Thanks! I have to say I'm finding your posts on this subject extremely enjoyable and informative. I've always since I was a kid had a love/hate thing going with Japanese culture. Do you ever blog?
Ask anybody in the mail order business if the ballooning shipping charges have hurt or improved sales. Same goes for food prices, or anything which needs to be moved from point A to point B.
Greed destroys itself. --And let's not make any mistakes here; the higher fuel prices are being artificially inflated. It's a short-term money grab which will of course threaten the continued health of the oil industry and many of our daily economic realities.
I'd certainly enjoy seeing that happen, (especially if it involves the hanging of Bush and his oil cronies), although the collapse will be painful. We're probably going to see lots of unnecessary deaths from cold this winter, lots of frost-bitten children in emergency wards, and that will be difficult to live through. It will take a while before new systems are found to replace the rotten old ones, but New is good when it comes to the cycle of life and decay.
Where I do find this positive is in the alternative power markets; electric vehicles actually have a shot at market viability. That could be a really cool thing to see. --If new schemes are implemented smartly, that is.
I can't say I've even really noticed the thing. --But then, I rarely type anything directly into the address bar when cut and paste and bookmarks are so easy. I think the last time I physically typed something in was when I was given a business card with somebody's myspace page on it I'd promised to look at.
What kind of work do you do that makes it so annoying, and why is it annoying? Is it purely a matter of aesthetics, or is there some feature from FF2 which is now missing and upon which your old processes relied?
I've often wondered what the objection is as well. --Having seen acres of white windmills, I can honestly say I was filled with pride at the sight. They were actually quite beautiful from an aesthetic standpoint. Without making any judgments about other forms of power generation, compare the simple aesthetics of wind power to the gray cooling towers associated with nuclear power, or the toxic smokestacks from coal burning plants.
I think the complaints are almost more grudging responses to the implication that we have been in some ways irresponsible and dirty as a culture with respect to our approach to power generation. Because people don't like to feel guilty, they choose instead to sneer at and complain about alternative solutions. --Or perhaps they are squeamish about things they register as being, "Touchey-Feeley", (like a grade school kid being afraid of cooties. "Caring about the environment is GAAAAAY! EEEWWW!"), and so they react in the same way.
Don't laugh. I know far too many grown men who are emotionally still stuck in Jr. High. While this kind of behavior is more prevalent among geeks than the gen pop, there appears to be a counter-balance in effect; that is, some of the most enlightened people I've ever met are also geeks, and their enlightenment derives exactly through geekdom. Geeks are extremists.
--I knew some Japanese kids when I was in my twenties, who had all moved away from Japan exactly because they felt like square pegs going quietly out of their minds. --And they basically seemed like very normal and healthy people to me, so I always marveled at the sort of social conditions they must have endured.
But I do have to ask. . .
How bad is it really? Are the things you describe pandemic or is it just among certain social areas, certain strata of muggles? --To watch a Miyazaki film, for instance, one gets the impression that people are wonderful creatures and that there is plenty of wisdom to be found in Japanese culture. Or is it simply that Miyazaki is being an optimist?
A company whose directors willfully take action that dilutes shareholder value without justification can be subject to civil tort lawsuits from their shareholders. Ethics are a justification. Ignorance is a justification.
I will grant you that I use the term 'illegal' in a rather over-dramatic manner to make the point. The problem is that we see corporate misdeeds all the time; they shape nearly every aspect of our daily world. You may not agree with this, but a simple tallying of the contents of one's grocery store will illustrate what I am talking about. --As will an assessment of the "made in" labels on the various products around one's home. The air quality outdoors and the water quality in the pipes, the education our children receive and the international policy our governments enact; all of it is shaped and affected negatively by the corporate drive for profit. If you do not recognize the problem, then there is no point in further discussion, but if you know what I am talking about then I think you will agree that something is wrong. There is a force at work which compels corporate directors to choose anti-ethical courses of action over ethical ones. Now perhaps I am naive to think that it is merely the legal momentum established by corporate charters and legal decisions over the decades which have led to the current pattern of anti-ethical business behavior being considered normal. Perhaps it is something else.
Assuming you recognize the problem, to what would you attribute the cause?
Just because some corporations do not put lives ahead of balance sheets does not mean it is illegal to do so.
Not illegal to put lives ahead of profit? This may be true, but the manner in which you say it. . . I shudder at the thought of what might live in your heart. I'll suspend the forming of an opinion until you respond.
What in the hell are you talking about? Seriously, I don't think you even understand what you're replying to. The fact that the author of the article seems to be having trouble getting a job doesn't have a damn thing to do with the problems she's talking about. Her rants against corporations and capitalism sound like they have far more to do with her disappointing career prospects than they do with critiquing corporate science. Her inability to get work has nothing to do with whatever problems may exist with science labs being run by pharmaceutical corporations. If she were angry about having been 'wronged' by virtue of having been harmed by some pharmaceutical product that had been improperly tested due to the problems with corporate science that she was talking about then what you said might begin to make sense. As it stand, your comment is incomprehensible.
Incomprehensible? No. Anybody with a bit of imagination could have easily figured that one out. You simply weren't taking the time to connect the dots. (Or weren't perhaps you weren't capable). I will do that for you now. ..
1. A system which rewards corrupt behavior with lots of money has chosen that course of behavior because it believes ethical behavior to be less profitable and requiring of more work.
2. Therefore, those who are willing to abandon ethical behavior will be rewarded in such a system while those who insist on following principals of right and wrong will be locked out of that system because ethical behavior would threaten to damage the corrupt principals and thus prevent the unethical people from continuing to benefit. (Essentially, a corrupt police force won't allow a Good officer to rise to a position of power. If that analogy is too confusing for you, just ignore it and move on. Everybody else will get it.)
3. The ethical and aware person is, because of those ethics, discriminated against and limited in professional advancement exactly because of this. Thus the ethical person is far more likely to have difficulty making a sizable income, which in the world of medicine, is actually necessary given the massive student debts accumulated during the training period. If that person is human, when they realize that they are being wronged by corrupt people, he or she will likely be upset.
Now here's the tricky part which you seem to have had difficulty with. Read slowly. ..
4. You argued that the author's being upset diminished the value of her complaint. This is not a valid argument on your part. I brought up the criminal justice system as an example because society on the whole collectively agrees that it is at least in principal, a valid system. It is a system whereby people who have been wronged make complaints which are taken seriously. Specifically, I brought up that system because the people making complaints are as a result of being wronged, nearly always upset, and that their being upset does not in any way invalidate their complaints.
5. If the criminal justice system does not consider a victim's being upset to be reasonable cause to ignore a valid complaint, then why on earth should it be any different in any other part of society? --Indeed, the criminal justice system grew out of society, not the other way around, (though you might have trouble understanding why that is relevant since it requires the ability to connect a few more logical dots.)
What is wrong with you? Do you even know anything about business or business law? I'm not even going to try and tell you how fucked up what you just said is. You need more education and less Michael Moore.
Goodness! I nearly responded to that, and your ears would have been blistered by my analysis of why what you just said is hopelessly wrong, even though it is SO much easier to simply declare with great authority that you are hopelessly wrong and that you are so far beneath me that I needn't bother pointing out exactly what it is that makes you wrong. --But then in your next para
Was it just me, or did anyone else detect more than just a bit of personal bitterness on the part of the author of TFA? [. ..] She may have a point about scientists at pharmaceutical companies being motivated to publish only "positive" results, but her rhetoric makes it seem just as likely to me that she simply harbors a grudge against anyone with steady employment.
Heck, I harbor a grudge against Bush and his cronies for messing up the economy I have to live in. Are you suggesting that my being affected by his actions somehow makes my complaints illegitimate? Do you understand exactly why it is we have a criminal justice system designed to redress wrongs?
Capitalism and corporations aren't evil. Some of the best science of the 20th century - no, make that of all time - has come from corporate labs.
And this could still be the case even if those corporate labs did not happen to be bound by insane mandates. --While it is totally unnecessary, it remains actually illegal that codes of ethical behavior be allowed to hold final say on what actions an American corporate entity takes. So while I agree with you in principal, in practice the corporations which rule our lives ARE in fact demonstrably evil. Until it becomes legal for a corporation to put human lives ahead of balance sheets, evil will rule. --Even good people on executive boards have their hands tied when it comes to preventing evil practices. This stuff is quite real.
What video do you not have from twenty years ago, 1988, but which you really, really wish you still had?
I can only think of half a dozen items, and I actually still have some of them; although I'd need a VCR and TV to watch those exact copies again. (And the will power to dig them out of whoever's basement I abandoned them in). --Then I discovered that somebody was in the same boat but who cared more than me and so did the work to digitize and upload their VHS copies to the internet as torrents. (Thank-you!)
But basically, I did absolutely nothing, and I still have access to everything I would have wanted to keep.
Although, I admit, I don't shoot my own stuff; most of the things I might be interested in seeing are commercial product, which means somebody else is worrying about maintaining its life expectancy. Really, unless you have very specialized needs, are you really going to care about watching ancient SouthPark episodes when you're twenty years older than you are now? --I've lost enormous amounts of data over the years, and frankly, I consider it very healthy to let stuff go. How relevant are old "Cosby Show" and "Family Ties" episodes today? --Stuff which if you really want to see again, can be found with relatively little effort.
I suppose the whole YouTube phenomenon offers a different dimension; there's lots of video news and evidence which is available only on-line, and such footage might well be useful for historical reasons later on.
Still. . , the question is almost certainly entirely academic; if you think you're going to be watching movies in twenty years time, you're far more optimistic than I am about the continued viability of the human race.
If you think for one stinking minute that liberals and ultra left wing closet marxist liberals like Barak Obama and Co. have a better solution, your as dumb as they come.
All of this and I mean all of it, War, Perpetual Poverty, Societal Decay and now this loss of additional Privacy Protection has come about because of Liberals and Liberalism and is a direct result of the following-
Their flawed and idiotic ideology of appeasement and inaction in the 90's of which they want to return to once elected later this year has ushered in more than just 9/11 and the resulting unnecessary bureacracy which has resulted in the growth of the "spy sector" if you will.
You have no one to blame but yourselves you dopes once again, you are reaping it all and are nto done yet, enjoy your miserable ride
P.S. If you really want or understand meaningful privacy, you'll engage in some face time instead of hiding behind your keyboards
The psychopath always blames the victim. The psychopath never takes responsibility for the damage they cause, or admits to personal flaw or error. The psychopath says the most outrageous things which no rational human could ever say without feeling stupid and ashamed, and s/he does so with a straight face. This is possible because the psychopath is simply wired wrong.
Also, that's some very strange formatting and odd logical construction there, mister. Confused communication is also a standard hallmark of the psychopath. Did you also like blowing up frogs with firecrackers when you were a kid?
Who knows. Maybe you're just drunk and stupid. Whatever the case, you are hopelessly wrong in your assertions and anybody with a brain should immediately be able to see why. But it should be noted that the sociopath/narcissist/psychopath would be incapable of understanding why this is so; literally incapable --on a neurological level.
Hm. Vonnegut is thought-provoking. (Just read the story). --And I finally found out where the term, "Snaggle-Tooth" came from.
As per usual, it's all about balance; I don't want to live in a society where "Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General" can shoot me for being smart and strong. But I also certainly don't want to live in a society which has an emperor and and empress to rule over me because they happen to be stronger and smarter than I am. Actually, when it comes down to it, the whole "Rule over me" thing is the offensive bit. To hell with 'social contracts'. I'm not signing anything. I'll let compassion and my own inner guidance system lead me. Everything else is a fear-based control system.
Thanks for the info! I hope I didn't seem too gripe-y; I appreciate that you guys are working at all on such a project as the Archive. Though I would indeed love to see one day it fully searchable! Good luck in your continued efforts.
It's implausible they thought they could get the money and run to brazil before anyone play-tested this. Why else but a bit of a gag?
That's why the psychopathic mind is so effective in trumping humans; people simply cannot conceive of another human being making such massive errors in judgment, such callous transgressions, that they literally fall over themselves to try to explain away those transgressions. --To rationalize and apologize for the criminal. Witness the Bush presidency. My favorite was when he began promoting the sending of jobs overseas; there was a week of stunned silence, and then a month of desperate rhetoric from the Republican supporters, trying to rationalize such a boneheaded move. Just watch the pattern here as it unfolds; if these game publishers are some form of psychotic, (sociopathic, narcissistic, psychopathic), they will A) NEVER admit that they were wrong in any manner which would require their egos to lose points, B) Somehow shift the blame to the victim, C) Lie and charm and lie and lie. They will not stop until they are forced to.
Just watch. Then map it large to the political realm to understand why the world is so desperately messed up.
And if what you love to do is illegal or immoral(by society standards, natch)?
There are three elements at play. . .
The first element here consists of the confusion with what 'follow your bliss' means. 'Bliss' is a clumsy word which can be interpreted in a couple of ways. One way is the crack-cocaine style bliss, the other is not. I would estimate that generally people know internally which is which, and that the rest is semantics for the argumentative or those who haven't explored their inner workings deeply enough. --The crack-cocaine path is also self-correcting; that is, you deteriorate until you realize how things work and where one's true light resides. All there is are lessons, and everything fits together. I would also estimate that it may take several lives to work out the basics.
The second element is this. . .
Many true paths are indeed hampered by society, being made both illegal and immoral, or programmed against via the media and the education system which plant all manner of blocks, fears, knee-jerk reactions which attempt to prevent the series of realizations and acts which lead one to spiritual and life fulfillment. This is where a large part of the battle today resides. It's why I would say that, as a species, we are at war and have been at war for many centuries.
The final element is this. . .
Some souls, about half I would say, are afraid of life and wish to control it so that it cannot hurt them; their true paths, insofar as their path leads from the decisions made by their higher selves, are a retreat from life in an effort to return to the ultimate sleep of a fully dismantled and decomposed soul. . , these souls either don't have a path or their path is entirely made up of the crack-cocaine style approach of self-disintegrating and parasitic experiences. There's nothing you can do with these cowards except learn to recognize them, and give them the space to destroy themselves without letting them affect you. Treat them like fire. Don't get burned, and let themselves burn out on their own, and certainly don't put them into positions where they dictate the rules of your world. --That's the problem today; we have a bunch of spiritual, self-destructive cowards who have largely taken control of the world's mechanisms. They are trying to make everybody like them, because that way they can pretend that the higher path doesn't exist and they don't have to face the fact of their own cowardice.
As always, there are no direct and easy answers, so that's about as fully and clearly as I can answer your question.
True, true! "Do what you love and you'll love what you do." "If you are true to your inner light, then things just naturally seem to fall into place."
--And every Campbellian variation thereof.
But it's always worth repeating! Glad to hear you're finding success in life on the happy track. It's inspiring for everybody, since everybody can and should be following their own paths in similar ways. Thanks!
Dumb typo. Perhaps not obviously, I meant in the first line of the above post, "irrespective of the date"
Normally I let typos go; people are generally forgiving and will read around them knowing that they are just as susceptible to making errors, but in the case of those typos which don't just create a spelling mistake, but actually switch the meaning of an entire sentence, I will sometimes haul myself to the task of writing a short retraction. Just like this one.
Back in 2003, the Internet Archive guys set up a new project called, "Recall" which theoretically would allow somebody to do a Google-style search through the collected material irrespective of the data. 3D searches through the data stacks.
This was very exciting! Seriously; you might remember the content of a page you were looking at five years ago, but can you remember it's specific web address? --Especially with the turnover and abandoning of domain names, it is entirely possible to simply lose contact with mountains of data.
So a basic search engine was a very exciting idea!
Too bad they killed "Recall" after only a few weeks. I never got a chance to try it, (and boy, I would have made good use of it! There are still a few dozen items I'd love to find again.) I somehow didn't expect Recall to be discussed in the interview, and I was right about that. Too bad.
Maybe Google should set up something similar; they don't trash old data, do they? I know they've got a setting which allows you to look for data up to a year old, but it's rather vague and it doesn't provide specific controls. How awesome would a non-linear search engine in an archive going back to the beginning of the web be?
I wonder what the deal with "Recall" was, and why nobody talks about it.
Fax spam was just being invented. --Our office was hit with a big unsolicited ad which promised "Thousands of watches for sale! Hundreds of different styles, all cheap, cheap, cheap!" --And it gave an address for the sale, which happened to be the concourse of the building we were in, (which housed the offices of a hundred other businesses).
My first reaction was, "Ugh! How annoying! Who are these jerks blowing our fax paper on a stupid ad for a useless product?" --And this was before Spam existed under that name as a real feature of our reality, which to me indicates that I just have a very low tolerance for any kind of social manipulation. But here's the thing. . .
All the women in our office got into this fluster of consumerist excitement. "Hundreds of different watch styles for cheap!" The building concourse was flooded with people looking for watches, like a flea market hopped up on caffeine, and when the day was over the girls were showing off two and three watches each, swapping them like trading cards and generally having a grand old time. Even some of the guys got sucked in. And I felt like an old sourpuss sticking to principal and wondering if it was the Human Race which was stupid, or if it was me. (That office job did that to me a great deal.)
But anyway. . , the point is that with the right level of care and planning, SPAM not only works, but it works really well.
Heck, I know a couple of people who forwarded that "Bill Gates is giving a hundred bucks to everybody who forwards this email" email. It made their day! Some people actually enjoy being pandered to like consumerist bovines. They are locked into the system and being advertised at is a major feature of that system which is not only expected by desired.
So yeah. The point is that ignorant apes are sometimes happy being ignorant apes. But I still wouldn't send out 1000 emails to potential travel clients, because in the massive noise filling the channel most will ignore the spam and people like me will blacklist his company.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, I decided that neither me nor the Human Race were wrong. There's just different types of people and different levels of awareness/expectation, and that's okay! People can self-annihilate themselves through ignorance if that's their predisposition. But for some reason office buildings seem to attract that brand of human, and I will die before I allow myself to work in cubicle land ever again. My own level of ignorance needs to be worked on in a different environment, or I'll simply interrupt the process by murdering a bunch of apes with too many cheap watches.
I happen to agree, but i was just commenting on what will become a bashfest and the true issue will be lost in the noise. You are speaking rationally, which isn't in vogue here when it comes to political issues.
Actually, I don't think there is that much pure Bashing happening around these parts. --I equate 'Bashing' with the desire punish by proxy for purely emotional reasons devoid of rationality or factual data. You can see evidence of this on those blog sites which are hopelessly obsessed and enraged far beyond any measure of reason by such things as, 'welfare moms milking the system'.
When discussing Bush, however, it's hard when pointing out basic reality to sound like one is doing anything BUT bashing. This is due to the reality being so very grim and the damning facts so plentiful. Welfare Moms and similar concerns generally don't have much impact on anything, whereas Bush policies have resulted in $120 per barrel oil, a crashed dollar, a quagmired immoral war, the hideously mis-managed Katrina disaster, to name just a few items. So the complaints may sound like 'Bush Bashing' but really, I would say that it is rational and necessary discussion, especially in the lead-up to the next election. Calling legitimate complaints about things which affect everybody in the country 'Bush Bashing' and condemning it as such smacks of Republican pouting and pissiness.
Sorry. I refuse to allow people make me feel guilty for having legitimate complaints. Abusive parents do the same thing to their kids.
Note that, unlike popular current trends, judges are not there to decide what the law _should_ be and rule on that but only to enforce the applicability of current laws to the specifics of the case at hand. Might think about that before you decry the ruling.
Yeah, in a perfect world, this is true. But in the real world, which judges sit where is such a hotly contested game precisely because personal bias and political allegiance does in fact make a significant difference and everybody with a brain knows it. --Even you, otherwise you wouldn't be recommending people vote for people who, "will do what you want".
In other words, either write in a manner which doesn't self-contradict while at the same time condemning thinking people as 'whiners', or please just stop typing, because right now you sound both evil and wrong.
This rule list is cute, but actually does apply to women who have young souls and/or no souls.
Every instance on this list is a method for evading having to look at one's personal flaws and thus avoid the painful matter of spiritual growth. As a soul matures over many life-times, these issues settle out and more lessons are allowed through the ego's defense screen. I've known kids who have most of this stuff figured out, and adults who still play these games with the people around them. When you figure out what and why it's happening, it's much easier to deal with. (Typically, you have to decide whether it's worth hanging around to help somebody face themselves, or if it's too much trouble in which case you need to get out.)
There is a similar list for men, and personal growth is always a two-way street, though the ego hates to admit that.
Tin Whiskers? You have got to be joking! If somebody wrote this into a sci-fi story, it would be one of the dumber Doctor Who episodes. Even the name is dorky.
And, sorry, it may cause brain damage, when I grew up, the soldering iron was my sonic screwdriver, and 'flux' should be available as a room scent; I associate it with many happy memories. (Well, also with burnt fingers and exhausted frustration as expensive parts utterly failed to work at the 11th hour, but still. ..) Lead-based solder is on my top five list of all-time favorite non-food/medicinal substances.
Ground-up ESTES rocket-engine powder is one of the others.
I'd heard of this phenomenon before, but didn't really take it too seriously.
So I took a wander over to the site you linked and discovered the following item description for one of their most expensive cables, (and this isn't even for signal balanced cable pairs, which actually do prevent the causing of inductance-based interference in surrounding cables. What's being sold here are just garden variety audio wires. Made of gold.)
Details: Golden Reference is the latest evolutionary interconnect design by George Cardas. It features Cardas patented Golden Section, multi-gauge stranding in a symmetrical, helical tri-axial design. Thin wall, Teflon® air tubes are used as dielectric and provide air suspension for the conductors. Cardas patented, Constant-Q construction places the smallest of the Golden Ratio strands at the center of the conductor to reduce stored energy and conductor resonance. Cable resonance is further reduced with controlled propagation, Crossfield construction, matching conductor to dielectric characteristics with carefully computed strand layering. Multi-layer shielding and cross layered conductors reduce EMI and RFI to a new low. All conductors are individually coated to insulate and prevent oxidation. Golden Reference is a perfectly neutral reference cable. It sounds the same at any length, between any component, at any originating or terminating impedance. Golden Reference is perfectly symmetrical and non-directional. Like all Cardas cables, Golden Reference is individually inspected, and hand terminated using Rhodium plated connectors and Cardas formulated Quad Eutectic solder, for a lifetime of listening pleasure.
Wow! I got scared just reading that. They sure know how to make you feel insecure about your audio signal! --The price for security in plugs and wires? $4358 for twenty feet of cable! I bet you could sell some of these around the White House. (Just had to get a political dig in.)
I am stunned. I am clearly in the wrong business. I should be selling wires to rubes. Of course, I can't imagine that would do much for one's self esteem. George Cardas either doesn't sleep well at night, or he can talk up a real shit-storm when you challenge him on his ridiculous product line. . !
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Thanks! I have to say I'm finding your posts on this subject extremely enjoyable and informative. I've always since I was a kid had a love/hate thing going with Japanese culture. Do you ever blog?
-FL
Exports will also go down.
Ask anybody in the mail order business if the ballooning shipping charges have hurt or improved sales. Same goes for food prices, or anything which needs to be moved from point A to point B.
Greed destroys itself. --And let's not make any mistakes here; the higher fuel prices are being artificially inflated. It's a short-term money grab which will of course threaten the continued health of the oil industry and many of our daily economic realities.
I'd certainly enjoy seeing that happen, (especially if it involves the hanging of Bush and his oil cronies), although the collapse will be painful. We're probably going to see lots of unnecessary deaths from cold this winter, lots of frost-bitten children in emergency wards, and that will be difficult to live through. It will take a while before new systems are found to replace the rotten old ones, but New is good when it comes to the cycle of life and decay.
Where I do find this positive is in the alternative power markets; electric vehicles actually have a shot at market viability. That could be a really cool thing to see. --If new schemes are implemented smartly, that is.
But seriously. Let's hang Bush.
-FL
What is it about the Awesomebar you don't like?
I can't say I've even really noticed the thing. --But then, I rarely type anything directly into the address bar when cut and paste and bookmarks are so easy. I think the last time I physically typed something in was when I was given a business card with somebody's myspace page on it I'd promised to look at.
What kind of work do you do that makes it so annoying, and why is it annoying? Is it purely a matter of aesthetics, or is there some feature from FF2 which is now missing and upon which your old processes relied?
-FL
Hear hear!
I've often wondered what the objection is as well. --Having seen acres of white windmills, I can honestly say I was filled with pride at the sight. They were actually quite beautiful from an aesthetic standpoint. Without making any judgments about other forms of power generation, compare the simple aesthetics of wind power to the gray cooling towers associated with nuclear power, or the toxic smokestacks from coal burning plants.
I think the complaints are almost more grudging responses to the implication that we have been in some ways irresponsible and dirty as a culture with respect to our approach to power generation. Because people don't like to feel guilty, they choose instead to sneer at and complain about alternative solutions. --Or perhaps they are squeamish about things they register as being, "Touchey-Feeley", (like a grade school kid being afraid of cooties. "Caring about the environment is GAAAAAY! EEEWWW!"), and so they react in the same way.
Don't laugh. I know far too many grown men who are emotionally still stuck in Jr. High. While this kind of behavior is more prevalent among geeks than the gen pop, there appears to be a counter-balance in effect; that is, some of the most enlightened people I've ever met are also geeks, and their enlightenment derives exactly through geekdom. Geeks are extremists.
-FL
Neat comment!
--I knew some Japanese kids when I was in my twenties, who had all moved away from Japan exactly because they felt like square pegs going quietly out of their minds. --And they basically seemed like very normal and healthy people to me, so I always marveled at the sort of social conditions they must have endured.
But I do have to ask. . .
How bad is it really? Are the things you describe pandemic or is it just among certain social areas, certain strata of muggles? --To watch a Miyazaki film, for instance, one gets the impression that people are wonderful creatures and that there is plenty of wisdom to be found in Japanese culture. Or is it simply that Miyazaki is being an optimist?
What do you think?
-FL
A company whose directors willfully take action that dilutes shareholder value without justification can be subject to civil tort lawsuits from their shareholders. Ethics are a justification. Ignorance is a justification.
I will grant you that I use the term 'illegal' in a rather over-dramatic manner to make the point. The problem is that we see corporate misdeeds all the time; they shape nearly every aspect of our daily world. You may not agree with this, but a simple tallying of the contents of one's grocery store will illustrate what I am talking about. --As will an assessment of the "made in" labels on the various products around one's home. The air quality outdoors and the water quality in the pipes, the education our children receive and the international policy our governments enact; all of it is shaped and affected negatively by the corporate drive for profit. If you do not recognize the problem, then there is no point in further discussion, but if you know what I am talking about then I think you will agree that something is wrong. There is a force at work which compels corporate directors to choose anti-ethical courses of action over ethical ones. Now perhaps I am naive to think that it is merely the legal momentum established by corporate charters and legal decisions over the decades which have led to the current pattern of anti-ethical business behavior being considered normal. Perhaps it is something else.
Assuming you recognize the problem, to what would you attribute the cause?
Just because some corporations do not put lives ahead of balance sheets does not mean it is illegal to do so.
Not illegal to put lives ahead of profit? This may be true, but the manner in which you say it. . . I shudder at the thought of what might live in your heart. I'll suspend the forming of an opinion until you respond.
-FL
What in the hell are you talking about? Seriously, I don't think you even understand what you're replying to. The fact that the author of the article seems to be having trouble getting a job doesn't have a damn thing to do with the problems she's talking about. Her rants against corporations and capitalism sound like they have far more to do with her disappointing career prospects than they do with critiquing corporate science. Her inability to get work has nothing to do with whatever problems may exist with science labs being run by pharmaceutical corporations. If she were angry about having been 'wronged' by virtue of having been harmed by some pharmaceutical product that had been improperly tested due to the problems with corporate science that she was talking about then what you said might begin to make sense. As it stand, your comment is incomprehensible.
Incomprehensible? No. Anybody with a bit of imagination could have easily figured that one out. You simply weren't taking the time to connect the dots. (Or weren't perhaps you weren't capable). I will do that for you now. . .
1. A system which rewards corrupt behavior with lots of money has chosen that course of behavior because it believes ethical behavior to be less profitable and requiring of more work.
2. Therefore, those who are willing to abandon ethical behavior will be rewarded in such a system while those who insist on following principals of right and wrong will be locked out of that system because ethical behavior would threaten to damage the corrupt principals and thus prevent the unethical people from continuing to benefit. (Essentially, a corrupt police force won't allow a Good officer to rise to a position of power. If that analogy is too confusing for you, just ignore it and move on. Everybody else will get it.)
3. The ethical and aware person is, because of those ethics, discriminated against and limited in professional advancement exactly because of this. Thus the ethical person is far more likely to have difficulty making a sizable income, which in the world of medicine, is actually necessary given the massive student debts accumulated during the training period. If that person is human, when they realize that they are being wronged by corrupt people, he or she will likely be upset.
Now here's the tricky part which you seem to have had difficulty with. Read slowly. . .
4. You argued that the author's being upset diminished the value of her complaint. This is not a valid argument on your part. I brought up the criminal justice system as an example because society on the whole collectively agrees that it is at least in principal, a valid system. It is a system whereby people who have been wronged make complaints which are taken seriously. Specifically, I brought up that system because the people making complaints are as a result of being wronged, nearly always upset, and that their being upset does not in any way invalidate their complaints.
5. If the criminal justice system does not consider a victim's being upset to be reasonable cause to ignore a valid complaint, then why on earth should it be any different in any other part of society? --Indeed, the criminal justice system grew out of society, not the other way around, (though you might have trouble understanding why that is relevant since it requires the ability to connect a few more logical dots.)
What is wrong with you? Do you even know anything about business or business law? I'm not even going to try and tell you how fucked up what you just said is. You need more education and less Michael Moore.
Goodness! I nearly responded to that, and your ears would have been blistered by my analysis of why what you just said is hopelessly wrong, even though it is SO much easier to simply declare with great authority that you are hopelessly wrong and that you are so far beneath me that I needn't bother pointing out exactly what it is that makes you wrong. --But then in your next para
Was it just me, or did anyone else detect more than just a bit of personal bitterness on the part of the author of TFA? [. . .] She may have a point about scientists at pharmaceutical companies being motivated to publish only "positive" results, but her rhetoric makes it seem just as likely to me that she simply harbors a grudge against anyone with steady employment.
Heck, I harbor a grudge against Bush and his cronies for messing up the economy I have to live in. Are you suggesting that my being affected by his actions somehow makes my complaints illegitimate? Do you understand exactly why it is we have a criminal justice system designed to redress wrongs?
Capitalism and corporations aren't evil. Some of the best science of the 20th century - no, make that of all time - has come from corporate labs.
And this could still be the case even if those corporate labs did not happen to be bound by insane mandates. --While it is totally unnecessary, it remains actually illegal that codes of ethical behavior be allowed to hold final say on what actions an American corporate entity takes. So while I agree with you in principal, in practice the corporations which rule our lives ARE in fact demonstrably evil. Until it becomes legal for a corporation to put human lives ahead of balance sheets, evil will rule. --Even good people on executive boards have their hands tied when it comes to preventing evil practices. This stuff is quite real.
-FL
What video do you not have from twenty years ago, 1988, but which you really, really wish you still had?
I can only think of half a dozen items, and I actually still have some of them; although I'd need a VCR and TV to watch those exact copies again. (And the will power to dig them out of whoever's basement I abandoned them in). --Then I discovered that somebody was in the same boat but who cared more than me and so did the work to digitize and upload their VHS copies to the internet as torrents. (Thank-you!)
But basically, I did absolutely nothing, and I still have access to everything I would have wanted to keep.
Although, I admit, I don't shoot my own stuff; most of the things I might be interested in seeing are commercial product, which means somebody else is worrying about maintaining its life expectancy. Really, unless you have very specialized needs, are you really going to care about watching ancient SouthPark episodes when you're twenty years older than you are now? --I've lost enormous amounts of data over the years, and frankly, I consider it very healthy to let stuff go. How relevant are old "Cosby Show" and "Family Ties" episodes today? --Stuff which if you really want to see again, can be found with relatively little effort.
I suppose the whole YouTube phenomenon offers a different dimension; there's lots of video news and evidence which is available only on-line, and such footage might well be useful for historical reasons later on.
Still. . , the question is almost certainly entirely academic; if you think you're going to be watching movies in twenty years time, you're far more optimistic than I am about the continued viability of the human race.
-FL
The psychopath always blames the victim. The psychopath never takes responsibility for the damage they cause, or admits to personal flaw or error. The psychopath says the most outrageous things which no rational human could ever say without feeling stupid and ashamed, and s/he does so with a straight face. This is possible because the psychopath is simply wired wrong.
Also, that's some very strange formatting and odd logical construction there, mister. Confused communication is also a standard hallmark of the psychopath. Did you also like blowing up frogs with firecrackers when you were a kid?
Who knows. Maybe you're just drunk and stupid. Whatever the case, you are hopelessly wrong in your assertions and anybody with a brain should immediately be able to see why. But it should be noted that the sociopath/narcissist/psychopath would be incapable of understanding why this is so; literally incapable --on a neurological level.
-FL
As per usual, it's all about balance; I don't want to live in a society where "Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General" can shoot me for being smart and strong. But I also certainly don't want to live in a society which has an emperor and and empress to rule over me because they happen to be stronger and smarter than I am. Actually, when it comes down to it, the whole "Rule over me" thing is the offensive bit. To hell with 'social contracts'. I'm not signing anything. I'll let compassion and my own inner guidance system lead me. Everything else is a fear-based control system.
Thanks, Kurt.
-FL
Cheers!
-FL
That's why the psychopathic mind is so effective in trumping humans; people simply cannot conceive of another human being making such massive errors in judgment, such callous transgressions, that they literally fall over themselves to try to explain away those transgressions. --To rationalize and apologize for the criminal. Witness the Bush presidency. My favorite was when he began promoting the sending of jobs overseas; there was a week of stunned silence, and then a month of desperate rhetoric from the Republican supporters, trying to rationalize such a boneheaded move. Just watch the pattern here as it unfolds; if these game publishers are some form of psychotic, (sociopathic, narcissistic, psychopathic), they will A) NEVER admit that they were wrong in any manner which would require their egos to lose points, B) Somehow shift the blame to the victim, C) Lie and charm and lie and lie. They will not stop until they are forced to.
Just watch. Then map it large to the political realm to understand why the world is so desperately messed up.
-FL
There are three elements at play. . .
The first element here consists of the confusion with what 'follow your bliss' means. 'Bliss' is a clumsy word which can be interpreted in a couple of ways. One way is the crack-cocaine style bliss, the other is not. I would estimate that generally people know internally which is which, and that the rest is semantics for the argumentative or those who haven't explored their inner workings deeply enough. --The crack-cocaine path is also self-correcting; that is, you deteriorate until you realize how things work and where one's true light resides. All there is are lessons, and everything fits together. I would also estimate that it may take several lives to work out the basics.
The second element is this. . .
Many true paths are indeed hampered by society, being made both illegal and immoral, or programmed against via the media and the education system which plant all manner of blocks, fears, knee-jerk reactions which attempt to prevent the series of realizations and acts which lead one to spiritual and life fulfillment. This is where a large part of the battle today resides. It's why I would say that, as a species, we are at war and have been at war for many centuries.
The final element is this. . .
Some souls, about half I would say, are afraid of life and wish to control it so that it cannot hurt them; their true paths, insofar as their path leads from the decisions made by their higher selves, are a retreat from life in an effort to return to the ultimate sleep of a fully dismantled and decomposed soul. . , these souls either don't have a path or their path is entirely made up of the crack-cocaine style approach of self-disintegrating and parasitic experiences. There's nothing you can do with these cowards except learn to recognize them, and give them the space to destroy themselves without letting them affect you. Treat them like fire. Don't get burned, and let themselves burn out on their own, and certainly don't put them into positions where they dictate the rules of your world. --That's the problem today; we have a bunch of spiritual, self-destructive cowards who have largely taken control of the world's mechanisms. They are trying to make everybody like them, because that way they can pretend that the higher path doesn't exist and they don't have to face the fact of their own cowardice.
As always, there are no direct and easy answers, so that's about as fully and clearly as I can answer your question.
-FL
--And every Campbellian variation thereof.
But it's always worth repeating! Glad to hear you're finding success in life on the happy track. It's inspiring for everybody, since everybody can and should be following their own paths in similar ways. Thanks!
-FL
Normally I let typos go; people are generally forgiving and will read around them knowing that they are just as susceptible to making errors, but in the case of those typos which don't just create a spelling mistake, but actually switch the meaning of an entire sentence, I will sometimes haul myself to the task of writing a short retraction. Just like this one.
Cheers.
-FL
This was very exciting! Seriously; you might remember the content of a page you were looking at five years ago, but can you remember it's specific web address? --Especially with the turnover and abandoning of domain names, it is entirely possible to simply lose contact with mountains of data.
So a basic search engine was a very exciting idea!
Too bad they killed "Recall" after only a few weeks. I never got a chance to try it, (and boy, I would have made good use of it! There are still a few dozen items I'd love to find again.) I somehow didn't expect Recall to be discussed in the interview, and I was right about that. Too bad.
Maybe Google should set up something similar; they don't trash old data, do they? I know they've got a setting which allows you to look for data up to a year old, but it's rather vague and it doesn't provide specific controls. How awesome would a non-linear search engine in an archive going back to the beginning of the web be?
I wonder what the deal with "Recall" was, and why nobody talks about it.
-FL
My first reaction was, "Ugh! How annoying! Who are these jerks blowing our fax paper on a stupid ad for a useless product?" --And this was before Spam existed under that name as a real feature of our reality, which to me indicates that I just have a very low tolerance for any kind of social manipulation. But here's the thing. . .
All the women in our office got into this fluster of consumerist excitement. "Hundreds of different watch styles for cheap!" The building concourse was flooded with people looking for watches, like a flea market hopped up on caffeine, and when the day was over the girls were showing off two and three watches each, swapping them like trading cards and generally having a grand old time. Even some of the guys got sucked in. And I felt like an old sourpuss sticking to principal and wondering if it was the Human Race which was stupid, or if it was me. (That office job did that to me a great deal.)
But anyway. . , the point is that with the right level of care and planning, SPAM not only works, but it works really well.
Heck, I know a couple of people who forwarded that "Bill Gates is giving a hundred bucks to everybody who forwards this email" email. It made their day! Some people actually enjoy being pandered to like consumerist bovines. They are locked into the system and being advertised at is a major feature of that system which is not only expected by desired.
So yeah. The point is that ignorant apes are sometimes happy being ignorant apes. But I still wouldn't send out 1000 emails to potential travel clients, because in the massive noise filling the channel most will ignore the spam and people like me will blacklist his company.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, I decided that neither me nor the Human Race were wrong. There's just different types of people and different levels of awareness/expectation, and that's okay! People can self-annihilate themselves through ignorance if that's their predisposition. But for some reason office buildings seem to attract that brand of human, and I will die before I allow myself to work in cubicle land ever again. My own level of ignorance needs to be worked on in a different environment, or I'll simply interrupt the process by murdering a bunch of apes with too many cheap watches.
-FL
Actually, I don't think there is that much pure Bashing happening around these parts. --I equate 'Bashing' with the desire punish by proxy for purely emotional reasons devoid of rationality or factual data. You can see evidence of this on those blog sites which are hopelessly obsessed and enraged far beyond any measure of reason by such things as, 'welfare moms milking the system'.
When discussing Bush, however, it's hard when pointing out basic reality to sound like one is doing anything BUT bashing. This is due to the reality being so very grim and the damning facts so plentiful. Welfare Moms and similar concerns generally don't have much impact on anything, whereas Bush policies have resulted in $120 per barrel oil, a crashed dollar, a quagmired immoral war, the hideously mis-managed Katrina disaster, to name just a few items. So the complaints may sound like 'Bush Bashing' but really, I would say that it is rational and necessary discussion, especially in the lead-up to the next election. Calling legitimate complaints about things which affect everybody in the country 'Bush Bashing' and condemning it as such smacks of Republican pouting and pissiness.
Sorry. I refuse to allow people make me feel guilty for having legitimate complaints. Abusive parents do the same thing to their kids.
-FL
Yeah, in a perfect world, this is true. But in the real world, which judges sit where is such a hotly contested game precisely because personal bias and political allegiance does in fact make a significant difference and everybody with a brain knows it. --Even you, otherwise you wouldn't be recommending people vote for people who, "will do what you want".
In other words, either write in a manner which doesn't self-contradict while at the same time condemning thinking people as 'whiners', or please just stop typing, because right now you sound both evil and wrong.
-FL
Every instance on this list is a method for evading having to look at one's personal flaws and thus avoid the painful matter of spiritual growth. As a soul matures over many life-times, these issues settle out and more lessons are allowed through the ego's defense screen. I've known kids who have most of this stuff figured out, and adults who still play these games with the people around them. When you figure out what and why it's happening, it's much easier to deal with. (Typically, you have to decide whether it's worth hanging around to help somebody face themselves, or if it's too much trouble in which case you need to get out.)
There is a similar list for men, and personal growth is always a two-way street, though the ego hates to admit that.
-FL
Hey! That's me! My ignorance is justified for once. Cool!
-FL
--Which just goes to show that life is stranger than fiction. Except when it's a Doctor Who episode.
-FL
And, sorry, it may cause brain damage, when I grew up, the soldering iron was my sonic screwdriver, and 'flux' should be available as a room scent; I associate it with many happy memories. (Well, also with burnt fingers and exhausted frustration as expensive parts utterly failed to work at the 11th hour, but still. .
Ground-up ESTES rocket-engine powder is one of the others.
How did Heston put it. . .
-FL
So I took a wander over to the site you linked and discovered the following item description for one of their most expensive cables, (and this isn't even for signal balanced cable pairs, which actually do prevent the causing of inductance-based interference in surrounding cables. What's being sold here are just garden variety audio wires. Made of gold.)
Wow! I got scared just reading that. They sure know how to make you feel insecure about your audio signal! --The price for security in plugs and wires? $4358 for twenty feet of cable! I bet you could sell some of these around the White House. (Just had to get a political dig in.)
I am stunned. I am clearly in the wrong business. I should be selling wires to rubes. Of course, I can't imagine that would do much for one's self esteem. George Cardas either doesn't sleep well at night, or he can talk up a real shit-storm when you challenge him on his ridiculous product line. . !
-FL