Oh really? http://www.faireconomy.org/research/CEO_Pay_charts .html Would disagree. And that's just the last 15 years; decades ago, top level executives made about 13 or 14 times as much as the lowest paid worker in a company, on average.
Things have definitely changed, and the gap continues to widen. I believe anyone who has ever read history knows what happens when the gap gets too wide.
One group of anarchists crashed the party and broke a small number of windows, in a small area, and were quickly disrupted. Oddly enough, the media coverage on the entire 3 day protest was of the same few storefronts and had very little coverage of the police's absolutely heavy handed response to what was, by any reasonable measure, an incredibly peaceable assembly for any assembly of that size.
You'd have more damage done at a concert than these protestors instigated. Seriously; if 40,000 people wanted to be "assholes", seattle could EASILY have been a smoking pile of rubble. Nothing even remotely close to that occurred. Yes, traffic was blocked, access to buildings was denied... but no large amounts of property damage occurred nor was any real aggression instigated by the protestors. I agree the wikipedia entry is "gloomy"... when people simply refuse to play, gather en masse (and that's a pretty huge mass), and refuse to obey WITHOUT causing mass damage, which is exactly what happened here... and are attacked by our own police with rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, truncheons, and the like... that's pretty sad.
I don't know much about New York except that in principle it is extremely bothersome to have government agents of any level infiltrating grassroots organizations, since history shows they tend to engage in disruptive activities like causing strife and discontent within the organizations to render them ineffective, which is EXTREMELY undemocratic and against any principle of freedom I am aware of. But I strongly object to your utter misrepresentation of the events of Seattle. That was a well run protest, run over roughshod by a panicking city administration afraid to look bad in front of the "big boys", and complicit in the spin was the mainstream media in every possible way.
if you disagree, I would simply ask on what planet is it considered more newsworthy that a few windows got broken, compared to the reasons driving tens of thousands of people into the streets to protest? The reasons were nowhere to be found in the news coverage. No analysis. Nothing. You'd think, were the media independant and objective, at least a small amount of time would have been given to bring viewers up to speed on WHY this many people where this agitated.. no? This isn't a terrorist cell with a manifesto kidnapping someone for publicity. This was a mass movement.
yeah, seattle was awash in crime and violence. There was what, 40,000 people in that protest? How many windows got broken? Three?
If that was a "mob of assholes", Seattle would have been burned to the ground in response to the totalitarian mob-attack tactics their police force used. Luckily for seattle, the vast majority of the protestors are inhumanly dedicated to peaceful protest, because I tell you now if it were me taking a face full of tear gas for sitting down on a sidewalk, watching other non-violent protestors getting beaten with batons, I'd have led the rush to show the police exactly what is and is not acceptable when facing a peaceful protest.
But I guess that's why I'm not a pacifist. but it might illustrate to you why civil disobediance is, in fact, a lot better than the alternative... armed insurrection.
I think realistically it doesn't work because we do not have the data access, analysis abilities, or even the time to think everything through to that level, and we can't see the ramifications of all of our actions.
So empathy is an evolved response to that; acting with empathy promotes co-operative behaviour which IN GENERAL provides better survival characteristics than purely selfish behaviour.
What's cool, and what makes me feel better about the universe as a whole, is that "good" behaviour, co-operative behaviour, empathic behaviour actually leads to better results, in general! Pretty cool that the universe is set up that way... somehow.
There will always be room for PROMOTERS, advertising/marketing guys, that sort of thing, sure.
There is very little need for a RECORDING/PUBLISHING INDUSTRY though, because the barrier of entry to recording and publishing music has, at this point, fallen to the point where any halfway serious band or musician can buy a computer, a few mikes, and get a friend to help them mix, and it can sound just almost as good as the band that went to a $100,000 studio and hired a megabucks producer. It won't always, talent is talent, but the equipment is cheap now.
The recording industry then will, at some point, be better served focusing on the promotion side of their business. But the entire idea of a "recording industry" in the age of GarageBand and ubiquitous computing is simply laughable.
If a society of purely self interested people existed, how could they never thrive because of conflicting self interest?
If it became apparent that their conflicting apparent self interest was keeping them from thriving, as individuals, then wouldn't the self interested thing to do be to overcome this obstacle to your thriving?
That is, would it not be the purely self interested thing to do to co-operate with those around you, so they AND YOU could thrive?
This does not require empathy. This requires a clarity of thought and a level of rationality we don't often see, perhaps, but it doesn't require empathy. A social structure *could* exist without empathy, simply as a survival mechanism.
However empathy does provide a mechanism to bypass our imperfect understanding of the cause and effects around us, that's for sure. I know it's bad to kill people, without having to rationalize a chain of events in which my killing of this particular person might cause problems for me in particular later... it's just BAD.
Maybe because they find that the arabs have some very real and compelling reasons for resisting american-sponsored activities in the area once they can talk to the people there. Like, how we tend support powers that will do business with us, who are in turn plundering their own country's resources while the people of those countries see very little of the benefits.
However, would you disagree that one hallmark of geekery is a respect for well-reasoned, rational arguements when things actually matter (i.e., not in your choice of entertainment)?
it's not sound or letter. it's the substance of the idea being expressed. Sounds, sights, and letters are just the conveying media.
If I scribble something in crayon, it may not look as professional as a typewritten, double spaced letter on business stationary.. but that in no way changes the thoughts or words in use, and so judging the two by different standards is irrational unless for some reason conformity to some norm is relevant to the communication (such as, a resume for a job application).
Understood, but really it just boils down to whether you communicate the idea effectively. If your poor spelling and grammar really inhibit UNDERSTANDING, then you failed at communicating. I agree with that. Certainly it makes no sense to communicate poorly.
However, typos, incorrect word usage when the meaning of the sentance is perfectly clear, run on sentences.. whatever. If they don't inhibit understanding... that is, if you read and understand what the person is saying, not play the "well if I interpeted that literally" game... then the communication is successful and pointing out the misuse of a contraction (for example) is just a waste of time to type, and to read.
Otherwise, you force people to assume that your Asperger's syndrome is so bad that you have absolutely no ability to infer anything from context, IMHO of course;)
Understood... just using your post as a foil, no worries. The infantilism of grammar/spelling police is just a troubling thing to me and I think it's indicative of sorely misplaced priorities is all. Your post was quite good;)
I hate to be the one to bear bad news though, but some "geek identity" characteristics.. like HAVING to display intellectual superiority, even when it's meaningless to do so... is simply neurotic behaviour rooted in fundamentally low self-esteem.
Smart people understand that proper spelling and grammar are important in some cases... probably not so much in offhand, informal forum posts. Grammar nazism is much like judging a person by how they dress... I thought the hallmark of smart, rational people was supposed to be a tendency to judge based on merit, not appearance? If the substance of an idea is sound, does it matter if it's wearing shabby grammar?
I would respectfully submit that if proper spelling and grammar are really that important to you or anyone else, that you take a look at how and why you judge people. Certainly if you hold rationality to be an important trait, as most geeks do. And I would also submit than you as a person have more worth than simply acting as a grammar policeman on a forum, correcting people who don't give a shit about what you think about their spelling. Really, you all do. I'm serious. Please believe me, we'll all be better off if you do.
I think I'd have to point out the clearly radical notion that for people to reliably act in their own best interest, they would have to be perfectly rational, perfectly educated, and pretty much infallible human beings.
Any computer program that predicts that folks will act in their own best interest... indeed, that they will even know what their best interest really IS... would be completely out of touch with reality and incapable of making any useful predictions about the real world we all live in.
Predicting how people actually act would be much more useful than predicting how we should act in a hypothetical perfect world, no?
that's true, they don't. And they fight each other for the right to breed.
Interestingly enough, humans rule the earth, not lions. I wonder if those behaviour tendencies might have something to do with it... co-operative capabilities do seem to confer some interesting benefits, no?
We live in a world where one of the greatest scientific minds of our generation would, in any other generation, have died years ago. That may illustrate that "survival of the fittest" means something a little different in our society.
Someone can start out in quite a hole in life... and many never rise out. That's too bad, and I agree there is a limit to how far we need to go to help them. But then again, purely pragmatically, if you don't help them, you pay another way in crime, or in another generation being spawned without those opportunities/without the education they need, and it perpetuates itself.
at least attempting to empower people, even people who do not necessarily "deserve" it, has direct benefit to society as well as some waste. Ignoring them really doesn't help though, and building prisons and caring for the children of those who do not care for them on their own isn't cheap either.
I'm not sure how you think punk has "thrived" by "going against the mainstream". It did, until it thrived enough to make major interests interested. Then, post-Green day, we got the whole emo scene, which is basically "corporate punk" targetted at the teens that don't want to wear the country or urban uniforms and instead identify with angst ridden rockers.
And it sells very well. Kids very easily accept corporations telling them what is cool, as long as the corporation says the right things and has the right imagery in their ads. Look at skate culture.. used to be a bunch of small companies in garages making boards, and small runs of shoes/t-shirts. Now, they are all "real companies" and Nike, of all people, are doing very well in the clothing market, targetting this demographic.
Not to say that indie music doesn't have an impact. But all sub cultures that achieve some critical mass are gobbled up by big business, chewed up, and turned into a soulless pile of marketing hype and manufactured images. As soon as it becomes profitable enough to be worth it, it's inevitable. And then you wait for the "next thing" to come along, and that gets gobbled up.. and so on, and so on.
I think your glasses are pretty rose colored if your think the corps have "failed" to subvert ANY counter culture that has achieved any sufficiently large number of adherants.
Not Necessarily. You can choose to rotate out your energy, spinning instead of flying backwards, for example.
Also, how grounded your target is has a very strong effect. If your target is well rooted and proficient, you could throw yourself back without doing anything to them. If your target is off balance, you could literally make them JUMP and impart their own energy into the movement; for instance, many martial arts moves are basically techniques for making your opponent do what you want them to do with their OWN energy, not yours. If you, for example, push someone back a little, they will generally try to move forward to counterbalance (unless they are trained not to).. and if you jerk them forward at THAT moment, they in effect end up jumping into the move and you can hurl someone across the room without using much energy of your own to do it... You literally guide them into throwing themselves across the room.
Likewise it's POSSIBLE.. though not very easy... to make someone basically jump back into a wall by kicking them just right, at the right time, in the right place....
It's difficult, but not impossible. If you've ever taken a martial art for any length of time, you probably know a few tricks that would allow you to do this with little danger of overbalancing yourself, especially if your opponent is at all off balance or "unrooted". Most of the time in movies, the people blasting other people across the room are supposed to be very good fighters of some kind.
Likewise a martial artist may also know tricks that allow them to absorb seemingly impossible amounts of energy into the ground, or redirect energy back at the incoming force, and leave them standing upright.
You can do an awful lot with proper posture, knowledge, and composure. Try Tai Chi for awhile;)
This isn't a very good test. There are thousands of conceptions of "God" out there. It is eminently reasonable to say that we do not know if there is any kind of supreme being or power or unifiying force of some sort of spiritual nature out there, simply because it takes so many possible forms that how could you rule them all out?
For instance, I'm pretty positive there is no big bearded white guy hanging out around some pearly gates. I'm most definitely not a believer in a God as presented by Christians, Greeks, or any other personified form of a "God" that I am aware of.
But I'm not at all as confident in our 'knowledge' that the universe itself is not concious, or unified, or directed in some way. Since we do not even understand what conciousness is yet, it would quite arrogant to say anything with certainty about that; I don't see any evidence yet that you have to have a small pile of meat in a skull in order to be "concious". And this possible 'concious universe' could very well be something that all of these religions have touched on, labelled "God", and are interpeting in some peculiar way. Or, I could be on totally the wrong track, but that does not mean that there is NO force, power, or entity in the universe sufficiently powerful, connected, whatever to be called "God", or A god.
This would be an agnostic point of view; we DO NOT HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE to know with reason. We can believe or not believe, but what you choose to believe or not believe is simply a limitation of your own imagination; there is ALWAYS an aspect or a possibility that you couldn't have even thought of that could be a reasonable path to reasonable belief in SOMETHING that could be called "God".
That said, "Santa", "faeries", and other mythological/literary figures are distinct, discreet, fairly well defined entities that are very easy to believe or not to believe.
I meant to say reinvesting is not PROFIT.. of course it's income, but apparently if we do something like buy additional inventory, it's not profit until we sell it. Currently, it's profit when we pay for it, because it increases the value of the company.
Not sure exactly why that changes if you're a corp, but who am I to argue?
I'm in the same boat, and we're a Partnership LLC (I assume you're LLC, or Sole Proprietor).
Since we are in such a rapid growth cycle, we have been advised this year by our accountant, due for clearance by our lawyer, to become an actual corporation. Then the corporation pays taxes on profit, and re-investing in the business is NOT income.
Once growth levels out it's moot either way, but you might want to ask a tax attorney or accountant about this. Looks like it should save us about half of our current tax burden which is currently the money we reinvest in our business vs taking home ourselves, that is currently taxed as profit.
I'm curious, how is anything other than a secular society supposed to have "absolute moral values", unless all members of that society follow the same dogmatic paradigm?
Even in, say, a religious society, not all members ascribe to the dominant religion. So their moral choices are not dictated by "divine right" either, you're still free to disregard whatever you think you can get away with, and I see no difference, except the nature of the authority creating the laws.
And morality is not dictated by authority in the first place. Punishment and legality are dictated by authority, but morality can never be. Your morality is obviously influenced by your society, even heavily so, but it is not dictated by society. Even if you believe in the same higher power that DID bestow morality, the differences in personal interpetations of what that morality really means various from member to member in the society.
Now I"m confused, but I'm interested in hearing more about this stance you have.
There is nothing rational about organized religion. Now you could make an arguement that Rationality is not the be all and end all of existence, and in fact it's quite limited and I would agree with that. But you cannot possibly argue that there is any such thing as a rational, organized religion. The entire concept is irrational.
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Oh really? http://www.faireconomy.org/research/CEO_Pay_charts .html Would disagree. And that's just the last 15 years; decades ago, top level executives made about 13 or 14 times as much as the lowest paid worker in a company, on average.
Things have definitely changed, and the gap continues to widen. I believe anyone who has ever read history knows what happens when the gap gets too wide.
One group of anarchists crashed the party and broke a small number of windows, in a small area, and were quickly disrupted. Oddly enough, the media coverage on the entire 3 day protest was of the same few storefronts and had very little coverage of the police's absolutely heavy handed response to what was, by any reasonable measure, an incredibly peaceable assembly for any assembly of that size.
You'd have more damage done at a concert than these protestors instigated. Seriously; if 40,000 people wanted to be "assholes", seattle could EASILY have been a smoking pile of rubble. Nothing even remotely close to that occurred. Yes, traffic was blocked, access to buildings was denied... but no large amounts of property damage occurred nor was any real aggression instigated by the protestors. I agree the wikipedia entry is "gloomy"... when people simply refuse to play, gather en masse (and that's a pretty huge mass), and refuse to obey WITHOUT causing mass damage, which is exactly what happened here... and are attacked by our own police with rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, truncheons, and the like... that's pretty sad.
I don't know much about New York except that in principle it is extremely bothersome to have government agents of any level infiltrating grassroots organizations, since history shows they tend to engage in disruptive activities like causing strife and discontent within the organizations to render them ineffective, which is EXTREMELY undemocratic and against any principle of freedom I am aware of. But I strongly object to your utter misrepresentation of the events of Seattle. That was a well run protest, run over roughshod by a panicking city administration afraid to look bad in front of the "big boys", and complicit in the spin was the mainstream media in every possible way.
if you disagree, I would simply ask on what planet is it considered more newsworthy that a few windows got broken, compared to the reasons driving tens of thousands of people into the streets to protest? The reasons were nowhere to be found in the news coverage. No analysis. Nothing. You'd think, were the media independant and objective, at least a small amount of time would have been given to bring viewers up to speed on WHY this many people where this agitated.. no? This isn't a terrorist cell with a manifesto kidnapping someone for publicity. This was a mass movement.
yeah, seattle was awash in crime and violence. There was what, 40,000 people in that protest? How many windows got broken? Three?
If that was a "mob of assholes", Seattle would have been burned to the ground in response to the totalitarian mob-attack tactics their police force used. Luckily for seattle, the vast majority of the protestors are inhumanly dedicated to peaceful protest, because I tell you now if it were me taking a face full of tear gas for sitting down on a sidewalk, watching other non-violent protestors getting beaten with batons, I'd have led the rush to show the police exactly what is and is not acceptable when facing a peaceful protest.
But I guess that's why I'm not a pacifist. but it might illustrate to you why civil disobediance is, in fact, a lot better than the alternative... armed insurrection.
I think realistically it doesn't work because we do not have the data access, analysis abilities, or even the time to think everything through to that level, and we can't see the ramifications of all of our actions.
So empathy is an evolved response to that; acting with empathy promotes co-operative behaviour which IN GENERAL provides better survival characteristics than purely selfish behaviour.
What's cool, and what makes me feel better about the universe as a whole, is that "good" behaviour, co-operative behaviour, empathic behaviour actually leads to better results, in general! Pretty cool that the universe is set up that way... somehow.
There will always be room for PROMOTERS, advertising/marketing guys, that sort of thing, sure.
There is very little need for a RECORDING/PUBLISHING INDUSTRY though, because the barrier of entry to recording and publishing music has, at this point, fallen to the point where any halfway serious band or musician can buy a computer, a few mikes, and get a friend to help them mix, and it can sound just almost as good as the band that went to a $100,000 studio and hired a megabucks producer. It won't always, talent is talent, but the equipment is cheap now.
The recording industry then will, at some point, be better served focusing on the promotion side of their business. But the entire idea of a "recording industry" in the age of GarageBand and ubiquitous computing is simply laughable.
One problem with your arguement:
;)
If a society of purely self interested people existed, how could they never thrive because of conflicting self interest?
If it became apparent that their conflicting apparent self interest was keeping them from thriving, as individuals, then wouldn't the self interested thing to do be to overcome this obstacle to your thriving?
That is, would it not be the purely self interested thing to do to co-operate with those around you, so they AND YOU could thrive?
This does not require empathy. This requires a clarity of thought and a level of rationality we don't often see, perhaps, but it doesn't require empathy. A social structure *could* exist without empathy, simply as a survival mechanism.
However empathy does provide a mechanism to bypass our imperfect understanding of the cause and effects around us, that's for sure. I know it's bad to kill people, without having to rationalize a chain of events in which my killing of this particular person might cause problems for me in particular later... it's just BAD.
it's a shortcut.
Theory in progress, chip away if you wish
Maybe because they find that the arabs have some very real and compelling reasons for resisting american-sponsored activities in the area once they can talk to the people there. Like, how we tend support powers that will do business with us, who are in turn plundering their own country's resources while the people of those countries see very little of the benefits.
Just a guess.
I never claimed we were vulcans.
However, would you disagree that one hallmark of geekery is a respect for well-reasoned, rational arguements when things actually matter (i.e., not in your choice of entertainment)?
it's not sound or letter. it's the substance of the idea being expressed. Sounds, sights, and letters are just the conveying media.
If I scribble something in crayon, it may not look as professional as a typewritten, double spaced letter on business stationary.. but that in no way changes the thoughts or words in use, and so judging the two by different standards is irrational unless for some reason conformity to some norm is relevant to the communication (such as, a resume for a job application).
Understood, but really it just boils down to whether you communicate the idea effectively. If your poor spelling and grammar really inhibit UNDERSTANDING, then you failed at communicating. I agree with that. Certainly it makes no sense to communicate poorly.
;)
However, typos, incorrect word usage when the meaning of the sentance is perfectly clear, run on sentences.. whatever. If they don't inhibit understanding... that is, if you read and understand what the person is saying, not play the "well if I interpeted that literally" game... then the communication is successful and pointing out the misuse of a contraction (for example) is just a waste of time to type, and to read.
Otherwise, you force people to assume that your Asperger's syndrome is so bad that you have absolutely no ability to infer anything from context, IMHO of course
Understood... just using your post as a foil, no worries. The infantilism of grammar/spelling police is just a troubling thing to me and I think it's indicative of sorely misplaced priorities is all. Your post was quite good ;)
Wow, you really thought about that.
I hate to be the one to bear bad news though, but some "geek identity" characteristics.. like HAVING to display intellectual superiority, even when it's meaningless to do so... is simply neurotic behaviour rooted in fundamentally low self-esteem.
Smart people understand that proper spelling and grammar are important in some cases... probably not so much in offhand, informal forum posts. Grammar nazism is much like judging a person by how they dress... I thought the hallmark of smart, rational people was supposed to be a tendency to judge based on merit, not appearance? If the substance of an idea is sound, does it matter if it's wearing shabby grammar?
I would respectfully submit that if proper spelling and grammar are really that important to you or anyone else, that you take a look at how and why you judge people. Certainly if you hold rationality to be an important trait, as most geeks do. And I would also submit than you as a person have more worth than simply acting as a grammar policeman on a forum, correcting people who don't give a shit about what you think about their spelling. Really, you all do. I'm serious. Please believe me, we'll all be better off if you do.
I think I'd have to point out the clearly radical notion that for people to reliably act in their own best interest, they would have to be perfectly rational, perfectly educated, and pretty much infallible human beings.
Any computer program that predicts that folks will act in their own best interest... indeed, that they will even know what their best interest really IS... would be completely out of touch with reality and incapable of making any useful predictions about the real world we all live in.
Predicting how people actually act would be much more useful than predicting how we should act in a hypothetical perfect world, no?
Isn't that kind of the point of game theory?
that's true, they don't. And they fight each other for the right to breed.
Interestingly enough, humans rule the earth, not lions. I wonder if those behaviour tendencies might have something to do with it... co-operative capabilities do seem to confer some interesting benefits, no?
We live in a world where one of the greatest scientific minds of our generation would, in any other generation, have died years ago. That may illustrate that "survival of the fittest" means something a little different in our society.
Someone can start out in quite a hole in life... and many never rise out. That's too bad, and I agree there is a limit to how far we need to go to help them. But then again, purely pragmatically, if you don't help them, you pay another way in crime, or in another generation being spawned without those opportunities/without the education they need, and it perpetuates itself.
at least attempting to empower people, even people who do not necessarily "deserve" it, has direct benefit to society as well as some waste. Ignoring them really doesn't help though, and building prisons and caring for the children of those who do not care for them on their own isn't cheap either.
Hell, Cake put it pretty clearly. "Excess Ain't Rebellion... You're buying what they're selling..."
Let me get a black belt and I'll get back to you ;)
I'm not sure how you think punk has "thrived" by "going against the mainstream". It did, until it thrived enough to make major interests interested. Then, post-Green day, we got the whole emo scene, which is basically "corporate punk" targetted at the teens that don't want to wear the country or urban uniforms and instead identify with angst ridden rockers.
And it sells very well. Kids very easily accept corporations telling them what is cool, as long as the corporation says the right things and has the right imagery in their ads. Look at skate culture.. used to be a bunch of small companies in garages making boards, and small runs of shoes/t-shirts. Now, they are all "real companies" and Nike, of all people, are doing very well in the clothing market, targetting this demographic.
Not to say that indie music doesn't have an impact. But all sub cultures that achieve some critical mass are gobbled up by big business, chewed up, and turned into a soulless pile of marketing hype and manufactured images. As soon as it becomes profitable enough to be worth it, it's inevitable. And then you wait for the "next thing" to come along, and that gets gobbled up.. and so on, and so on.
I think your glasses are pretty rose colored if your think the corps have "failed" to subvert ANY counter culture that has achieved any sufficiently large number of adherants.
Push off of a wall sometime. if you push slightly angled, you don't have to go anywhere.
Not Necessarily. You can choose to rotate out your energy, spinning instead of flying backwards, for example.
Also, how grounded your target is has a very strong effect. If your target is well rooted and proficient, you could throw yourself back without doing anything to them. If your target is off balance, you could literally make them JUMP and impart their own energy into the movement; for instance, many martial arts moves are basically techniques for making your opponent do what you want them to do with their OWN energy, not yours. If you, for example, push someone back a little, they will generally try to move forward to counterbalance (unless they are trained not to).. and if you jerk them forward at THAT moment, they in effect end up jumping into the move and you can hurl someone across the room without using much energy of your own to do it... You literally guide them into throwing themselves across the room.
Likewise it's POSSIBLE.. though not very easy... to make someone basically jump back into a wall by kicking them just right, at the right time, in the right place....
It's difficult, but not impossible. If you've ever taken a martial art for any length of time, you probably know a few tricks that would allow you to do this with little danger of overbalancing yourself, especially if your opponent is at all off balance or "unrooted". Most of the time in movies, the people blasting other people across the room are supposed to be very good fighters of some kind.
;)
Likewise a martial artist may also know tricks that allow them to absorb seemingly impossible amounts of energy into the ground, or redirect energy back at the incoming force, and leave them standing upright.
You can do an awful lot with proper posture, knowledge, and composure. Try Tai Chi for awhile
This isn't a very good test. There are thousands of conceptions of "God" out there. It is eminently reasonable to say that we do not know if there is any kind of supreme being or power or unifiying force of some sort of spiritual nature out there, simply because it takes so many possible forms that how could you rule them all out?
For instance, I'm pretty positive there is no big bearded white guy hanging out around some pearly gates. I'm most definitely not a believer in a God as presented by Christians, Greeks, or any other personified form of a "God" that I am aware of.
But I'm not at all as confident in our 'knowledge' that the universe itself is not concious, or unified, or directed in some way. Since we do not even understand what conciousness is yet, it would quite arrogant to say anything with certainty about that; I don't see any evidence yet that you have to have a small pile of meat in a skull in order to be "concious". And this possible 'concious universe' could very well be something that all of these religions have touched on, labelled "God", and are interpeting in some peculiar way. Or, I could be on totally the wrong track, but that does not mean that there is NO force, power, or entity in the universe sufficiently powerful, connected, whatever to be called "God", or A god.
This would be an agnostic point of view; we DO NOT HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE to know with reason. We can believe or not believe, but what you choose to believe or not believe is simply a limitation of your own imagination; there is ALWAYS an aspect or a possibility that you couldn't have even thought of that could be a reasonable path to reasonable belief in SOMETHING that could be called "God".
That said, "Santa", "faeries", and other mythological/literary figures are distinct, discreet, fairly well defined entities that are very easy to believe or not to believe.
I meant to say reinvesting is not PROFIT.. of course it's income, but apparently if we do something like buy additional inventory, it's not profit until we sell it. Currently, it's profit when we pay for it, because it increases the value of the company.
Not sure exactly why that changes if you're a corp, but who am I to argue?
I'm in the same boat, and we're a Partnership LLC (I assume you're LLC, or Sole Proprietor).
Since we are in such a rapid growth cycle, we have been advised this year by our accountant, due for clearance by our lawyer, to become an actual corporation. Then the corporation pays taxes on profit, and re-investing in the business is NOT income.
Once growth levels out it's moot either way, but you might want to ask a tax attorney or accountant about this. Looks like it should save us about half of our current tax burden which is currently the money we reinvest in our business vs taking home ourselves, that is currently taxed as profit.
And I'm with you.. it HURTS.
I'm curious, how is anything other than a secular society supposed to have "absolute moral values", unless all members of that society follow the same dogmatic paradigm?
Even in, say, a religious society, not all members ascribe to the dominant religion. So their moral choices are not dictated by "divine right" either, you're still free to disregard whatever you think you can get away with, and I see no difference, except the nature of the authority creating the laws.
And morality is not dictated by authority in the first place. Punishment and legality are dictated by authority, but morality can never be. Your morality is obviously influenced by your society, even heavily so, but it is not dictated by society. Even if you believe in the same higher power that DID bestow morality, the differences in personal interpetations of what that morality really means various from member to member in the society.
Now I"m confused, but I'm interested in hearing more about this stance you have.
There is nothing rational about organized religion. Now you could make an arguement that Rationality is not the be all and end all of existence, and in fact it's quite limited and I would agree with that. But you cannot possibly argue that there is any such thing as a rational, organized religion. The entire concept is irrational.