You have my respect, and I agree: "we've had a fair discussion and compared worldview which is always fun." All the best to you, for today and for tomorrow.
Perhaps we should both preface this argument with the concession that an internet forum like Slashdot is necessarily constrained as to length and breadth and not at all the same thing as a spoken forum or printed forum with room for more extensive replies and/or time for deliberation.
Clarify this; you believe passionately that life is such a randomized, rich and eclectic experience for folks such as ourselves and that (for our masses) set principles do not work?
No, not do not work. Rather, I argue that the very broad limits of the modern and/or enlightenment-centric framework are rarely, if ever acknowledged. "Work" is an compromise term in this context and were I to choose an adjective I'd choose one with much finer granularity (unfortunately, a ready alternative with similar connotation does not present itself).
You have basically arrived at the concept of compassion; something recognised by all of our aforementioned faith systems to some extent. In the purest sense Buddhism alludes to this principle; especially the myth texts which detail enlightenment attained when one say...cleans a rotting dog from the side of a road who thereafter becomes a Buddha incarnation and so forth. Thus, again I request definition - these "sappy new agers"; who are they? Your arguments seem distinctly Buddhist/Hindu in flavour; and yet you have condemned the 'new age' who embraced said philosophy?
Yes! Compassion. Very good. My response to the Slashdot story should simply have been that word.
No, I never mentioned Buddhism/Hinduism in the context of "new age" at all. I suppose this is a semantic game to some extent. In the US (particularly in the west) you'll find no shortage of "Buddhists" who have never once read a Buddhist text or even had a leisure lunch with Buddhist master from any nation or tradition. Instead, their Buddhism is largely an endorsement of what they perceive to be "the other," i.e. a rejection of typical American values. Unfortunately, even as they reject them they often seem unable to move beyond them in the material sense.
When I make reference to "new age" -isms I refer to that broad category of religions by which wealthy (in the global comparison) Americans seek to justify every last thing they do (even leveraged buyouts of collections agencies) as "spiritual moves," and who light a candle and consult the Yi Ching, for example, when they go to their mailbox to collect the mail, and who chant when they open their mobile phone bill, but who can also drop a friend like a hat simply because the friend didn't tip well enough at the bistro on Thursday and embarrassed them. I freely admit here that having lived in southern California for the last year I've likely adopted a somewhat cynical position, but for what it's worth the oft-decried urban "blue areas" form fully half the U.S. population, and furthermore I have encountered the same mentality repeatedly both in Salt Lake City and in Portland and San Francisco areas, though not at all in Chicago or the midwest.
With regard to the last two paragraphs of your post, my position is that you apply what I've said far too broadly. As usual, it is an all-or-nothing proposition: rationality in all things or in no things is implied to be the complete set of possible states. I argue that rationality is misplaced in any discussion of spiritual health. I make no argument as to the deployment of rationality, for example, in physics problems or the construction of space elevators. Indeed, those are the sorts of things that enlightenment-era thinking has done very well.
- Widespread prosperity shields people from the ordinary trials of life that build character and bring people together - Peace deprives people of the bond of a common cause - Feminization weakens us by favoring consiliation and non-confrontationalism over resolve and steadfastness - Mass marketing eggagerates the importance of the trivial - Government policies have undermined the importance of families on dozens of fronts - Television entertainment is created by that vastly deep and meaningful Southern CA culture - News outlets no longer focus on telling the facts. They're now almost 100% emotion-based. - Sex has invaded every part of life. (i.e. "Those two guys sure are good friends, I wonder if they're gay? That old guy is being nice to those kids, I wonder if he's a child molester?") The only protection is to never be close to anyone. - Right and wrong have given way to "political awareness" tests. Say the right things and you're golden.
Actually (and this is a much larger argument than can be made in a Slashdot post), I agree with much of what you've said. In a different place, I'd argue that "work" is a manifestation of the collection of states and failings you've mentioned.
Just ask yourself: how many of these are tied to industry/capital? Constructions of women and the culturally feminine are the primary engines of immaterial consumption; mass-marketing supports consumption and rationalized labor; families dilute the body of individual consumption units by tying multiple units into a single one; television provides an avenue for market-making; "fair and balanced" news reporting reinforces a consumptive status quo; sex sells more than all else...
No doubt I will be attacked on all sides for even making a post like this one without being able to spend 100 or 1000 pages to discuss it, but so far as I am concerned you are not wrong at all, and I even think that we are saying the same thing... Only to attack the problem from your direction is to need a dozen monographs to explain it, and even then to be attacked from all sides, whereas to follow the Frankfurt school methodology and simply tie it all to measure and increase is to attack a single problem: rationalization/rationality/instrumentality.
Beneath it all lies mortality, the ultimate absurdity and the one which renders all other arguments moot. Americans are, I find, not at all attuned to such things.
So, you want people to be there for you even when you don't deserve it.
Yes, and I also want to be there for them when they don't deserve it. The more of us there are, the more likely that we will meet others of the same ilk and if everyone is willing to make the compromise, everyone will have real friends. That is the point of my post, absolutely.
Yes, yes, "Cum-Ba-Ya" and all that shit.
It's very subtle for Americans, somehow. But that's it, in a nutshell. Sounds simple, but it's really rare right now.
Absolutely I have a bias. And it is in my sig. Congratulations, you found it. Would you rather I was "fair and balanced?";-)
P.S. Reality is also biased. People are dead or they aren't. Bullets kill. Gravity pulls things down and not up. "Down" means toward Earth and not away from it. Money spent on food is not spent on gin and vice-versa. These are the biases of our lives. Welcome to the world!
Right now I live in Salt Lake City. In 2003 I lived in Chicago. In 2004 in the Portland area. In 2005 in Los Angeles. Next year I will be living either in Manhattan or on the Jersey shore (I am currently finding a place).
Really? What is your philosophical alternative then
After you descend into ad hominem, you make my point for me. You appeal to systematization by way of criticism against a post whose premise is that systematization is not always in order!
The absolute need to elucidate a philosophical alternative to a polemic against elucidatable orders speaks to the enlightenment-centric mentality that all that is must be measurable or it simply isn't, which is precisely the state of affairs I was bemoaning in my post.
My alternative is not philosophical, it is material, and it is not argument but rather deed: self-sacrifice in the interest of making others happier. That is my solution, and I don't appeal to logic to justify it because my polemic is precisely that logic is an inappropriate metric for feeling. I freely admit that I have no measurable justification. I make no incremental, falsifiable argument to buttress the point, because to do so is to concede from the start precisely what I seek to contradict: that all virtues or all things of merit must first be elucidated and second measured, whether measured in isolation or measured against.
Measurement is the problem here. Yes, the enlightenment brought us from the middle ages to the era of laser eye surgery, but its methods have limits and those limits are reached at the boundary of meaning, because meaning is an undefinable abstraction that has thus far only ever been expressed and sought, but as of yet never actually defined for all our work on the subject across disciplines from the behavioral sciences through the hard sciences. There is ample empirical evidence everywhere you look for the inability of modernism and enlightenment thinking to come to terms with meaning: Al Qaeda, Columbine, Heaven's Gate, Obesity, American Idol, plastic surgery, Internet friendships, and on and on. I do not propose to attempt a measurable linkage between these and lack of meaning, either. You'll just have to deal with that, as will readers.
To seek to apply rigor to the notion of life's "meaning" (which is, after all, fundamentally related to friendship and to work and to mortality) is to fail. Or at least, no-one has thus far succeeded in any commonly accepted way.
So in short, I refuse to make a logical argument to support my point that logical arguments are the wrong metric to use when discussion relationships because to do so is to subvert the point to begin with. Indeed, the need to move beyond logic in relationships is the point, and I happily concede that without logic there is not currently a commonly accepted means by which to make any appeal at all, regarding feelings and friendships or anything else. But that is the nature of things: when you dismiss all that is, you must face all that as of yet isn't.
But I reiterate my claim: cost-benefit analyses and cogent arguments are by definition constrained and framed by that selfsame worldview that I made my post in order to accuse, and beyond this, I suspect that many here would agree with me: that to apply logic and method to your relationships is to get only logic and method back from them. And that is the problem. I and many others want irrational things from friendship: people who are there for me even when I don't deserve it, people that I enjoy even though they don't add to my wealth or prestige, company that I want to keep even though it will all be meaningless when I am dead.
I can not make arguments for any of these needs, under any system of thought or belief, or by any standard or method of measurement. But that does not by any means make them weaker. I need them, and so do others. And increasingly, we don't have them.
The one redeeming quality of socialism (if socialists would recognize it), is that it promotes a notion of community as opposed to the depersonalization and fragmentation of our relationships
If you consult The German Ideology and other non-Das-Kapital works by Marx, you'll find that this is the philosophical underpinning of fundamental socialism and communism--the belief that no matter what other consequences socialism/communism do or don't bring, they're more likely to lead to meaningful relationships, meaningful labor, and thus meaningful living, than other systems of political-economics.
People dismiss statements like "comrades in suffering are comrades indeed" but it's true to some point and many in the modern world are discovering it: you can be alone with your hummer, your mansion, your jewels, your swimming pool, and your twelve degrees, but you're still alone, and many would trade all of it just to have a real friend or two and a reason to wake up tomorrow. We'll all die. You can't take it with you. If you're busy being alone to earn it, you're never getting those years back.
I find that the hollowness of American social life is not only due to the Internet, but to a growing American utilitarianism and sense of entitlement that stretches into personal relationships.
Friends and would-be lovers alike are more and more forming and maintaining friendships on the basis of "What is this person doing for me right now?"
If someone isn't making them a profit, or is (gasp) taking their time or effort without a mechanically measurable payoff of some kind, people are only too ready these days to "kick them to the curb" and look for friends who are profitable or represent a measurable gain of some kind, whether in prestige or job prospects or exclusive memberships or exploitable expertise/skills.
This mentality of "everything has a price and can be calculated as a cost-benefit" has already ruled American material life for years and led to a kind of spiritual bankruptcy that leads to cults, sappy new-ageism, under/overeducation, and other strange social pathologies and now it is polluting our social lives as well.
When everyone is busy being a self-interested climber in their relationships, is is any wonder that nobody seems to be able to find non-selfish-climber friends? When everyone is busy sensing that they are entitled to their opinion, their time, their wishes, their preferences without the need for discussion or compromise, is it any wonder that people suddenly find that no-one is willing to compromise or have patience with them?
It gets to the point that you socialize on the Internet merely because the stakes are lower. You're less likely to get screwed or hurt or exploited and at the same time you can justify the time expenditure to others because "spending time online" appeals more to the protestant ethic of endless "useful" labor than does a phrase like "hanging out with some friends at the bar."
People are working all the time, their social relations have now become part of work too, calculated like work, and so they are finding that relationships feel like work and are subject to all of the risks and pitfalls that occur in the workplace.
The solutions? Stop bringing work home, set aside time to be "home," don't try to measure what other people are doing for you, only what you are doing for other people, and try not to take it personally when people "kick you to the curb" for not being productive enough or razz you for being a "slacker" and not leaving work at 8:30 PM to bring it home and pound on it with some climber friends from the office until 1:30 AM while calling it a "social life."
Low power systems can make a huge difference in energy conservation
Actually, that's not as true as we would like it to be.
Multiply that difference of 88 watts by 1,000,000 PCs in a major metropolitan area and you have a monthly savings of 88,000,000 watts. Over the course of a single business day, that's 704 Megawatt-Hours, much less over the course of a month, or a year, or spread across an entire nation.
Or... "Low power systems can make a huge difference in energy conservation."
Go to your local office supply store and buy one of the metal clipboards used by delivery personnel--the sort that are 0.5-1.5" thick (depending on which you buy) and open with a hinge. Then you have an ideal heat-conductive laptop-using surface for your lap or anywhere else, along with a place to carry your papers, pencils/pens, PDA, mobile phone (if its thin enough), and something to swing at muggers' heads if you should be unlucky enough to encounter one. They cost $25-35. And they also fit nicely in a laptop bag without enhancing its thickness or weight too much, while at the same time protecting the laptop from impact on one side.
Capital can afford to move. Hell, it saves money each time it moves. Labor can't afford to move. It costs labor money when it moves. That's globalization for you. Capital increases and is free (as in freedom). Labor competes against other labor and is unfree (as in unfreedom).
LA is a cesspool and living there was horrible. Hopefully they are equipped with atomic bombs and can take LA out. It'll improve the nation and the world immensely.
I'm getting older. I long ago realized that life is sexist. Men like gadgets, football, and salty language. Women like dolls, drama, and social work.
The computing industry is male, Spike TV. Now there are some Oprah or TLC elements, like MMORPGs and "community building" but by and large nuts and bolds are a man's game, whether we're talking computers, cars, or lawn furniture.
It's not that women can't do it, it's just women by and large don't want to do it. They have other ambitions. This sounds incredibly sexist to many, and makes me a very bad liberal, but at some point you're just fighting reality.
For those who are doing to say "nature vs. nurture blah blah" or "that's only because society xyz," fine, I don't care *why* it is I'm just saying that's what *is*. Maybe in 100 years things will be different. GREAT!
But for now... in my life I have always been surrounded by women. I have worked a lot of jobs in my time, where there were a lot of women in house. I have an aging mother, a pile of sisters (I was the only boy in a *large* family), and most of my friends and my girlfriend are women. 97.5% of the women I've known have not been interested in programming *anything*. They don't even want to *hear* about science and tech. Hell, they even get annoyed at the thought of learning how to program a remote control. It's an unemotional, antiseptic, button-pushing, unresponsive *male* thing, the remote control. The sheer unemotional nature of something so central to our society is clearly evidence of the Male White Corporate Oppression.
That's just the way the world is. GNOME might pick up three girl hackers. Great! If they'll pay for three more, they'll pick up six girl hackers. The rest of the girls will be watching "Trading Spaces," climbing the corporate ladder in areas like HR and QC, and going to Food Not Bombs (which I fully support).
You miss the point. Employees employ people--at least, any company I ever work for will employ people--rather than automatons. And thus, anything they do is personal, at work or at home.
Persons have ideas. They are who they are. And it's immoral for employers to demand that persons become non-persons just so that they can work. A healthy company will employ people from a wide variety of backgrounds, opinions, political orientations, and practices. A piss-poor, PHB company will employ a whole bunch of identicaloids who have agreed to be nobodies 24/7.
If I can't be at work the person that I am at home, then I am in the wrong line of work, and so are you.
"If someone would not hire me based on information on my site, I would not want to work for them anyway."
Exactly my feelings, and something I'm surprised I don't hear more of on Slashdot beneath these types of stories. Instead, I see hundreds of geeks clamoring to say "Keep your mouth shut and stay repressed in your personal life! Only then can you land the job that will also force you to keep your mouth shut and stay repressed in your professional life!"
I think things. I think them at home, and I think them at work. And if I put myself in a position by which I can't ever say them, at home or at work, then I'm not much of a person.
I certainly refuse to work for any employer who is unwilling to countenance the notion that employers have a unique, interesting, and un-work-like private life.
In my experience, it's the other way around--these types of initiatives and "relationships" are evidence that the original (often founding) management of a company, who was passionate about its products and its quality, has been substantially replaced over time by MBA types who have no clue how to do anything but trade every asset (including customer loyalty) for immediate dollars to line their golden parachutes.
In short, the gimmicky crap is evidence that the company is now headed by the type of management who will eventually drive the products into the ground through micromanagement, mismanagement, complete un-informed-ness about core businesses, and general short-sightedness. It's not necessarily evidence that the company has already "fallen," though if someone doesn't get to the helm and throw, jackasses overboard, and right the company's ship, that's almost certain to happen as the products gradually look more and more like cracker-jack box prizes (and the clueless management trends more and more toward filling ranks with "popcorn personnel," rather than solid and experienced workers, who are often very inconveniently stubborn about things like quality and workmanship).
Suppose the OSS community managed to lobby for and have passed a liability law that was based on the customer's (software buyer's) ability to have the problem fixed, i.e. you're liable only if your software is buggy and your product by its nature presents technical obstacles to the customer's ability to make any needed "repairs" to make it work properly.
Such a statute would be a huge book for open software and DRM schemes, since it would essentially free open source from any liability, and at the same time it would discourage software companies from using DRM since it lets them out of any "grey area" argument about excuse from liability due to the customer's ability to fix software by disassembly and/or reverse engineering.
Your marketplace argument relies on the assumption that the consumer is actually aware of the possibility of phones that work.
I'd suggest that a large portion of American consumers have been led by marketing, the corporate and public infrastructures, and a failed educational system to believe that everything in American life is already "the best it can get."
In my experience, people believe that dropped calls are intrinsic to the technology of wireless communication in the same way that they believe that mistake and instability are inherent to the technology of computers thanks to their experience with Windows. They don't pay more for reliability because a) there are no more reliable choices, b) they wouldn't be aware of them if there were, and c) they wouldn't believe they were actually more reliable anyway, given their own experience and what marketing departments and regulatory agencies imply, and because they wouldn't therefore rush to switch, any new entrant that actually did have a reliable network would struggle to compete thanks to the marketplace belief that in truth they're the same as other carriers and thus overpriced since no dropped calls is impossible as everyone knows.
"Fewest dropped calls" is an implication by the cell company that dropped calls happen and are a cost of using wireless, something to be mitigated; the fact that these companies aren't better regulated is an implication to most of the American sheep that government also doesn't believe that wireless technology can perform better, since Americans by and large believe that their government and its regulatory policies are always ideal--that is to say that if things aren't better, it's because they can't realistically be better, otherwise American (capital 'A') government and industry would already have made them better or imposed regulation to punish failures. After all, this is America, by definition the best on Earth. If we invade Iraq, it is by definition moral. Similarly, if our cellphones don't work, it implies by definition that the technology is unreliable. It's a conspiracy that links the American ethos to willfull miseducation of consumers by marketplace and regulatory forces with vested interests in the policy and production realities that they support.
And of course government and corporations are happy to maintain such misconceptions among the general public.
Before you assume that the consumer has made a choice in the marketplace, you have to account for forces in the marketplace that conspire to keep all consumers misinformed and without choices that might inform them, thereby benefitting the marketplace.
The solution (that "marketplace" people hate) is regulation, something sorely lacking in helpful ways in the US economy and on the other hand overabundant in damaging and detrimental ways that benefit only the wealthy.
Not a fine, just the legal fees of anyone they've taken to court along with returning any/all licensing fees they've been paid by others to the wronged parties, along with interest pegged to standard lending rates over the time period during which licensing was paid.
Slashdot Mirror
<bow>
You have me smile, and I thank you.
You have my respect, and I agree: "we've had a fair discussion and compared worldview which is always fun." All the best to you, for today and for tomorrow.
Godspeed!
Perhaps we should both preface this argument with the concession that an internet forum like Slashdot is necessarily constrained as to length and breadth and not at all the same thing as a spoken forum or printed forum with room for more extensive replies and/or time for deliberation.
Clarify this; you believe passionately that life is such a randomized, rich and eclectic experience for folks such as ourselves and that (for our masses) set principles do not work?
No, not do not work. Rather, I argue that the very broad limits of the modern and/or enlightenment-centric framework are rarely, if ever acknowledged. "Work" is an compromise term in this context and were I to choose an adjective I'd choose one with much finer granularity (unfortunately, a ready alternative with similar connotation does not present itself).
You have basically arrived at the concept of compassion; something recognised by all of our aforementioned faith systems to some extent. In the purest sense Buddhism alludes to this principle; especially the myth texts which detail enlightenment attained when one say...cleans a rotting dog from the side of a road who thereafter becomes a Buddha incarnation and so forth. Thus, again I request definition - these "sappy new agers"; who are they? Your arguments seem distinctly Buddhist/Hindu in flavour; and yet you have condemned the 'new age' who embraced said philosophy?
Yes! Compassion. Very good. My response to the Slashdot story should simply have been that word.
No, I never mentioned Buddhism/Hinduism in the context of "new age" at all. I suppose this is a semantic game to some extent. In the US (particularly in the west) you'll find no shortage of "Buddhists" who have never once read a Buddhist text or even had a leisure lunch with Buddhist master from any nation or tradition. Instead, their Buddhism is largely an endorsement of what they perceive to be "the other," i.e. a rejection of typical American values. Unfortunately, even as they reject them they often seem unable to move beyond them in the material sense.
When I make reference to "new age" -isms I refer to that broad category of religions by which wealthy (in the global comparison) Americans seek to justify every last thing they do (even leveraged buyouts of collections agencies) as "spiritual moves," and who light a candle and consult the Yi Ching, for example, when they go to their mailbox to collect the mail, and who chant when they open their mobile phone bill, but who can also drop a friend like a hat simply because the friend didn't tip well enough at the bistro on Thursday and embarrassed them. I freely admit here that having lived in southern California for the last year I've likely adopted a somewhat cynical position, but for what it's worth the oft-decried urban "blue areas" form fully half the U.S. population, and furthermore I have encountered the same mentality repeatedly both in Salt Lake City and in Portland and San Francisco areas, though not at all in Chicago or the midwest.
With regard to the last two paragraphs of your post, my position is that you apply what I've said far too broadly. As usual, it is an all-or-nothing proposition: rationality in all things or in no things is implied to be the complete set of possible states. I argue that rationality is misplaced in any discussion of spiritual health. I make no argument as to the deployment of rationality, for example, in physics problems or the construction of space elevators. Indeed, those are the sorts of things that enlightenment-era thinking has done very well.
Actually (and this is a much larger argument than can be made in a Slashdot post), I agree with much of what you've said. In a different place, I'd argue that "work" is a manifestation of the collection of states and failings you've mentioned.
Just ask yourself: how many of these are tied to industry/capital? Constructions of women and the culturally feminine are the primary engines of immaterial consumption; mass-marketing supports consumption and rationalized labor; families dilute the body of individual consumption units by tying multiple units into a single one; television provides an avenue for market-making; "fair and balanced" news reporting reinforces a consumptive status quo; sex sells more than all else...
No doubt I will be attacked on all sides for even making a post like this one without being able to spend 100 or 1000 pages to discuss it, but so far as I am concerned you are not wrong at all, and I even think that we are saying the same thing... Only to attack the problem from your direction is to need a dozen monographs to explain it, and even then to be attacked from all sides, whereas to follow the Frankfurt school methodology and simply tie it all to measure and increase is to attack a single problem: rationalization/rationality/instrumentality.
Beneath it all lies mortality, the ultimate absurdity and the one which renders all other arguments moot. Americans are, I find, not at all attuned to such things.
Yes, and I also want to be there for them when they don't deserve it. The more of us there are, the more likely that we will meet others of the same ilk and if everyone is willing to make the compromise, everyone will have real friends. That is the point of my post, absolutely.
Yes, yes, "Cum-Ba-Ya" and all that shit.
It's very subtle for Americans, somehow. But that's it, in a nutshell. Sounds simple, but it's really rare right now.
Absolutely I have a bias. And it is in my sig. Congratulations, you found it. Would you rather I was "fair and balanced?" ;-)
P.S. Reality is also biased. People are dead or they aren't. Bullets kill. Gravity pulls things down and not up. "Down" means toward Earth and not away from it. Money spent on food is not spent on gin and vice-versa. These are the biases of our lives. Welcome to the world!
And I can type faster than you, too, albeit with a few errors, apparently.
Right now I live in Salt Lake City. In 2003 I lived in Chicago. In 2004 in the Portland area. In 2005 in Los Angeles. Next year I will be living either in Manhattan or on the Jersey shore (I am currently finding a place).
I have lived in:
San Francisco (yes, east bay)
Chicago (south side)
Los Angeles (northern burbs)
Salt Lake City (downtown)
Portland (hillsboro area)
I have also visited over two-thirds of the 50 states, and much of that time not on the interstate system.
I haven't yet lived in or visited New York City but will be moving there later this year. I'll let you know.
After you descend into ad hominem, you make my point for me. You appeal to systematization by way of criticism against a post whose premise is that systematization is not always in order!
The absolute need to elucidate a philosophical alternative to a polemic against elucidatable orders speaks to the enlightenment-centric mentality that all that is must be measurable or it simply isn't, which is precisely the state of affairs I was bemoaning in my post.
My alternative is not philosophical, it is material, and it is not argument but rather deed: self-sacrifice in the interest of making others happier. That is my solution, and I don't appeal to logic to justify it because my polemic is precisely that logic is an inappropriate metric for feeling. I freely admit that I have no measurable justification. I make no incremental, falsifiable argument to buttress the point, because to do so is to concede from the start precisely what I seek to contradict: that all virtues or all things of merit must first be elucidated and second measured, whether measured in isolation or measured against.
Measurement is the problem here. Yes, the enlightenment brought us from the middle ages to the era of laser eye surgery, but its methods have limits and those limits are reached at the boundary of meaning, because meaning is an undefinable abstraction that has thus far only ever been expressed and sought, but as of yet never actually defined for all our work on the subject across disciplines from the behavioral sciences through the hard sciences. There is ample empirical evidence everywhere you look for the inability of modernism and enlightenment thinking to come to terms with meaning: Al Qaeda, Columbine, Heaven's Gate, Obesity, American Idol, plastic surgery, Internet friendships, and on and on. I do not propose to attempt a measurable linkage between these and lack of meaning, either. You'll just have to deal with that, as will readers.
To seek to apply rigor to the notion of life's "meaning" (which is, after all, fundamentally related to friendship and to work and to mortality) is to fail. Or at least, no-one has thus far succeeded in any commonly accepted way.
So in short, I refuse to make a logical argument to support my point that logical arguments are the wrong metric to use when discussion relationships because to do so is to subvert the point to begin with. Indeed, the need to move beyond logic in relationships is the point, and I happily concede that without logic there is not currently a commonly accepted means by which to make any appeal at all, regarding feelings and friendships or anything else. But that is the nature of things: when you dismiss all that is, you must face all that as of yet isn't.
But I reiterate my claim: cost-benefit analyses and cogent arguments are by definition constrained and framed by that selfsame worldview that I made my post in order to accuse, and beyond this, I suspect that many here would agree with me: that to apply logic and method to your relationships is to get only logic and method back from them. And that is the problem. I and many others want irrational things from friendship: people who are there for me even when I don't deserve it, people that I enjoy even though they don't add to my wealth or prestige, company that I want to keep even though it will all be meaningless when I am dead.
I can not make arguments for any of these needs, under any system of thought or belief, or by any standard or method of measurement. But that does not by any means make them weaker. I need them, and so do others. And increasingly, we don't have them.
If you consult The German Ideology and other non-Das-Kapital works by Marx, you'll find that this is the philosophical underpinning of fundamental socialism and communism--the belief that no matter what other consequences socialism/communism do or don't bring, they're more likely to lead to meaningful relationships, meaningful labor, and thus meaningful living, than other systems of political-economics.
People dismiss statements like "comrades in suffering are comrades indeed" but it's true to some point and many in the modern world are discovering it: you can be alone with your hummer, your mansion, your jewels, your swimming pool, and your twelve degrees, but you're still alone, and many would trade all of it just to have a real friend or two and a reason to wake up tomorrow. We'll all die. You can't take it with you. If you're busy being alone to earn it, you're never getting those years back.
I find that the hollowness of American social life is not only due to the Internet, but to a growing American utilitarianism and sense of entitlement that stretches into personal relationships.
Friends and would-be lovers alike are more and more forming and maintaining friendships on the basis of "What is this person doing for me right now?"
If someone isn't making them a profit, or is (gasp) taking their time or effort without a mechanically measurable payoff of some kind, people are only too ready these days to "kick them to the curb" and look for friends who are profitable or represent a measurable gain of some kind, whether in prestige or job prospects or exclusive memberships or exploitable expertise/skills.
This mentality of "everything has a price and can be calculated as a cost-benefit" has already ruled American material life for years and led to a kind of spiritual bankruptcy that leads to cults, sappy new-ageism, under/overeducation, and other strange social pathologies and now it is polluting our social lives as well.
When everyone is busy being a self-interested climber in their relationships, is is any wonder that nobody seems to be able to find non-selfish-climber friends? When everyone is busy sensing that they are entitled to their opinion, their time, their wishes, their preferences without the need for discussion or compromise, is it any wonder that people suddenly find that no-one is willing to compromise or have patience with them?
It gets to the point that you socialize on the Internet merely because the stakes are lower. You're less likely to get screwed or hurt or exploited and at the same time you can justify the time expenditure to others because "spending time online" appeals more to the protestant ethic of endless "useful" labor than does a phrase like "hanging out with some friends at the bar."
People are working all the time, their social relations have now become part of work too, calculated like work, and so they are finding that relationships feel like work and are subject to all of the risks and pitfalls that occur in the workplace.
The solutions? Stop bringing work home, set aside time to be "home," don't try to measure what other people are doing for you, only what you are doing for other people, and try not to take it personally when people "kick you to the curb" for not being productive enough or razz you for being a "slacker" and not leaving work at 8:30 PM to bring it home and pound on it with some climber friends from the office until 1:30 AM while calling it a "social life."
Oops, should have read "a monthly savings on an 88,000,000 watt difference." My bad for typing too fast.
Multiply that difference of 88 watts by 1,000,000 PCs in a major metropolitan area and you have a monthly savings of 88,000,000 watts. Over the course of a single business day, that's 704 Megawatt-Hours, much less over the course of a month, or a year, or spread across an entire nation.
Or... "Low power systems can make a huge difference in energy conservation."
Go to your local office supply store and buy one of the metal clipboards used by delivery personnel--the sort that are 0.5-1.5" thick (depending on which you buy) and open with a hinge. Then you have an ideal heat-conductive laptop-using surface for your lap or anywhere else, along with a place to carry your papers, pencils/pens, PDA, mobile phone (if its thin enough), and something to swing at muggers' heads if you should be unlucky enough to encounter one. They cost $25-35. And they also fit nicely in a laptop bag without enhancing its thickness or weight too much, while at the same time protecting the laptop from impact on one side.
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Capital can afford to move. Hell, it saves money each time it moves. Labor can't afford to move. It costs labor money when it moves. That's globalization for you. Capital increases and is free (as in freedom). Labor competes against other labor and is unfree (as in unfreedom).
LA is a cesspool and living there was horrible. Hopefully they are equipped with atomic bombs and can take LA out. It'll improve the nation and the world immensely.
I'm getting older. I long ago realized that life is sexist. Men like gadgets, football, and salty language. Women like dolls, drama, and social work.
The computing industry is male, Spike TV.
Now there are some Oprah or TLC elements, like MMORPGs and "community building" but by and large nuts and bolds are a man's game, whether we're talking computers, cars, or lawn furniture.
It's not that women can't do it, it's just women by and large don't want to do it. They have other ambitions. This sounds incredibly sexist to many, and makes me a very bad liberal, but at some point you're just fighting reality.
For those who are doing to say "nature vs. nurture blah blah" or "that's only because society xyz," fine, I don't care *why* it is I'm just saying that's what *is*. Maybe in 100 years things will be different. GREAT!
But for now... in my life I have always been surrounded by women. I have worked a lot of jobs in my time, where there were a lot of women in house. I have an aging mother, a pile of sisters (I was the only boy in a *large* family), and most of my friends and my girlfriend are women. 97.5% of the women I've known have not been interested in programming *anything*. They don't even want to *hear* about science and tech. Hell, they even get annoyed at the thought of learning how to program a remote control. It's an unemotional, antiseptic, button-pushing, unresponsive *male* thing, the remote control. The sheer unemotional nature of something so central to our society is clearly evidence of the Male White Corporate Oppression.
That's just the way the world is. GNOME might pick up three girl hackers. Great! If they'll pay for three more, they'll pick up six girl hackers. The rest of the girls will be watching "Trading Spaces," climbing the corporate ladder in areas like HR and QC, and going to Food Not Bombs (which I fully support).
You miss the point. Employees employ people--at least, any company I ever work for will employ people--rather than automatons. And thus, anything they do is personal, at work or at home.
Persons have ideas. They are who they are. And it's immoral for employers to demand that persons become non-persons just so that they can work. A healthy company will employ people from a wide variety of backgrounds, opinions, political orientations, and practices. A piss-poor, PHB company will employ a whole bunch of identicaloids who have agreed to be nobodies 24/7.
If I can't be at work the person that I am at home, then I am in the wrong line of work, and so are you.
"If someone would not hire me based on information on my site, I would not want to work for them anyway."
Exactly my feelings, and something I'm surprised I don't hear more of on Slashdot beneath these types of stories. Instead, I see hundreds of geeks clamoring to say "Keep your mouth shut and stay repressed in your personal life! Only then can you land the job that will also force you to keep your mouth shut and stay repressed in your professional life!"
I think things. I think them at home, and I think them at work. And if I put myself in a position by which I can't ever say them, at home or at work, then I'm not much of a person.
I certainly refuse to work for any employer who is unwilling to countenance the notion that employers have a unique, interesting, and un-work-like private life.
In my experience, it's the other way around--these types of initiatives and "relationships" are evidence that the original (often founding) management of a company, who was passionate about its products and its quality, has been substantially replaced over time by MBA types who have no clue how to do anything but trade every asset (including customer loyalty) for immediate dollars to line their golden parachutes.
In short, the gimmicky crap is evidence that the company is now headed by the type of management who will eventually drive the products into the ground through micromanagement, mismanagement, complete un-informed-ness about core businesses, and general short-sightedness. It's not necessarily evidence that the company has already "fallen," though if someone doesn't get to the helm and throw, jackasses overboard, and right the company's ship, that's almost certain to happen as the products gradually look more and more like cracker-jack box prizes (and the clueless management trends more and more toward filling ranks with "popcorn personnel," rather than solid and experienced workers, who are often very inconveniently stubborn about things like quality and workmanship).
Suppose the OSS community managed to lobby for and have passed a liability law that was based on the customer's (software buyer's) ability to have the problem fixed, i.e. you're liable only if your software is buggy and your product by its nature presents technical obstacles to the customer's ability to make any needed "repairs" to make it work properly.
Such a statute would be a huge book for open software and DRM schemes, since it would essentially free open source from any liability, and at the same time it would discourage software companies from using DRM since it lets them out of any "grey area" argument about excuse from liability due to the customer's ability to fix software by disassembly and/or reverse engineering.
Does someone need a clue? Pleae mod back up.
Your marketplace argument relies on the assumption that the consumer is actually aware of the possibility of phones that work.
I'd suggest that a large portion of American consumers have been led by marketing, the corporate and public infrastructures, and a failed educational system to believe that everything in American life is already "the best it can get."
In my experience, people believe that dropped calls are intrinsic to the technology of wireless communication in the same way that they believe that mistake and instability are inherent to the technology of computers thanks to their experience with Windows. They don't pay more for reliability because a) there are no more reliable choices, b) they wouldn't be aware of them if there were, and c) they wouldn't believe they were actually more reliable anyway, given their own experience and what marketing departments and regulatory agencies imply, and because they wouldn't therefore rush to switch, any new entrant that actually did have a reliable network would struggle to compete thanks to the marketplace belief that in truth they're the same as other carriers and thus overpriced since no dropped calls is impossible as everyone knows.
"Fewest dropped calls" is an implication by the cell company that dropped calls happen and are a cost of using wireless, something to be mitigated; the fact that these companies aren't better regulated is an implication to most of the American sheep that government also doesn't believe that wireless technology can perform better, since Americans by and large believe that their government and its regulatory policies are always ideal--that is to say that if things aren't better, it's because they can't realistically be better, otherwise American (capital 'A') government and industry would already have made them better or imposed regulation to punish failures. After all, this is America, by definition the best on Earth. If we invade Iraq, it is by definition moral. Similarly, if our cellphones don't work, it implies by definition that the technology is unreliable. It's a conspiracy that links the American ethos to willfull miseducation of consumers by marketplace and regulatory forces with vested interests in the policy and production realities that they support.
And of course government and corporations are happy to maintain such misconceptions among the general public.
Before you assume that the consumer has made a choice in the marketplace, you have to account for forces in the marketplace that conspire to keep all consumers misinformed and without choices that might inform them, thereby benefitting the marketplace.
The solution (that "marketplace" people hate) is regulation, something sorely lacking in helpful ways in the US economy and on the other hand overabundant in damaging and detrimental ways that benefit only the wealthy.
I hadn't considered the vocative case (and it took me a moment to see it), but I have no problem with it either.
Not a fine, just the legal fees of anyone they've taken to court along with returning any/all licensing fees they've been paid by others to the wronged parties, along with interest pegged to standard lending rates over the time period during which licensing was paid.