I've come to the conclusion that social networking is screwed up because the people who use it most are the people who are least invested in reality.
Every time I try to use Facebook, I get driven away by the behavior of its users. Not the Instagram dinner plate updates, or the personal drama, because I've already filtered out those people.
It's the sensitivity. People take anything seriously. I posted an article showing that divorce really screws up kids. I got back a half-dozen replies, all from people who'd had divorces, defending their own decisions. When I said that it wasn't personal, they said they still felt attacked.
There were other instances of similar behavior too. People hover around Facebook, looking for some reason to cause a scene. Why was this, I wondered.
It seems to me that if you have found something worth doing in life, you're mostly doing it. That doesn't mean your job. If your job sucks, you've probably got a project on the side. You're not going to devote your time to screwing around, which is what most people on Facebook do.
This means that social networking including Facebook selects out the people who have any direction in life, and leaves the resentful, bored, unemployed, disabled, upset, insane, teenage, etc. and concentrates them in large numbers. This is why so much of the response is crazy.
I should amend the post title. I used to keep trying to use Facebook (and MySpace, Digg, Reddit, Friendster, Pinterest, etc.). But now, I don't. These aren't places where healthy people hang out.
These 2.3 terrabytes of bit torrent downloads are not piracy.
They are performance art.
Some express themselves through defecating paint on canvas, or inserting nostalgic objects into their vaginas, or even collecting garbage in a room and calling it art.
My art is poetry formed of the sequence of downloads I am undertaking.
Now please stop troubling me with your talk about "piracy" and "illegality" because it's simply not true.
The process of civilization is self-destructive for two reasons.
First, any civilization develops rules and methods and eventually uses those to the exclusion of anything else.
Second, any civilization creates a "system" which must be manipulated by individuals to achieve success.
Both of these remove people from contact with raw reality.
Eventually, people recognize success only within what the civilization already recognizes as important, which excludes any ideas that are actually new.
Worse, the civilization produces its own form of "innovation" which consists of re-applying its principles in new combinations. These innovations take precedence because they are recognized by the audience, since they are based on previously approved ideas within both the system and the rules.
In other words, the problem of civilization is that it re-targets our goals from pure engineering (adapt to reality) toward social goals (adapt to civilization's expectations).
Social goals are expressed through the utilitarian mode of what most individuals approve of. This in turn is based on what the average person can expect based on past successes in the system, and what they can recognize as building on that past.
In short, everything that civilization does is against innovation and more importantly, independent leadership. Civilization forces self-referentiality on its citizens and thus constrains them to its current direction, which is like a kind of super-inertia.
It is for this reason that screwballs such as myself exist. We don't trust existing frameworks, and build our own from scratch. Not only does this mean ditching Ruby on Rails for Perl wildcoding, but also, wildcoding in philosophy and politics so that future generations don't have to suffer under the mistakes of the past.
The problem with the cell phone carrier market is that there are relatively few providers, and worse, consumers do not demonstrate loyalty to any one, but switch when better deals are offered on the others.
This means the only factor that matters is price and availability of features the market wants.
As a result, this news story will have zero effect. Every few months another atrocity comes out about some cellular carrier or another, but the audience just doesn't care.
We got tired of upper middle class white kids. That's gauche.
Now, we have a multicultural empire of elites, who are selected for their obedience as much as anything else.
It seems they cheat a lot. When you prioritize obedience and detail-memorization above the ability to think, that's what you get: little robots that do anything to get the grades.
That's your future, America.
Now transferring my investments to Europe and Asia...
Easy to do basic stuff on, no barriers to entry, and yet also very friendly to either grandma or the weekend code warrior.
After that, Apple started wanting to go for the easy money. The Macintosh was marketed with the de facto notion that even if mental retardation struck you where you stood, you could still use one.
Now it's just a hipster machine.
Bring back the hacker days, when not everything came with "wipers" to make sure we didn't screw up.
Are you listening, Apple? After the iHype fades, you're going to need a new direction. What's like an Arduino, Raspberry Pi and new frontier all in one? A hacker's machine, of course.
I realize it's unpopular to like what we have in the West, and most people express this with fawning adoration for its opposites, but I beg to differ.
Communism sucks in every way.
It doesn't work politically, it sabotages the intellectual and moral will of the population, and it even fails economically, wherever it is tried.
I'm sure the VC are trying hard to cover up their failures with propaganda. It's what they always do. And yet, that means collapse is right around the corner.
It'll be interesting to see the USA granted a late victory in this war.
People often commit suicide out of a sense of revenge on the world.
If we blame the government for Aaron's actions, this encourages more people to commit suicide, so that whoever is antagonizing them gets blamed.
The best logic if we want to stop suicides is to frame it as what it always is: an individual choice. This allows us to emphasize the consequences of that choice on the individual and immediate family, discouraging that individual.
It's sort of an unwritten rule that the people who should kill themselves do not kill themselves, while the people who should not seem to succeed at an alarming rate.
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Is it still 1999? We haven't moved on from this buggy, horrible, shitty runtime (Flash) yet? Even though its origins are in early 1990s interface design software?
Our Constitution guarantees us a number of ways to work through government for change.
The problem with protests is that by working around these methods, the methods are weakened. In addition, people start believing that dramatic public attention-getting is more important than reasoned political argument.
As the only people who truly profit from this, the media love it, coming and going. One great reason to support piracy is to weaken the profits of Hollywood and the news-entertainment media.
The only reason people like you think climate change is politically driven myth is because you weren't paying attention *before* it became a political issue.
Try the 1970s consensus that warming was occurring:
Michael Crichton's attack on global warming was particularly devastating. But what the crowd wants to believe, they simply pretend is reality and call the rest of us "ignorant."
But to deny the utter and overwhelming reality of the results of vast quantities of climate scientists (including some who came in skeptical when they started, but realized that, hey, the data say what the data say) is simply wrong.
Their conclusions are projections, not hard evidence, and they are also of unclean hands because their funding is overwhelmingly political in nature.
You are denying the bigger problem in favor of a political creation.
I normally don't tell people they're "simply wrong," but after reading your pompous reply to me, I felt turnabout was fair play.
Problem: the number of humans grows constantly on a world of finite space.
Conclusion: eventually, resources will run out, and we will commit ecocide as we try to use technology to provide enough food, water, medicine, air, etc. for our population.
However, people don't want to hear about this. It requires too much thinking.
Solution: invent a symbol for it all called "global warming."
The problem with this is that it's the same strategy anti-drug workshops use. "You better not smoke pot, or you'll end up a homeless bum with a criminal record!"
First time they smoke and that does not happen, they'll assume it's safe.
Global warming proponents have been howling about imminent apocalypse for years, and so have desensitized their audience. This is because their main point is a political symbol, not a reasoned scientific view.
I've worked with enough people who are nuts to think that if we're going to test the leaders, we should test everyone and put the psychopaths out of the workplace entirely.
One bad person on a team can not only make life miserable, but ruin the work output of the team, drive away anyone competent and damage everyone else's careers when they're associated with the failed team's product.
Slashdot Mirror
Google does scan your emails for keywords. That information may be stored or revealed in any number of ways.
What I'd like from MSFT: a guarantee (legal contract) that MSFT will not do the same on the new Outlook.com.
I've come to the conclusion that social networking is screwed up because the people who use it most are the people who are least invested in reality.
Every time I try to use Facebook, I get driven away by the behavior of its users. Not the Instagram dinner plate updates, or the personal drama, because I've already filtered out those people.
It's the sensitivity. People take anything seriously. I posted an article showing that divorce really screws up kids. I got back a half-dozen replies, all from people who'd had divorces, defending their own decisions. When I said that it wasn't personal, they said they still felt attacked.
There were other instances of similar behavior too. People hover around Facebook, looking for some reason to cause a scene. Why was this, I wondered.
It seems to me that if you have found something worth doing in life, you're mostly doing it. That doesn't mean your job. If your job sucks, you've probably got a project on the side. You're not going to devote your time to screwing around, which is what most people on Facebook do.
This means that social networking including Facebook selects out the people who have any direction in life, and leaves the resentful, bored, unemployed, disabled, upset, insane, teenage, etc. and concentrates them in large numbers. This is why so much of the response is crazy.
I should amend the post title. I used to keep trying to use Facebook (and MySpace, Digg, Reddit, Friendster, Pinterest, etc.). But now, I don't. These aren't places where healthy people hang out.
Corruption is corruption.
Hang them from the trees on Wall Street as a warning to others.
And stop creating government regulations that give them lots of loopholes to exploit.
These 2.3 terrabytes of bit torrent downloads are not piracy.
They are performance art.
Some express themselves through defecating paint on canvas, or inserting nostalgic objects into their vaginas, or even collecting garbage in a room and calling it art.
My art is poetry formed of the sequence of downloads I am undertaking.
Now please stop troubling me with your talk about "piracy" and "illegality" because it's simply not true.
Also because I'm in the EU, can I get welfare benefits for heavy metal addiction?
That's what I'm downloading. Help me!
The process of civilization is self-destructive for two reasons.
First, any civilization develops rules and methods and eventually uses those to the exclusion of anything else.
Second, any civilization creates a "system" which must be manipulated by individuals to achieve success.
Both of these remove people from contact with raw reality.
Eventually, people recognize success only within what the civilization already recognizes as important, which excludes any ideas that are actually new.
Worse, the civilization produces its own form of "innovation" which consists of re-applying its principles in new combinations. These innovations take precedence because they are recognized by the audience, since they are based on previously approved ideas within both the system and the rules.
In other words, the problem of civilization is that it re-targets our goals from pure engineering (adapt to reality) toward social goals (adapt to civilization's expectations).
Social goals are expressed through the utilitarian mode of what most individuals approve of. This in turn is based on what the average person can expect based on past successes in the system, and what they can recognize as building on that past.
In short, everything that civilization does is against innovation and more importantly, independent leadership. Civilization forces self-referentiality on its citizens and thus constrains them to its current direction, which is like a kind of super-inertia.
It is for this reason that screwballs such as myself exist. We don't trust existing frameworks, and build our own from scratch. Not only does this mean ditching Ruby on Rails for Perl wildcoding, but also, wildcoding in philosophy and politics so that future generations don't have to suffer under the mistakes of the past.
I agree this is the fatal flaw of democracy.
Most people do not vote intelligently, because they do not act intelligently, and often it has nothing to do with their raw intelligence potential.
Mostly, people are narcissistic, distracted, neurotic, selfish, individualistic, and afloat in a world of desires, judgments, feelings and fears.
They aren't making decisions using their logical abilities, but their emotional reactions.
But how can that be?
The people have the vote, freedom of speech and assembly, and their own media.
How is it that these bad outcomes can take place given all the safeguards we've put in, including giving power to the people?
Or is it that apathy, laziness, narcissism and general stupidity (that ugly bell curve of unequal human ability) won out?
If that's the case, democracy has failed.
What do you think?
The problem with the cell phone carrier market is that there are relatively few providers, and worse, consumers do not demonstrate loyalty to any one, but switch when better deals are offered on the others.
This means the only factor that matters is price and availability of features the market wants.
As a result, this news story will have zero effect. Every few months another atrocity comes out about some cellular carrier or another, but the audience just doesn't care.
See, the free market came through where government did not.
These are your new elites, America.
We got tired of upper middle class white kids. That's gauche.
Now, we have a multicultural empire of elites, who are selected for their obedience as much as anything else.
It seems they cheat a lot. When you prioritize obedience and detail-memorization above the ability to think, that's what you get: little robots that do anything to get the grades.
That's your future, America.
Now transferring my investments to Europe and Asia...
People work on problems that are (a) fun to solve and (b) will bring them acclaim.
Tiny, ugly, boring bugs don't do that and so in many software projects they get overlooked the longest.
The ][, ][+, //e and //c were great machines.
They were hacker's machines.
Easy to do basic stuff on, no barriers to entry, and yet also very friendly to either grandma or the weekend code warrior.
After that, Apple started wanting to go for the easy money. The Macintosh was marketed with the de facto notion that even if mental retardation struck you where you stood, you could still use one.
Now it's just a hipster machine.
Bring back the hacker days, when not everything came with "wipers" to make sure we didn't screw up.
Are you listening, Apple? After the iHype fades, you're going to need a new direction. What's like an Arduino, Raspberry Pi and new frontier all in one? A hacker's machine, of course.
I realize it's unpopular to like what we have in the West, and most people express this with fawning adoration for its opposites, but I beg to differ.
Communism sucks in every way.
It doesn't work politically, it sabotages the intellectual and moral will of the population, and it even fails economically, wherever it is tried.
I'm sure the VC are trying hard to cover up their failures with propaganda. It's what they always do. And yet, that means collapse is right around the corner.
It'll be interesting to see the USA granted a late victory in this war.
People often commit suicide out of a sense of revenge on the world.
If we blame the government for Aaron's actions, this encourages more people to commit suicide, so that whoever is antagonizing them gets blamed.
The best logic if we want to stop suicides is to frame it as what it always is: an individual choice. This allows us to emphasize the consequences of that choice on the individual and immediate family, discouraging that individual.
It's sort of an unwritten rule that the people who should kill themselves do not kill themselves, while the people who should not seem to succeed at an alarming rate.
Quoth the content:
Is it still 1999? We haven't moved on from this buggy, horrible, shitty runtime (Flash) yet? Even though its origins are in early 1990s interface design software?
A small (7.62 mm) hole is made at the base of the skull, eliminating the patient's need to ever disagree with the State again.
Of those 100 travelers in a busy public space, about 8 are farting at any given moment.
If that heat and gas could be captured, we might have an alternate energy revolution, especially within a few blocks of a Taco Bell.
Our Constitution guarantees us a number of ways to work through government for change.
The problem with protests is that by working around these methods, the methods are weakened. In addition, people start believing that dramatic public attention-getting is more important than reasoned political argument.
As the only people who truly profit from this, the media love it, coming and going. One great reason to support piracy is to weaken the profits of Hollywood and the news-entertainment media.
Try the 1970s consensus that warming was occurring:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-1970s-science-said-about-global-cooling.html
This has always been a political issue which exists as a proxy for denial of the actual underlying problem, which is overpopulation.
Global warming existed to justify wealth transfer from the first to third worlds.
It was always a political agenda, with scientists taken along for the ride because they could get funding that way.
Michael Crichton's attack on global warming was particularly devastating. But what the crowd wants to believe, they simply pretend is reality and call the rest of us "ignorant."
Their conclusions are projections, not hard evidence, and they are also of unclean hands because their funding is overwhelmingly political in nature.
You are denying the bigger problem in favor of a political creation.
I normally don't tell people they're "simply wrong," but after reading your pompous reply to me, I felt turnabout was fair play.
Problem: the number of humans grows constantly on a world of finite space.
Conclusion: eventually, resources will run out, and we will commit ecocide as we try to use technology to provide enough food, water, medicine, air, etc. for our population.
However, people don't want to hear about this. It requires too much thinking.
Solution: invent a symbol for it all called "global warming."
The problem with this is that it's the same strategy anti-drug workshops use. "You better not smoke pot, or you'll end up a homeless bum with a criminal record!"
First time they smoke and that does not happen, they'll assume it's safe.
Global warming proponents have been howling about imminent apocalypse for years, and so have desensitized their audience. This is because their main point is a political symbol, not a reasoned scientific view.
A true-blue nutcase will always think of themselves first, and so they will always cover their own asses or make their own errors appear as successes.
Thus, often management will look from above or look at metrics and conclude that the psychopath is the most competent team member.
Have seen this happen a few times too...
I've worked with enough people who are nuts to think that if we're going to test the leaders, we should test everyone and put the psychopaths out of the workplace entirely.
One bad person on a team can not only make life miserable, but ruin the work output of the team, drive away anyone competent and damage everyone else's careers when they're associated with the failed team's product.