Is there then a category below "genuinely"? Because I'm too poor to have debt.
My social security check just covers the rent on a place of ~180 sq.ft.; I get a much smaller check from SSI and a very small amount from the state - both of these last to bring me up to some level of mandated minimum, as I understand it, for a total which works out around 75% of poverty level.
I'm "good" until any of the checks stop. If Medicare goes, I die, given the events of the past year and their continuing consequences. It keeps things simple enough, even if I'm not genuine.
Don't misunderstand - I'm grateful to have as much as I have; folks such as Frosty Piss have my sympathy. Retroactive pay is good, but the possibility of losing most everything before it kicks in doesn't make things easy. And for those without even that?
The worst part of this whole mess, apart from people's losses, is that by the time elections roll around, folks won't remember, and if they do, they'll likely remember it wrongly anyway.
Where I live it's more along the lines that the cops can do whatever they don't get caught doing, while the deputies can do whatever the judges don't mind and the citizens don't get hugely riled about. Law exists to furnish a list of arrest or ticket charges, carried over for arraignment, and get convicted for; good stats on that are handy come election time.
You raise some good points. The commons bit and poaching off pure R done by another country frankly hadn't occurred to me at all.
Was a time - within my own lifetime, no less - that pure research was pursued as a matter of course by any and most every country in some fashion. When cash didn't exist, there was other support - lodging, food, such supplies and gear as could be borrowed or cobbled. It wasn't just for prestige, either. For a period of time many were able to see that research for its own sake was important, even tho it might never make a dime.
Wasn't Einstein working at the patent office in Bern when he cooked up the paper on the photo-electric effect?
I also think that sometimes phrasing things differently can carry better precision or connotation. It also may help to avoid getting stuck in the rut of, say, a 1500-word core vocabulary.
I am not in school, haven't an editor, enter no contests, and at my age don't much give a shit so long as I can get a point across or ask a question. I don't generally try to give offense; if someone takes it that's their act, not mine.
I don't blame your caution. For the rest, while I'm a simpleton I still try to call it as I see it. Further, like you, I too try to use more useful terms than ones which generate reflexes rather than thought.
Btw, your sig, I found Dave's instructions and essays on CSS and a bunch of other stuff helpful and informative; his glimpse into the workings of W3C are most interesting.
How does common confer meaninglessness? Also, it's not so much a matter of humiliation as it is having the fact of a mug shot being used as a social weapon.
I have little truck with labels, parties, ideologies, etc. It takes most of my feeble energies trying to find and develop a picture of what happened, how things were, and how things are.
I try to start with science where appropriate, then scholars and historians (and trying to separate wheat from chaff, understand the bias of those with an axe to grind, is non-trivial), then on to paying close attention to people directly involved. The latter is why I pay particular attention to comments from those overseas and to those who've lived under significantly differing circumstance, so I thank you for that.
Over the years I've found that it is hard for those who have little history, who haven't known survivors of the various totalitarians' camps, and who haven't troubled themselves with trying to learn some about what they comment upon, to have views that are worth paying a whole lot of attention to, other than as a barometer on common thought. Half the time I'm in the same boat, and can only claim to try.
Another way to put it, if somebody comments on fire, I'll pay more attention to someone who's camped out, lived rough, or an old-school Scout, and less to a prof, shopkeeper, or admin.
Yeah, none of the people I knew who'd been in combat talked about it, other than to say it was not good, and they were glad to back and then change the subject. I never pushed it. My friends who came back from Vietnam were the same, sometimes a bit more open.
Funny, I got caught a time or two with stuff I wasn't supposed to be able to read also. All I ever got out of it was a talking-to or makework. That's one of the biggest peeves I had, and still do; even with somewhat better student-teacher ratios available post-Baby Boom, there's really not much of a concerted effort towards real flexibility for teachers or schools allowed - and from what I've seen the past fifty years the programs attempted to deal with anomalous students tend to be flawed and create problems on their own. I think we could use more of an academy and read-and-mentor approach, with lots of small-group q&a discussions. (For all the great survey numbers from parents saying education is important, I see a big gap 'twixt saying and doing - like a lot of stuff in life.)
Cheers on your impending retirement, and good luck with writing. Btw, I read time and again from quite a number of writers who've found some success that regular participation in writers' workshops has been found helpful.
The 19th century somehow managed to reduce the workweek while increasing the yield of farming. Now we need two people of a household to work and food is expensive.
I love this. I'm going to make a point to remember it and use it.
It succinctly describes what unchecked consumerism has done in ways that are difficult to dodge.
It's a-political...in points out a truth in a way that demands clear action but cannot be easily trolled.
It succinctly describes what unchecked capitalism has done in ways that are difficult to dodge.
FTFY. A large amount of the proceeds of that increased productivity went into the coffers of the minuscule percent and has largely never gone back into the general economy. You don't have to take my word for it; a bit of searching, and many of the better results available directly from such places as the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the IRS, will give you a start. Until Bush the Younger the greatest recorded shift in wealth occurred under Reagan, for instance. There was a brief expansion of the middle class peaking around the middle of the last century, but that was more a bagatelle, and a large bit of it on credit as distinct equity, temporary trends in home ownership notwithstanding.
Yes, there indeed has been increased consumerism and that credit bubble is real, but it's only a partial explanation for the question of where all the productivity went to. Moreover, the military-industrial complex while providing some jobs has been a large suck by any yardstick.
Follow the money, follow the profit, follow the profiteers. Where does the money come back out? It doesn't, in meaningful terms.
A few years back I had recourse to read both what the U.S. and the UN had to say of torture. They were pretty close, btw. Both had exceptions granted to law-enforcement being allowed to applying measures necessary to obtain compliance. This is the loophole. The main criterion, if memory serves, is that no lasting damage be done.
You're certainly welcome to look up the stuff, and I suggest anyone do so. It's informative.
However I contend that politics is not, or perhaps should not be, about comparison shopping. One might propose politics as being a bit more than just being the pursuit of the possible but rather the betterment of the commonweal.
Even for the simple exercise of free speech and assembly, the order of the day is increasingly "catch and release", often without so much as a ticket for most yet all are routinely fingerprinted and photographed. This was not uncommon all the way back to anti-war protests in the '70s and it's only gotten worse.
Will you seriously contend that exercising basic rights [once-upon-a-time] protected by the constitution makes one a bad person?
Mayhap you presume that anyone arrested is automatically guilty of something and deserving of conviction? Is someone convicted under what is later shown to be bad law also a bad person?
Well, then, carry on, Citizen, the State needs more like you.
I noted that even in July '69 the great bulk of the enthusiasm was not shared by great swathes of the populace but was also as ephemeral as a team winning the Superbowl, based upon my own observation, polls, editorials, and letters to editors. That situation hasn't gotten better. As far as I can figure people don't care.
There is to me a distinct lack of vision and imagination permeating everything unless it be an infatuation about something that will make gobs of money short-term.
I don't know who it was that remarked that leadership is the ability to follow from the front; if so, that's what we've had, and even that, badly.
When basic research is under attack at all levels, from the National Institutes down, from companies outward, I don't see a favorable outcome. Policy makers and purse holders have forgotten that applied- science, research, engineering, all stem from pure, and that basic research itself stems often as not from whimsy and speculation.
We've lost the sense of frontiers, largely to self-imposed blinders. We've lost the sense of awe and accompanying humility.
The discovery I made about boredom didn't come until I was in my early thirties, when I unaccountably got humongously badly depressed (beyond the usual crippling 'normal' depression) by getting completely bored to the point of ennui. Way out for me was an examination of my ignorance. When I was little, knowing so little, my ignorance encompassed the mud puddle of all the things that I could look at and ask the typical three-year old's "why?" As I got older, ignorance became a good-sized lake; by college, maybe the size of Lake Michigan - a lake so large as to appear vast, with no distant shore in sight.
I'd forgotten that, and gotten bored. When I realized that, with all I was learning from school and reading and thinking, pondering, musing, conversations with others, my ignorance was really as large as the Universe - in which case the entirety of existence became mystery, to be marveled at, teased out bit by strand, externally and internally. A night spent trying to fall asleep under a clear starry night clinched the deal and forever removed from me boredom, although I confess to slumps from time to time when the exigencies of the world weigh heavily in some personal manner via finances, health, and the like.
Yeah, I've had a few stinkers for teachers, or at least I thought so at the time, and mos' def some badly-conceived and -written textbooks, but I've also had some good and even great ones; but by and large all through school I had enough outside reading and extra-curricular stuff going on - building things and doing stuff with a few playmates or via Scouts or NRA. Also, Dad being in the Army, there were visits here and there to see things at different bases, and a visit to an uncle at Wright-Patterson's to see the museum. (Main-gear wheel well of the B-36 was size of my bedroom, looked like.)
I feel really lucky looking back that I was somehow able to compensate on my own hook for the occasional bad patches of school, and to this day feel badly that I was unable to figure out how to communicate any of it to any useful effect with some of my classmates. It hurts me to see when somebody gets locked into a downer place; after a lifetime of crushing depression I can sympathize at least.
While I got good grades in math (until uni) I was a dunce at really grasping it enuf to be inventive about it. The various geometry courses were by far my favorites.
What got me into history a bit was growing with so many of the adults having been through WWII; that and all the various movies and documentaries, and a few places we visited in Germany, and getting into some of the unit histories from my father's war, gave me an entry. Couple that with curiosity - how do you build a submarine; how does RADAR work; what are the differences amongst center of gravity, center of buoyancy, center of effort; just how in the hell did they really dig a ditch from the Atlantic to the Pacific; the questions kept arising like unto an itch that needed scratching. A clincher was getting the Brittanica for my eighth birthday - that answered for rainy days and more.
Again, I was lucky. Too many aren't. We need adults, parents, schools, all of it, to focus on presenting young'uns with fact, history, and the mechanism of scrupulous enquiry à la critical thinking (along with the three-R's basics) as preparation for making their way into the world. Parents have to want this, else the effort will fall apart (after all, cain't have the gummint telling our kinders what's what, now can we?) And for the love of anything holy or valued or worthwhile, frickin' pay good teachers some good money and keep the gorint admin off their back.
As an aside, no accountants or lawyers in the chain of command anywhere, ever. They can make good advisors, but put 'em to run something and they can screw up a wet dream.
It's an odd thought, but capitalism can never succeed. On a personal level, one's desire to maximize profit is tempered by many aspects of reality, such that at some point getting enough is acceptable or resigned to, at least for many.
At the systemic level, however, the need for profit becomes greed - which has no bounds. A capitalistic system would destroy itself, except that it morphs into something else - plutocracy, for example, where capitalistic sub-systems are the tools for internecine warfare.
(Looking back we can see that capitalism arose from both the individual storekeeper et al and the needs of plutocrats - the birth of corporations was a marriage of convenience for both parties.)
I see no logical required successor to plutocracy, unless one subscribes to "there can be only one." The only way out for the people - for all people - would require all of the following: an over-abundance of electricity that is essentially too cheap to bother metering; robotics that includes good vision; high-function AI.
The article and those linked make some good points but their conclusion is flawed due to being based on history. What is happening now is not covered by precedent, especially when that precedent is filtered by hindsight through rose-colored glasses. Also left out was the ever-increasing size of the 'underclass'.
There will be so many workers displaced in the next few decades that there is no way in hell that enough job openings will arise or can be created even as make-work, and there are individual limits to education and re-training that far outnumber such positions. Further, there are limits as to just how many of those displaced can make up their own businesses or support themselves on some supposed creative works.
The whole "profit required by law" shtick is but one of the canards continually bruited by certain interests; it's a ploy straight from Goebbels' playbook. Getting enough people to buy in to a false "truth" is a great way to have the people do to themselves what power alone cannot.
From many years back there's a poem that starts, "An Austrian army awfully arrayed, boldly by battery besieged Belgrade." Author went on through all 26 letters of English alphabet with but few really bad stretches. It's a hoot, and tells a true story to boot.
Yup, one gots innies, t'other, outies; moral of story, get 'er done.
Fellow a ways above in regard the menses pointed out the positive aspect: "although it does come with a benefit of being able to have children." I can't remember speaking with a mother who at some point doesn't nigh gush on the wonder, the thrill, the immense sense of fulfillment yadda yadda, yet I have privately (ere now) suspected it was at least also a gigantic shared myth and mythos preventing the fairer sex from running amok.
Some time back during a discussion with one of my nurses the thought arose and I said that if men were the ones who had to bear children that the species would likely die out in a generation. It didn't surprise me that she agreed. Any male survivors would be variously masochists, slaves, those whose commitment over-ran sense, or someone would invent either an artificial womb or means for another species to carry humans to term.
All of the above, of course done with tongue firmly in cheek.
Meritocracy supposes one or more traits which ought be rewarded to those having them. It used to generally refer to being smarter and more capable of doing various sophisticated things such as designing and building useful items and infrastructure and doing the research that allowed of advancement. These days the presumed, if tacit, trait is being able to make lots of money by whatever means. The further tacit supposition is that being able to make lots of money is a function of higher, more useful, intelligence.
Eugenics is two-fold: selecting for better traits by active assessment and matching of those possessing superior genetic material. The other edge is working to eliminate less desirable traits, these days perhaps by genetic screening, in aid of floating all boats. It's downside in extreme is eradication camps. Arbeit Macht Frei and all that. "Better" and "superior" are somewhat movable feasts; academia supposes people like themselves, while being good at making money is the more common yardstick although it's sometimes disguised as being smarter.
Yeah, 3 minutes would be handy, but it'd be one king-hell of a parabola. WikiP was my second hit read, but went to NASA for the clincher. Memory; aw crap, mine's about shot (in fairness it's maybe not so much the librarian's fault, as it's the waning army of file clerks not finding things.)
Shooey, mcgrew, there's likely enuf of us old farts to start our own geezers sittin' and spittin' porch. I was wondering the other day how many still remember "Weekly Reader" - was something like a quarter a year to subscribe, and one got great discounts on books.
I had a number of fine slide rules. One was from Japan, of bamboo, with extra scales; another, gotten at university incorporated titanium for claimed stability. Had an "is-was" and another more general circular one also. Not claiming I ever learned how to best or even well use any of them.
I remember getting a CRC handbook for the tables, but found using a little 6" slide-rule got me about the same accuracy when doing analytical geometry and such for freshman maths. Still one of my favorite classes; may have had a lot to do with the teacher, who, among other things, had the cachet of a glass eye courtesy of 28 missions as a waist gunner in B-17s over Europe.
That's another thing feeding into the whole schmeer of perspective and its loss. One source was all the adults who'd been involved in WWII, another that at the time so many of my classmates still read books. I think we are likely the last generation to have any real kind of multi-generational perspective; from what I can see, somebody 25-35 today has only their own bubble for most stuff; they're maybe vaguely aware of pre-computer and pre-spaceflight, for example, but it has no meaning to them. And unless they have personal connection, even something as recent as the whole Vietnam war thing is little more than a few paragraphs in a history book. Moreover, most of what they seem to know of anything outside their bubble is too often just plain wrong.
No doubt, and I read that as well. The WikiP article is worth looking at, for those interested. I was being an absolutist (mass has the property of gravitational attraction) and hope it didn't come across that I was trying to be a dick-head about it - although I may have failed in that.
There's a lot of stuff that goes into just orbital mechanics - more than I can comfortably even approach, let alone all the extra stuff that's involved in practical terms of maintaining a stable orbit against all the impediments working to counter one.
For an oddball thing, unless there's some great gotcha, I'm all in favor of eliminating the lower Van Allen belt; an extra hundred miles of altitude, while initially more expensive in boost, would go a long way to practical simplification of stuff to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there then a category below "genuinely"? Because I'm too poor to have debt.
My social security check just covers the rent on a place of ~180 sq.ft.; I get a much smaller check from SSI and a very small amount from the state - both of these last to bring me up to some level of mandated minimum, as I understand it, for a total which works out around 75% of poverty level.
I'm "good" until any of the checks stop. If Medicare goes, I die, given the events of the past year and their continuing consequences. It keeps things simple enough, even if I'm not genuine.
Don't misunderstand - I'm grateful to have as much as I have; folks such as Frosty Piss have my sympathy. Retroactive pay is good, but the possibility of losing most everything before it kicks in doesn't make things easy. And for those without even that?
The worst part of this whole mess, apart from people's losses, is that by the time elections roll around, folks won't remember, and if they do, they'll likely remember it wrongly anyway.
"the supervisory arrangements for our intelligence services need as much updating as their bugging techniques."
Hear, hear.
Well, it'd be a start.
Where I live it's more along the lines that the cops can do whatever they don't get caught doing, while the deputies can do whatever the judges don't mind and the citizens don't get hugely riled about. Law exists to furnish a list of arrest or ticket charges, carried over for arraignment, and get convicted for; good stats on that are handy come election time.
You raise some good points. The commons bit and poaching off pure R done by another country frankly hadn't occurred to me at all.
Was a time - within my own lifetime, no less - that pure research was pursued as a matter of course by any and most every country in some fashion. When cash didn't exist, there was other support - lodging, food, such supplies and gear as could be borrowed or cobbled. It wasn't just for prestige, either. For a period of time many were able to see that research for its own sake was important, even tho it might never make a dime.
Wasn't Einstein working at the patent office in Bern when he cooked up the paper on the photo-electric effect?
Nope, just somebody who enjoys the language.
I also think that sometimes phrasing things differently can carry better precision or connotation. It also may help to avoid getting stuck in the rut of, say, a 1500-word core vocabulary.
I am not in school, haven't an editor, enter no contests, and at my age don't much give a shit so long as I can get a point across or ask a question. I don't generally try to give offense; if someone takes it that's their act, not mine.
Thank you.
I don't blame your caution. For the rest, while I'm a simpleton I still try to call it as I see it. Further, like you, I too try to use more useful terms than ones which generate reflexes rather than thought.
Btw, your sig, I found Dave's instructions and essays on CSS and a bunch of other stuff helpful and informative; his glimpse into the workings of W3C are most interesting.
How does common confer meaninglessness? Also, it's not so much a matter of humiliation as it is having the fact of a mug shot being used as a social weapon.
Congrats on move from Soviet place, and welcome.
I have little truck with labels, parties, ideologies, etc. It takes most of my feeble energies trying to find and develop a picture of what happened, how things were, and how things are.
I try to start with science where appropriate, then scholars and historians (and trying to separate wheat from chaff, understand the bias of those with an axe to grind, is non-trivial), then on to paying close attention to people directly involved. The latter is why I pay particular attention to comments from those overseas and to those who've lived under significantly differing circumstance, so I thank you for that.
Over the years I've found that it is hard for those who have little history, who haven't known survivors of the various totalitarians' camps, and who haven't troubled themselves with trying to learn some about what they comment upon, to have views that are worth paying a whole lot of attention to, other than as a barometer on common thought. Half the time I'm in the same boat, and can only claim to try.
Another way to put it, if somebody comments on fire, I'll pay more attention to someone who's camped out, lived rough, or an old-school Scout, and less to a prof, shopkeeper, or admin.
Yeah, none of the people I knew who'd been in combat talked about it, other than to say it was not good, and they were glad to back and then change the subject. I never pushed it. My friends who came back from Vietnam were the same, sometimes a bit more open.
Funny, I got caught a time or two with stuff I wasn't supposed to be able to read also. All I ever got out of it was a talking-to or makework. That's one of the biggest peeves I had, and still do; even with somewhat better student-teacher ratios available post-Baby Boom, there's really not much of a concerted effort towards real flexibility for teachers or schools allowed - and from what I've seen the past fifty years the programs attempted to deal with anomalous students tend to be flawed and create problems on their own. I think we could use more of an academy and read-and-mentor approach, with lots of small-group q&a discussions. (For all the great survey numbers from parents saying education is important, I see a big gap 'twixt saying and doing - like a lot of stuff in life.)
Cheers on your impending retirement, and good luck with writing. Btw, I read time and again from quite a number of writers who've found some success that regular participation in writers' workshops has been found helpful.
I love this. I'm going to make a point to remember it and use it.
It succinctly describes what unchecked consumerism has done in ways that are difficult to dodge.
It's a-political...in points out a truth in a way that demands clear action but cannot be easily trolled.
It succinctly describes what unchecked capitalism has done in ways that are difficult to dodge.
FTFY. A large amount of the proceeds of that increased productivity went into the coffers of the minuscule percent and has largely never gone back into the general economy. You don't have to take my word for it; a bit of searching, and many of the better results available directly from such places as the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the IRS, will give you a start. Until Bush the Younger the greatest recorded shift in wealth occurred under Reagan, for instance. There was a brief expansion of the middle class peaking around the middle of the last century, but that was more a bagatelle, and a large bit of it on credit as distinct equity, temporary trends in home ownership notwithstanding.
Yes, there indeed has been increased consumerism and that credit bubble is real, but it's only a partial explanation for the question of where all the productivity went to. Moreover, the military-industrial complex while providing some jobs has been a large suck by any yardstick.
Follow the money, follow the profit, follow the profiteers. Where does the money come back out? It doesn't, in meaningful terms.
"the postal office actually allows anonymous letters"
Nope, USPS photographs every envelope.
A few years back I had recourse to read both what the U.S. and the UN had to say of torture. They were pretty close, btw. Both had exceptions granted to law-enforcement being allowed to applying measures necessary to obtain compliance. This is the loophole. The main criterion, if memory serves, is that no lasting damage be done.
You're certainly welcome to look up the stuff, and I suggest anyone do so. It's informative.
True enough and good points.
However I contend that politics is not, or perhaps should not be, about comparison shopping. One might propose politics as being a bit more than just being the pursuit of the possible but rather the betterment of the commonweal.
I don't think you know how things work.
Even for the simple exercise of free speech and assembly, the order of the day is increasingly "catch and release", often without so much as a ticket for most yet all are routinely fingerprinted and photographed. This was not uncommon all the way back to anti-war protests in the '70s and it's only gotten worse.
Will you seriously contend that exercising basic rights [once-upon-a-time] protected by the constitution makes one a bad person?
Mayhap you presume that anyone arrested is automatically guilty of something and deserving of conviction? Is someone convicted under what is later shown to be bad law also a bad person?
Well, then, carry on, Citizen, the State needs more like you.
Good points and well said.
I noted that even in July '69 the great bulk of the enthusiasm was not shared by great swathes of the populace but was also as ephemeral as a team winning the Superbowl, based upon my own observation, polls, editorials, and letters to editors. That situation hasn't gotten better. As far as I can figure people don't care.
There is to me a distinct lack of vision and imagination permeating everything unless it be an infatuation about something that will make gobs of money short-term.
I don't know who it was that remarked that leadership is the ability to follow from the front; if so, that's what we've had, and even that, badly.
When basic research is under attack at all levels, from the National Institutes down, from companies outward, I don't see a favorable outcome. Policy makers and purse holders have forgotten that applied- science, research, engineering, all stem from pure, and that basic research itself stems often as not from whimsy and speculation.
We've lost the sense of frontiers, largely to self-imposed blinders. We've lost the sense of awe and accompanying humility.
I did appreciate the linked journal entry.
The discovery I made about boredom didn't come until I was in my early thirties, when I unaccountably got humongously badly depressed (beyond the usual crippling 'normal' depression) by getting completely bored to the point of ennui. Way out for me was an examination of my ignorance. When I was little, knowing so little, my ignorance encompassed the mud puddle of all the things that I could look at and ask the typical three-year old's "why?" As I got older, ignorance became a good-sized lake; by college, maybe the size of Lake Michigan - a lake so large as to appear vast, with no distant shore in sight.
I'd forgotten that, and gotten bored. When I realized that, with all I was learning from school and reading and thinking, pondering, musing, conversations with others, my ignorance was really as large as the Universe - in which case the entirety of existence became mystery, to be marveled at, teased out bit by strand, externally and internally. A night spent trying to fall asleep under a clear starry night clinched the deal and forever removed from me boredom, although I confess to slumps from time to time when the exigencies of the world weigh heavily in some personal manner via finances, health, and the like.
Yeah, I've had a few stinkers for teachers, or at least I thought so at the time, and mos' def some badly-conceived and -written textbooks, but I've also had some good and even great ones; but by and large all through school I had enough outside reading and extra-curricular stuff going on - building things and doing stuff with a few playmates or via Scouts or NRA. Also, Dad being in the Army, there were visits here and there to see things at different bases, and a visit to an uncle at Wright-Patterson's to see the museum. (Main-gear wheel well of the B-36 was size of my bedroom, looked like.)
I feel really lucky looking back that I was somehow able to compensate on my own hook for the occasional bad patches of school, and to this day feel badly that I was unable to figure out how to communicate any of it to any useful effect with some of my classmates. It hurts me to see when somebody gets locked into a downer place; after a lifetime of crushing depression I can sympathize at least.
While I got good grades in math (until uni) I was a dunce at really grasping it enuf to be inventive about it. The various geometry courses were by far my favorites.
What got me into history a bit was growing with so many of the adults having been through WWII; that and all the various movies and documentaries, and a few places we visited in Germany, and getting into some of the unit histories from my father's war, gave me an entry. Couple that with curiosity - how do you build a submarine; how does RADAR work; what are the differences amongst center of gravity, center of buoyancy, center of effort; just how in the hell did they really dig a ditch from the Atlantic to the Pacific; the questions kept arising like unto an itch that needed scratching. A clincher was getting the Brittanica for my eighth birthday - that answered for rainy days and more.
Again, I was lucky. Too many aren't. We need adults, parents, schools, all of it, to focus on presenting young'uns with fact, history, and the mechanism of scrupulous enquiry à la critical thinking (along with the three-R's basics) as preparation for making their way into the world. Parents have to want this, else the effort will fall apart (after all, cain't have the gummint telling our kinders what's what, now can we?) And for the love of anything holy or valued or worthwhile, frickin' pay good teachers some good money and keep the gorint admin off their back.
As an aside, no accountants or lawyers in the chain of command anywhere, ever. They can make good advisors, but put 'em to run something and they can screw up a wet dream.
It's an odd thought, but capitalism can never succeed. On a personal level, one's desire to maximize profit is tempered by many aspects of reality, such that at some point getting enough is acceptable or resigned to, at least for many.
At the systemic level, however, the need for profit becomes greed - which has no bounds. A capitalistic system would destroy itself, except that it morphs into something else - plutocracy, for example, where capitalistic sub-systems are the tools for internecine warfare.
(Looking back we can see that capitalism arose from both the individual storekeeper et al and the needs of plutocrats - the birth of corporations was a marriage of convenience for both parties.)
I see no logical required successor to plutocracy, unless one subscribes to "there can be only one." The only way out for the people - for all people - would require all of the following: an over-abundance of electricity that is essentially too cheap to bother metering; robotics that includes good vision; high-function AI.
The article and those linked make some good points but their conclusion is flawed due to being based on history. What is happening now is not covered by precedent, especially when that precedent is filtered by hindsight through rose-colored glasses. Also left out was the ever-increasing size of the 'underclass'.
There will be so many workers displaced in the next few decades that there is no way in hell that enough job openings will arise or can be created even as make-work, and there are individual limits to education and re-training that far outnumber such positions. Further, there are limits as to just how many of those displaced can make up their own businesses or support themselves on some supposed creative works.
The whole "profit required by law" shtick is but one of the canards continually bruited by certain interests; it's a ploy straight from Goebbels' playbook. Getting enough people to buy in to a false "truth" is a great way to have the people do to themselves what power alone cannot.
Thanks for the good posts.
From many years back there's a poem that starts, "An Austrian army awfully arrayed, boldly by battery besieged Belgrade." Author went on through all 26 letters of English alphabet with but few really bad stretches. It's a hoot, and tells a true story to boot.
Yup, one gots innies, t'other, outies; moral of story, get 'er done.
Fellow a ways above in regard the menses pointed out the positive aspect: "although it does come with a benefit of being able to have children." I can't remember speaking with a mother who at some point doesn't nigh gush on the wonder, the thrill, the immense sense of fulfillment yadda yadda, yet I have privately (ere now) suspected it was at least also a gigantic shared myth and mythos preventing the fairer sex from running amok.
Some time back during a discussion with one of my nurses the thought arose and I said that if men were the ones who had to bear children that the species would likely die out in a generation. It didn't surprise me that she agreed. Any male survivors would be variously masochists, slaves, those whose commitment over-ran sense, or someone would invent either an artificial womb or means for another species to carry humans to term.
All of the above, of course done with tongue firmly in cheek.
A sarcasm detector that works here would be worth its weight in digitalis. Or Maalox.
Meritocracy supposes one or more traits which ought be rewarded to those having them. It used to generally refer to being smarter and more capable of doing various sophisticated things such as designing and building useful items and infrastructure and doing the research that allowed of advancement. These days the presumed, if tacit, trait is being able to make lots of money by whatever means. The further tacit supposition is that being able to make lots of money is a function of higher, more useful, intelligence.
Eugenics is two-fold: selecting for better traits by active assessment and matching of those possessing superior genetic material. The other edge is working to eliminate less desirable traits, these days perhaps by genetic screening, in aid of floating all boats. It's downside in extreme is eradication camps. Arbeit Macht Frei and all that. "Better" and "superior" are somewhat movable feasts; academia supposes people like themselves, while being good at making money is the more common yardstick although it's sometimes disguised as being smarter.
Yeah, 3 minutes would be handy, but it'd be one king-hell of a parabola. WikiP was my second hit read, but went to NASA for the clincher. Memory; aw crap, mine's about shot (in fairness it's maybe not so much the librarian's fault, as it's the waning army of file clerks not finding things.)
Shooey, mcgrew, there's likely enuf of us old farts to start our own geezers sittin' and spittin' porch. I was wondering the other day how many still remember "Weekly Reader" - was something like a quarter a year to subscribe, and one got great discounts on books.
I had a number of fine slide rules. One was from Japan, of bamboo, with extra scales; another, gotten at university incorporated titanium for claimed stability. Had an "is-was" and another more general circular one also. Not claiming I ever learned how to best or even well use any of them.
I remember getting a CRC handbook for the tables, but found using a little 6" slide-rule got me about the same accuracy when doing analytical geometry and such for freshman maths. Still one of my favorite classes; may have had a lot to do with the teacher, who, among other things, had the cachet of a glass eye courtesy of 28 missions as a waist gunner in B-17s over Europe.
That's another thing feeding into the whole schmeer of perspective and its loss. One source was all the adults who'd been involved in WWII, another that at the time so many of my classmates still read books. I think we are likely the last generation to have any real kind of multi-generational perspective; from what I can see, somebody 25-35 today has only their own bubble for most stuff; they're maybe vaguely aware of pre-computer and pre-spaceflight, for example, but it has no meaning to them. And unless they have personal connection, even something as recent as the whole Vietnam war thing is little more than a few paragraphs in a history book. Moreover, most of what they seem to know of anything outside their bubble is too often just plain wrong.
No doubt, and I read that as well. The WikiP article is worth looking at, for those interested. I was being an absolutist (mass has the property of gravitational attraction) and hope it didn't come across that I was trying to be a dick-head about it - although I may have failed in that.
There's a lot of stuff that goes into just orbital mechanics - more than I can comfortably even approach, let alone all the extra stuff that's involved in practical terms of maintaining a stable orbit against all the impediments working to counter one.
For an oddball thing, unless there's some great gotcha, I'm all in favor of eliminating the lower Van Allen belt; an extra hundred miles of altitude, while initially more expensive in boost, would go a long way to practical simplification of stuff to deal with.