceptable.tv's brilliant Pedophile Gladiators -- featuring Drew Carey! -- and put it in space instead.)
There's something about that phrase that seems incongruous in this context, but somehow I just can't figure out what it is...
(P.S.: For the record, I agree with you.)
The first time I read that, I thought you were channeling John Nash as a lolcat.
July 2009 Jupiter impact, I dub thee...the Wesley Crusher.
I'm the kind of person who usually does a fair amount of research before he leaps, and so when I first started burning CD-Rs, I did everything more or less by the book. I used quality media (Mitsui and Taiyo Yuden), quality burners (Plextor), always verified my burns, and never used any crazy high speeds. My CD-Rs have held up well in many aspects, and I've only had a few physically intact discs that went bad for no apparent reason (most of which are from what may have been a problem batch of Mitsui Silvers, burned around 2000/2001).
But no one really made it clear how physically fragile the damn things were, especially in comparison to pressed silver CDs. I kept my backups in a booklet-style binder. Yes, I know that's considered less than ideal, but these discs weren't burned solely for archival purposes -- I needed to be able to page through them efficiently. Most of them were taken out and used every so often -- say, four times a year on average, sometimes more -- and never knowingly abused.
Over time, the foil on quite a few of them started to flake off. Unbranded Taiyo Yudens, which are so often acclaimed, seem to be the most vulnerable -- I've had quite a few that developed holes in the foil, especially near the edge. It's a shame, because the discs read beautifully otherwise, and seem to ace most media tests. But the foil seems all too easy to damage.
(I've also lost a handful of Mitsui Silvers that way, whereas Mitsui Golds seem to have a more robust armoring on top, as do some of the 2nd tier discs I've tried -- Sony, Maxell, TDK, Memorex. Meanwhile, I've seen no evident physical damage to my DVD-Rs so far; fingers crossed.)