The monarchy is hardly in the same league as fanatical Christianity. The monarch does a nice job of promoting British business and keeping the rich and powerful neutralized.
I cant see the cloud supplying user written code for all the hardware connected to my pc. Software controlled shortwave radio, Sony walkman, GPS, telescope, three cameras, webcam security recorder, not to mention printers scanners disks optical media writers.
The cloud may be fine for an office PC but its going to be years before it becomes the natural place to put all those little applications that talk to hardware. And another thing, Photoshop on 20Mb RAW picture files, maybe, nonlinear editing of video files - I don't think so.
The cloud is just an additional way of deploying office applications and does not constitute the full spectrum of uses to which computing power can be applied.
The lack of belief in God forces you to take responsibility for your own decisions often based upon the collected wisdom of religions. Interestingly Confucianism and Buddhism are religions of this nature and lack a god. There are apparently several billion people who by your reasoning will always lie in a court of law. Fortunately there is more to humanity than just the people of the book and their god.
I am happy to use the predictive power of evolutionary theory to work out what global warming will do to the biosphere. It is insufficient for me to wait for a magical diktat from the leaders of the churches of the people of the book - to pronounce their reinterpretation of that book to tell me how to act. It may be only a temporary tide in human affairs but the scientific method does seem to be the only philosophy which is likely to lead to the continuation of the human race.
Whether its a good idea to continue with human civilization may well be a moot point.
I am not so sure. The vinyl era that ended in the 80' was replaced by the CD era and it was noticeable at the time that the CD recordings sounded terrible when played on the music reproduction systems of the time. They dont sound too bad now and we have the shift to digitaly compressed recordings which also sound awfull. What is noticeable is that the material on the recordings and the reproduction chain changes as the engineers and public eek out the best match between the capability of the chain and the style of the music. You dont get much change in the soundfield from very high quality reproduction chains in any era and the goal of reconstructing the soundstage is only ever achieved by specialist equipment. Everything else is affected by the fashion of the time. I cannot be alone for example in finding the sound of classical recordings to be universally awfull because they mostly do not seek to reproduce the sound you hear at a concert but by multimike techniques reproduce each instrument with total fidelity as if it were being recorded in an anechoic chamber. MP3's of sampled dance music sound excellent in earbuds played on a walkman/ipod because that is how they are meant to be listened to - the sound is almost the same when replicated in a club, the only difference being that the Bass vibrates the whole of your body instead of just your eardrums.
So music of an era sounds best when being played from a recorded source of the era through the reproduction chain of the era. Having said that it is possible to emulate some of these things now.
I seem to remember that a legal view of the goodness or badness of an action takes into account the intent of the perpetrator. So if you accidentally destroy the world you can get away with it but if you deliberately spit on my sandwich in order to destroy its value to me then you go to jail. The law is not just a list of fixed rules to refine the definition of, its also about whether a court can be persuaded that you are an asshat or not. At least this is true in the UK legal system which does not have a constitution to distract it.
Its also ironic that people are still dying of starvation and easily treatable diseases all over the world but this does not come in for the righteous anger of these religious zealots. I am appalled by their double standards.
Chicken and egg problem, we know so little about stem cells that I do not know whether it is possible to make stem cells available by another route. If we discover that it is possible to remove this method of acquiring cells for research then the method can be stopped at a later date removing the religious objection.
On another front it is clear that religious intervention in science has severely limited the progress of some societies on Earth. Religion does change its interpretation of what the fundamental rules of living should be as societies change and science provides more accurate knowledge about the world but it often takes many lifetimes for this adjustment to occur.
All societies are facing severe threats from the overpopulation of the world, resource shortages, climate change and poverty. Scientific progress is the only source of solutions to these problems unless we are prepared to allow the problems to multiply to the point where a dramatic population crash occurs. We are at a crossroads, the choice is in our hands, use our creativity and intelligence to take charge of our own destiny or allow our environment to expell us. 2000 year old books prefer the second solution, by default they select the lemmings fate of allowing the environment to kill us off.
Pick you side, I know which one I find more human.
Actually sunlight is blue, the sun looks bluish in space. Its only because the blue frequencies are scattered across the sky that the sun looks yellow on the ground. Bizarre but true.
This is the strongest reason for casting the authors guild into the darkest depth of hell. There is a tremendous problem getting books in audio format for blind people. The Kindle breaks that barrier. The authors guild are not just greedy they also want to discriminate against blind people. They are well on their way to achieving the status of bank executives.
I'm not sure that western culture can argue from a position of strength at the moment, seeing as most of our advertising revenue is spent on persuading people to take up lifestyle brands. I'm not sure that we have many individuals left under the age of 40. I'm throwing this out as a challenge of course, but I'm seeing huge pressure for rather drone like conformity being expressed in politics as well as the commercial sphere.
It doesn't take very many creative types to grab hold of the rudder and steer the ship - just look at the impact of the iPhone - or the Walkman cassette player for that matter from another society formerly regarded as too conformist to change the world. The creatives in China have had access to a western lifestyle for more than a decade now and I predict that its not going to be long before interesting new things start flooding out in a very visible way.
thanks for fleshing out my rather ill tempered argument. I would say that evolution appears to fit the facts we know now but needs a lot more work to understand completely how life changes over time. This does not mean that it has to be discarded because we have an alternate model - a model that essentially says it may never be modified by empirical discovery because that would deny "faith".
It is a major failing of Religion that the churches that maintain its sophisticated (and often utilitarian) manipulation of human behavior are too slow to respond with modifications that fit circumstances that people find themselves living in. A typical example of this is the realization that the finite resources of the earth would be better managed if human population were not allowed to grow without restriction but some religions are unable to interpret this information in a utilitarian way because they are stuck with a large set of interlinked views predicated on the sanctity of human life that cannot be disentangled from a few rules about how to live that ensure endless population growth.
Utter tosh, both the article and this comment. We refer to Newtonian mechanics and Einsteinian space time so why not Darwinian Evolution. As for creationism, its just another religious ideology and you either fight its proponents to the death or you let them kill you. Politics is not civilized and grown up and we still settle political (read religious) differences with war. Darwinian evolution does not need proof in the terms offered by this post because it is a theory not a law. We use it because its predictions work. Find a better theory and we will adopt it, otherwise shut the F up.
I agree with a lot of what you say about modern education but I entreat you against getting too excited about immigrants, because I am utterly certain that we will see lynch mobs on the streets before this decade ends. I wouldn't want to be pushing that button too hard just at the moment, theres plenty of people lining up genocidal hatred to do it and personally I wouldn't want my coherent political views to get tarred with their agenda.
If it was the US governments fault that the financial system has collapsed do we also take it that the global financial systems collapse is due to all the other governments around the world making the same error? I agree that they all made errors but the error was not just being a government it was artificially sustaining a false boom after 9/11. I am afraid the bad guys have succeeded in badly hurting us because we propped up something unsustainable, when if they had not attacked us we would have had the guts to let this bubble pop half a decade ago. The motivation as ever was well intentioned but unwise, the road to hell is paved with good intention as ever. Welcome to hell.
I believe that you are correctly expressing what a third option could be. We could let the banks go bust and destroy all accumulated wealth.
You would of course destroy everyones life savings and that means everyones pensions, including those who have already retired. I think it would lead to a degree of social unrest but rapid deployment of the army in all population centers should take care of that.
There is a problem following this however which is that no financial institution currently existing would be able to trade again. Money itself would become worthless and unusable. We would rapidly become a barter society with no ability to invest or to borrow against future earnings. In short civilization itself will collapse. I don't see how that can work any better than either option one or two.
Totaly agree with your assesment, unless we all want to live in caves the only short term solution to the financial crisis is for the government to spend like crazy since neither the population or investors are going to. I dont like seeing my pension savings being turned into confetti by zero interest rates and the prospect of currency collapse as a result of national debt but if the only source of spending in the economy to replace credit card debt is the government then thats what has to happen. No one seems to have woken up yet, the entire global financial system has collapsed and every single company in the world is going bust fast because of demand collapse. The Chinese are going bust because we aint buying and there are millions of people in the West who are about to get turfed out on the street. Its insane and I havent heard one single theoretical proposition except government spending on how to stop 50 million unemployed worldwide, decades of deflation (thats pay cuts every year if you happen to have a job), zero investment, riots in the streets, lynch mobs against bankers etc. I can remember the right wing taking the piss out of the Japanese for their lost decade of deflation only a year ago on this bulletin board - and now it is the American right wing who think that doing nothing is going to work out just fine. Wake up people! At least give us a thought through proposal on what else we can do other than letting the government replace the missing personal debt that used to run the economy.
Except that the government strategy document was leaked some time ago. It says that disadvantaged groups like EU citizens working in the UK and children (Students) were to be bullied into accepting the ID cards so that when the time came to chip the population their resistance will have been broken down. Disgusting really, George Orwell would be proud of them.
The people of Ireland are easy to push around. Apart from following a Deity on Earth religion the population are predominantly young people. A lot of "progressive" legislation that would face resistance in the rest of Europe is tried out on them. Its one of the most oppressive countries in Europe.
Let me get this right. Anything that a government introduces is necessarily evil therefore any idea that the government promotes is evil.
Presumably we are better off listening to the Bernard Madeoffs of this world and their ilk who made a killing out of trading worthless financial instruments that have driven the world into a global recession.
You anti government haters are ignorant fools who are more interested in a theoretical political stance than in solving any pragmatic problem. I seem to recall spending the first 40 years of my life fighting a cold war against people with a similar world view, they were the communists of the Soviet Union.
Take your anti-government political stance and tell the millions of unemployed people around the world that private industry had their interests in mind when the people running the show took their cut of the profits and retired off of them.
Most of the problems in your political system are because the people who run it are corrupted by lobbyists and private business money. It it isn't them then it is the Church wanting to apply their ancient anti-humanist moral codes onto the population. That doesn't necessarily mean that all government interventions are evil, some of them are influenced by business, science and popular consensus.
Argue about whether global warming is due to burning fossil fuels, argue about how institutions like the government try and deal with such problems. But don't tell me that everything that government does is evil because you are wasting everybodys time displaying your own personal ideological blindness.
Global warming doesn't really bother me because I am going to be dead before it matters. Personally I don't see enough consensus over the importance of the environment to believe that either the biosystem or humanity will survive much longer. Just like bugs in a jar humanity will breed to the point where the population collapses, at that point technology will also collapse and humanity will cease to be of any interest. I hope you are young enough to enjoy the end of hot and cold running water as a personal experience, it might do you some good.
Easy for you to say awash with wealth and material resources. Looks a bit more of a problem when you try to imagine the other 80% of the world consuming at the rate you do.
Good thing is that you still have a leadership position that could influence the future, though seeing as the Chinese will shortly own you that wont be much for much longer.
I'm no professional pessimist but even I can see the level of human Sh1t rising around me in overcrowded southern England. Endless growth is possible but I don't want to live in a place where it seems like a good idea. Our capacity to create an artificial environment does not mean I want to live in it.
I just looked, there are no accounts, there is no traceable information except for whatever the hosting server might cache in terms of Ip addresses. The police did the right thing, they may be able to get the ip address from the server log by cross referencing the posting time.
I hope the police acted within the law. But I have every sympathy for their action. The court case in question was about a group of people who harassed individuals over a period of many years in violent and intimidating ways. There was every possibility that the threats would spill over into death or injury at any time.
The perpetrators got up to 8 years in jail for these activities so I am not at all surprised that the police have taken a keen interest in the publication of the judges address on an underground political activism bulletin board. If the pattern is followed the judge can expect bloody hypodermic needles in his post and excrement through his letter box for many years to come. Animal liberation groups are watched by the same law enforcement agencies as international political terrorists because they have used terrorist tactics like bombs in the past.
The animal liberation front people are sick and very dangerous, not to mention misguided at the end of the day - they don't seem to have any interest in millions of animals subjected to factory farming but attack people doing medical research who experiment on a few dozen animals.
If I was Indymedia I would entrap the poster of the threat and help the people of the country get a very nasty antisocial person locked up before they hurt anyone. I have no sympathy for Indymedia, if they can be shown to be colluding with the animal liberation front people then they should go to jail as well and good riddance. Just because you grok computers does not give you the right to enable terrorists to hurt and maim ordinary citizens going about their lawful business. Screw the stupid animals, people come first.
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The monarchy is hardly in the same league as fanatical Christianity. The monarch does a nice job of promoting British business and keeping the rich and powerful neutralized.
I cant see the cloud supplying user written code for all the hardware connected to my pc. Software controlled shortwave radio, Sony walkman, GPS, telescope, three cameras, webcam security recorder, not to mention printers scanners disks optical media writers.
The cloud may be fine for an office PC but its going to be years before it becomes the natural place to put all those little applications that talk to hardware. And another thing, Photoshop on 20Mb RAW picture files, maybe, nonlinear editing of video files - I don't think so.
The cloud is just an additional way of deploying office applications and does not constitute the full spectrum of uses to which computing power can be applied.
The lack of belief in God forces you to take responsibility for your own decisions often based upon the collected wisdom of religions. Interestingly Confucianism and Buddhism are religions of this nature and lack a god. There are apparently several billion people who by your reasoning will always lie in a court of law. Fortunately there is more to humanity than just the people of the book and their god.
I am happy to use the predictive power of evolutionary theory to work out what global warming will do to the biosphere. It is insufficient for me to wait for a magical diktat from the leaders of the churches of the people of the book - to pronounce their reinterpretation of that book to tell me how to act. It may be only a temporary tide in human affairs but the scientific method does seem to be the only philosophy which is likely to lead to the continuation of the human race.
Whether its a good idea to continue with human civilization may well be a moot point.
Precisely the philosophy of the Taliban. I'm just surprised to find it so popular in Texas.
I am not so sure. The vinyl era that ended in the 80' was replaced by the CD era and it was noticeable at the time that the CD recordings sounded terrible when played on the music reproduction systems of the time. They dont sound too bad now and we have the shift to digitaly compressed recordings which also sound awfull.
What is noticeable is that the material on the recordings and the reproduction chain changes as the engineers and public eek out the best match between the capability of the chain and the style of the music. You dont get much change in the soundfield from very high quality reproduction chains in any era and the goal of reconstructing the soundstage is only ever achieved by specialist equipment. Everything else is affected by the fashion of the time. I cannot be alone for example in finding the sound of classical recordings to be universally awfull because they mostly do not seek to reproduce the sound you hear at a concert but by multimike techniques reproduce each instrument with total fidelity as if it were being recorded in an anechoic chamber. MP3's of sampled dance music sound excellent in earbuds played on a walkman/ipod because that is how they are meant to be listened to - the sound is almost the same when replicated in a club, the only difference being that the Bass vibrates the whole of your body instead of just your eardrums.
So music of an era sounds best when being played from a recorded source of the era through the reproduction chain of the era. Having said that it is possible to emulate some of these things now.
I seem to remember that a legal view of the goodness or badness of an action takes into account the intent of the perpetrator. So if you accidentally destroy the world you can get away with it but if you deliberately spit on my sandwich in order to destroy its value to me then you go to jail. The law is not just a list of fixed rules to refine the definition of, its also about whether a court can be persuaded that you are an asshat or not. At least this is true in the UK legal system which does not have a constitution to distract it.
Its also ironic that people are still dying of starvation and easily treatable diseases all over the world but this does not come in for the righteous anger of these religious zealots. I am appalled by their double standards.
Chicken and egg problem, we know so little about stem cells that I do not know whether it is possible to make stem cells available by another route. If we discover that it is possible to remove this method of acquiring cells for research then the method can be stopped at a later date removing the religious objection.
On another front it is clear that religious intervention in science has severely limited the progress of some societies on Earth. Religion does change its interpretation of what the fundamental rules of living should be as societies change and science provides more accurate knowledge about the world but it often takes many lifetimes for this adjustment to occur.
All societies are facing severe threats from the overpopulation of the world, resource shortages, climate change and poverty. Scientific progress is the only source of solutions to these problems unless we are prepared to allow the problems to multiply to the point where a dramatic population crash occurs. We are at a crossroads, the choice is in our hands, use our creativity and intelligence to take charge of our own destiny or allow our environment to expell us. 2000 year old books prefer the second solution, by default they select the lemmings fate of allowing the environment to kill us off.
Pick you side, I know which one I find more human.
Actually sunlight is blue, the sun looks bluish in space. Its only because the blue frequencies are scattered across the sky that the sun looks yellow on the ground. Bizarre but true.
I for one welcome our new overlords - who at least recognize that freedom is part of the equation to be considered when organizing meatspace. Hurrah!
This is the strongest reason for casting the authors guild into the darkest depth of hell. There is a tremendous problem getting books in audio format for blind people. The Kindle breaks that barrier. The authors guild are not just greedy they also want to discriminate against blind people. They are well on their way to achieving the status of bank executives.
I'm not sure that western culture can argue from a position of strength at the moment, seeing as most of our advertising revenue is spent on persuading people to take up lifestyle brands. I'm not sure that we have many individuals left under the age of 40. I'm throwing this out as a challenge of course, but I'm seeing huge pressure for rather drone like conformity being expressed in politics as well as the commercial sphere.
It doesn't take very many creative types to grab hold of the rudder and steer the ship - just look at the impact of the iPhone - or the Walkman cassette player for that matter from another society formerly regarded as too conformist to change the world. The creatives in China have had access to a western lifestyle for more than a decade now and I predict that its not going to be long before interesting new things start flooding out in a very visible way.
thanks for fleshing out my rather ill tempered argument. I would say that evolution appears to fit the facts we know now but needs a lot more work to understand completely how life changes over time. This does not mean that it has to be discarded because we have an alternate model - a model that essentially says it may never be modified by empirical discovery because that would deny "faith".
It is a major failing of Religion that the churches that maintain its sophisticated (and often utilitarian) manipulation of human behavior are too slow to respond with modifications that fit circumstances that people find themselves living in. A typical example of this is the realization that the finite resources of the earth would be better managed if human population were not allowed to grow without restriction but some religions are unable to interpret this information in a utilitarian way because they are stuck with a large set of interlinked views predicated on the sanctity of human life that cannot be disentangled from a few rules about how to live that ensure endless population growth.
Utter tosh, both the article and this comment. We refer to Newtonian mechanics and Einsteinian space time so why not Darwinian Evolution. As for creationism, its just another religious ideology and you either fight its proponents to the death or you let them kill you. Politics is not civilized and grown up and we still settle political (read religious) differences with war. Darwinian evolution does not need proof in the terms offered by this post because it is a theory not a law. We use it because its predictions work. Find a better theory and we will adopt it, otherwise shut the F up.
I agree with a lot of what you say about modern education but I entreat you against getting too excited about immigrants, because I am utterly certain that we will see lynch mobs on the streets before this decade ends. I wouldn't want to be pushing that button too hard just at the moment, theres plenty of people lining up genocidal hatred to do it and personally I wouldn't want my coherent political views to get tarred with their agenda.
If it was the US governments fault that the financial system has collapsed do we also take it that the global financial systems collapse is due to all the other governments around the world making the same error? I agree that they all made errors but the error was not just being a government it was artificially sustaining a false boom after 9/11. I am afraid the bad guys have succeeded in badly hurting us because we propped up something unsustainable, when if they had not attacked us we would have had the guts to let this bubble pop half a decade ago. The motivation as ever was well intentioned but unwise, the road to hell is paved with good intention as ever. Welcome to hell.
I believe that you are correctly expressing what a third option could be. We could let the banks go bust and destroy all accumulated wealth.
You would of course destroy everyones life savings and that means everyones pensions, including those who have already retired. I think it would lead to a degree of social unrest but rapid deployment of the army in all population centers should take care of that.
There is a problem following this however which is that no financial institution currently existing would be able to trade again. Money itself would become worthless and unusable. We would rapidly become a barter society with no ability to invest or to borrow against future earnings. In short civilization itself will collapse. I don't see how that can work any better than either option one or two.
Totaly agree with your assesment, unless we all want to live in caves the only short term solution to the financial crisis is for the government to spend like crazy since neither the population or investors are going to. I dont like seeing my pension savings being turned into confetti by zero interest rates and the prospect of currency collapse as a result of national debt but if the only source of spending in the economy to replace credit card debt is the government then thats what has to happen. No one seems to have woken up yet, the entire global financial system has collapsed and every single company in the world is going bust fast because of demand collapse. The Chinese are going bust because we aint buying and there are millions of people in the West who are about to get turfed out on the street. Its insane and I havent heard one single theoretical proposition except government spending on how to stop 50 million unemployed worldwide, decades of deflation (thats pay cuts every year if you happen to have a job), zero investment, riots in the streets, lynch mobs against bankers etc. I can remember the right wing taking the piss out of the Japanese for their lost decade of deflation only a year ago on this bulletin board - and now it is the American right wing who think that doing nothing is going to work out just fine. Wake up people! At least give us a thought through proposal on what else we can do other than letting the government replace the missing personal debt that used to run the economy.
Except that the government strategy document was leaked some time ago. It says that disadvantaged groups like EU citizens working in the UK and children (Students) were to be bullied into accepting the ID cards so that when the time came to chip the population their resistance will have been broken down. Disgusting really, George Orwell would be proud of them.
The people of Ireland are easy to push around. Apart from following a Deity on Earth religion the population are predominantly young people. A lot of "progressive" legislation that would face resistance in the rest of Europe is tried out on them. Its one of the most oppressive countries in Europe.
Let me get this right. Anything that a government introduces is necessarily evil therefore any idea that the government promotes is evil.
Presumably we are better off listening to the Bernard Madeoffs of this world and their ilk who made a killing out of trading worthless financial instruments that have driven the world into a global recession.
You anti government haters are ignorant fools who are more interested in a theoretical political stance than in solving any pragmatic problem. I seem to recall spending the first 40 years of my life fighting a cold war against people with a similar world view, they were the communists of the Soviet Union.
Take your anti-government political stance and tell the millions of unemployed people around the world that private industry had their interests in mind when the people running the show took their cut of the profits and retired off of them.
Most of the problems in your political system are because the people who run it are corrupted by lobbyists and private business money. It it isn't them then it is the Church wanting to apply their ancient anti-humanist moral codes onto the population. That doesn't necessarily mean that all government interventions are evil, some of them are influenced by business, science and popular consensus.
Argue about whether global warming is due to burning fossil fuels, argue about how institutions like the government try and deal with such problems. But don't tell me that everything that government does is evil because you are wasting everybodys time displaying your own personal ideological blindness.
Global warming doesn't really bother me because I am going to be dead before it matters. Personally I don't see enough consensus over the importance of the environment to believe that either the biosystem or humanity will survive much longer. Just like bugs in a jar humanity will breed to the point where the population collapses, at that point technology will also collapse and humanity will cease to be of any interest. I hope you are young enough to enjoy the end of hot and cold running water as a personal experience, it might do you some good.
Easy for you to say awash with wealth and material resources. Looks a bit more of a problem when you try to imagine the other 80% of the world consuming at the rate you do.
Good thing is that you still have a leadership position that could influence the future, though seeing as the Chinese will shortly own you that wont be much for much longer.
I'm no professional pessimist but even I can see the level of human Sh1t rising around me in overcrowded southern England. Endless growth is possible but I don't want to live in a place where it seems like a good idea. Our capacity to create an artificial environment does not mean I want to live in it.
I just looked, there are no accounts, there is no traceable information except for whatever the hosting server might cache in terms of Ip addresses. The police did the right thing, they may be able to get the ip address from the server log by cross referencing the posting time.
I hope the police acted within the law. But I have every sympathy for their action. The court case in question was about a group of people who harassed individuals over a period of many years in violent and intimidating ways. There was every possibility that the threats would spill over into death or injury at any time.
The perpetrators got up to 8 years in jail for these activities so I am not at all surprised that the police have taken a keen interest in the publication of the judges address on an underground political activism bulletin board. If the pattern is followed the judge can expect bloody hypodermic needles in his post and excrement through his letter box for many years to come. Animal liberation groups are watched by the same law enforcement agencies as international political terrorists because they have used terrorist tactics like bombs in the past.
The animal liberation front people are sick and very dangerous, not to mention misguided at the end of the day - they don't seem to have any interest in millions of animals subjected to factory farming but attack people doing medical research who experiment on a few dozen animals.
If I was Indymedia I would entrap the poster of the threat and help the people of the country get a very nasty antisocial person locked up before they hurt anyone. I have no sympathy for Indymedia, if they can be shown to be colluding with the animal liberation front people then they should go to jail as well and good riddance. Just because you grok computers does not give you the right to enable terrorists to hurt and maim ordinary citizens going about their lawful business. Screw the stupid animals, people come first.
This story continues to support my view that what constitutes news these days is actually just light entertainment.
I particularly like the hilarious pictures of troops pitchforking babies into furnaces.
I suppose I shouldn't complain, all I have to say about the story is to make a bad taste joke.
The alleged woman is obviously in need of an alleged education which she is no doubt receiving in spades now.