I've been working part-time at a Salvation Army store for much of this year until I find another job in my field (which is apartment maintenance - y'know, fixing toilets, etc *g*) and I follow the same philosophy...
I rarely get sick, but the grime one can get on one's hands sorting thru donations is pretty disgusting.
Despite many years there, we are still no closer to shutting down the real enemy, the Taliban, the ones who directly attacked us.
We may not be using the same tactics the Soviet Union did in their venture there, but I don't see that we're any closer to anything one could call victory, either.
No, I don't know how we could "win" either. As more than a few have said, some "wars" just aren't winnable, and in that case, a solid defense against your enemies on your own home ground is a better option than trying to fight them on their ground.
I'm looking for somewhere where I can come and work hard, like I am now, and it matters to the people living there.
Somewhere where dreams are alive. Where I can talk about space travel in a bar and people don't dismiss it because they are more interested in the latest sports scores.
Not bloody likely there's anywhere like that on this planet.
I'd love to visit, but my resources are pretty limited right now. If I were to move it'd take everything I can earn in six months. The job market here sucks, I'm struggling harder than I have in 20 years.
I'm not an engineer (I know, it's slashdot:) ) but a middle-aged jack of all trades geek. Fix everything from toilets to windows viruses to air tools to sharpening saw blades to lots more... still learning at 42 and not gonna stop:) living old skool.
I'm actually more interested in small towns, not much of a big city boy. The people are better, in my exp.
Don't recall the last time I ate at a McDonalds. Cooked for myself for a couple decades, eating out for me is fancy Italian for the fun with a lady:)
Pretty much a veg myself nowadays, meat is too expensive and wreaks havoc with my gut (getting older thing, there) plus just plain cheaper in farming country, I freeze and can stuff where I can.
Thanks tho, all input is welcome, I won't set the killer delete bit *g*
Somehow I don't think the Chinese are crazy enough to try and blackmail a nuclear armed state.
Nuking China in response to economic blackmail would turn the entire world against the US. I hope that none of our politicians here are that crazy. If there are pols that crazy, we need to lock them up. Immediately.
Out of sheer curiosity (really *g*) just how hard is it to move from the US to NZ?
I'm not rich by any means, but I do have several good skillsets, know how to work hard and have moved and started a new life a couple times...
Reason? Well, I could say that I'm sick to death of the bullshit here in the US. That would be true. But mostly, I'm just ready for something different... I'm an independent sort, and am finding life here rather stifling.
Then 146 years after you are frozen, gold becomes a common commodity due to technology being able to retrieve it from deep in the earth's crust, or from asteroids, or it loses it's value completely to other rare metals or... ?;)
I suspect that the most valuable thing a corpsicle could have after hundreds of years, assuming it could be revived and have full memory and faculties, would likely be first hand knowledge of what society was like during it's previous existence. Only valuable to historians, perhaps, but when one considers what ancient texts can be worth...
We will almost certainly figure out how to revive the body. But will we figure out how to revive the mind? Isn't consciousness an ongoing process, rather than a state? What happens if we stop that process completely, then try and restart it? Will the organism still be able to function mentally as who and what it was? Until we do manage to revive a corpsicle (yes, I've read Niven:) ) we won't know.
I've been an atheist all my life, and I don't believe in a "soul". But I do believe that what we call consciousness is a whole lot more complicated than a simple 'state' which we can store and retrieve like a VM OS; at least simply by freezing it. Perhaps there may be some way of recording state like in a VM, and playing it back into a revived body. But when one considers the amount of data that just a snapshot of the "state" of a human nervous system must contain, the barriers against recording it all fast enough that it is all in sync, and the fact that the human nervous system does not operate at all like a computer, I suspect that revival of the sort we're talking about here is probably impossible.
I think we're better off focusing our efforts on how to extend human life both thru medical means and technological augmentation.
It has been great hearing from you again. I'll have to call you sometime fairly soon.,..
Contact me for right now at agroz@spe.midco.net, we'll go from there. I don't give out my contact info publicly anymore, but that's an address I can burn.
I've tried my little bit for trying to change mankind in my own way... by running for public office. It certainly gives you a different perspective on the whole concept of a representative republic when you try to become one of those representatives. It shocks me what I've actually voted for... with my very limited involvement in legislative franchise. I think I've done some good along the way, and I can only hope that I can continue to make some good in the future....
I've had too many experiences with local politicians to believe that honesty or rationality matter much. Nationally... that's becoming apparent to just about everyone lately, I suspect;) About frakking time, but too late.
For myself, I thought DHS was a good idea in terms of executive department coordination/organization from desperate agencies that needed a unified voice with both the President and the U.S. Congress. The parts and pieces of DHS existed prior to 9/11, and those parts unfortunately didn't work well with each other. That part perhaps needed to be fixed....
More of the same does not fix what's broken with the existing system.
The granting of authority that really didn't exist previously, however, is one thing that I have not been comfortable with, and I do think that the Bush administration (reinforced by the Obama administration that doesn't want to dismantle any of this authority either) was out of line to even seek after this sort of authority.....
Let's not mince words. I am sick of it. The misuse and mutation of freedom of communication in the name of profit is an abomination, for that there is no excuse (the current one is profit, there are others, but they all amount to manipulation of people for personal benefit).
Ditto for the ability of a government agency to restrict or control the communications infrastructure of its citizens. It does concern me that folks want to control something of this nature, and are apparently clueless over what it is that they want to get accomplished.....
Just so. Reread Asimov's Robot series.
Rob, truth is no longer a value in this country, not on any sort of national discourse level. That has been true for many decades, but has made itself more evident with the advent of easy global communications and it's effect on commerce.
I apologize for the format of my reply but I don't have the energy nor time to care.
I have much more to say about this, but I am engaged in my own personal struggle for survival in a society that does not value honesty, and I'd be lying if I said I was winning.
Lucas actually pretty much hit the nail square on with Phantom Menace. I hate to admit that, but...;)
Like religion, it should perhaps be kept to oneself.
Unfortunately due to it's basic nature it cannot be.
Politics in and of itself is useless.
Problem solving isn't.
I'll leave the difference for you to decide....
Not quite.
Y'know, my ex-girlfriend thinks I am arrogant. She used to complain about the housework not being done, and call me arrogant when I said we could save time and money doing it this way, or that way.
But I got a lot more housework done than she ever did, by at least an order of magnitude. She'd talk about how it needed to be done, I just went and did it.
I've spent most of my 42 years doing things for myself. If I didn't know how to do it, I learned. Sometimes the hard way.
I would imagine that at this point the administrators of the DHS are feeling a bit overworked. Historically most new government departments generally get more than they bargained for. Might be the reason they feel they have to continue to hire more drones to deal with the paperwork and internal politics.
In the short run, the DHS is an organization that has no real usefulness, other than to generate more reports to satisfy politicians who cannot understand what is going on for themselves - or aren't willing to try.
In the long run, it's just more waste of taxpayers money, contributing to the death spiral of greedy stupidity that is destroying our country.
So be it. Nobody and nothing can change what is happening right now. No new administration, no new initiatives, nothing. The "leader of the free world" lasted less than a century, in it's role. Slightly more than two centuries overall, depending on when one takes the decay as having started. Me, I figure it started in the paranoia and 'general prosperity' after WWII (bread and circuses) , but others will differ.
Others will blame technology. Still others will blame the granting of rights to "minorities". Nowadays, many blame our (relatively) free immigration policies, ignoring the same which enabled their ancestors to come here and prosper. I see a lot of that sort of ignorance on the web.
Public education, the war on *, the existence of the war on *, the lack of a war on *, politicians (granted, we do elect them), funding for this or that or the lack of, etc.
The simple fact is that we as a species are a factitious bunch who can't agree on anything. That fact is reflected in many things, amongst them our religion and our social discourse (politics). As a species we have no long term goals; no long term cohesiveness.
Unless we can evolve, develop, or force that amongst ourselves, we will not survive this age. It's not likely that any of us living right now will see that happen. It never has been that way;-/ but right now, with the explosion in easy, painless dissemination of knowledge thru electronic means, we can hope that within a few generations, some change might take place.
The invention of the printing press was just a precursor to what's happening now. What's happening now supersedes that by so far that there is simply no comparison.
So, like many science fiction "believers" over the decades, I am forced to conclude that the human race is not quite out of the womb.
I hope we can survive our birth. It's not going to be painless, it's not going to be easy, and it's not going to be over in any less than perhaps a hundred or more generations.
Living while it's happening sure as hell beats living during the Dark Ages, of that, I am sure:)
All of my life, that I can remember - and you do, certainly, Teancum, you remember me when I was in high school - I've taken the long view. I take it even more so, now. One cannot deny experience or knowledge.
Many hope that their words survive time; are read by people with the wisdom of centuries behind them. I hope that our mistakes in this age survive time, that future generations learn from them. If they don't, if our history does not survive, we are lost. If we truly are the only intelligent species within any reasonable contact time and distance, it would be a horrible tragedy if we don't survive long enough to pass our experiences on, and perhaps teach other fledgling species what not to do. For unless we manage to destroy all life on this planet, there will be other intelligences that follow us.
Wow. Sounds just like the experiences I have had with various flu viruses going all the way back to when I was a kid in the 70s.
I had a flu variant in '87 that knocked me out of college for almost two months. I lost almost thirty pounds - at the time I weighed about 175 at 6'2" - and after I was done with that I caught pneumonia and bronchitis and by the time I could function again had to start an entire semester of school over. It put me so far behind in school I never recovered from it.
There is nothing special about this latest version of the flu. Except the profits being reaped by the pharm companies in producing vaccines, and by the media in their scare stories, and attention deficit poliiticans who are using it as a platform for re-election.
What a silly bunch of paranoids our country has become.
Sure, the latest flu variant can kill people. So could all the others. H1 is hardly a "pandemic".
Given the moon's age and general geological stability, it's not likely any of these lava tubes are still active.
In any case, it'd be easy enough to land a small unmanned spacecraft there with seismometers and other sensors and determine whether or not the area in question is still active.
For quite a while, now, in the US, justice has belonged to the rich, or those who could make their voices heard longest and loudest. Not to the people.
We are successfully exporting this to other countries. For the same reason.
Democracy? Don't make me laugh. WRT this subject, it hurts.
So the next time some tinpot dictator moron gets it in his head to go invade someone else, we'll send you over there to tell him how wrong he is. I'm sure he'll listen.
Grow up, son. The world isn't as nice a place as we'd all like it to be.
Using nuclear weapons on two cities at that point *saved* millions of lives; the lives the invasion would have cost on both sides, those that would have been killed in years of hostile occupation afterward...
There seem to be an awful lot of people nowadays who have not read the history of what Japan was doing before those bombs were dropped. The lives their invasions and conquests of surrounding countries cost literally will never be known in any certainty, but those numbers are certainly in the millions.
Contrast it with Germany, where the Allies had to penetrate clear to the capital and nearly destroy it before there was anything resembling a cease fire.
When your enemy brings that sort of war to you, you either have to kill them, or force them to surrender using terms they can understand, in this case, "We have the capability to kill your citizens en masse without endangering large numbers of our people. Surrender or face the consequences."
I think that we - and by "we" I include the Japanese people - can all be fortunate that the emperor had the sense to accept surrender terms after Nagasaki. Otherwise the cost in lives would have been much, much higher.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been working part-time at a Salvation Army store for much of this year until I find another job in my field (which is apartment maintenance - y'know, fixing toilets, etc *g*) and I follow the same philosophy...
I rarely get sick, but the grime one can get on one's hands sorting thru donations is pretty disgusting.
SB
Are we doing any better?
Despite many years there, we are still no closer to shutting down the real enemy, the Taliban, the ones who directly attacked us.
We may not be using the same tactics the Soviet Union did in their venture there, but I don't see that we're any closer to anything one could call victory, either.
No, I don't know how we could "win" either. As more than a few have said, some "wars" just aren't winnable, and in that case, a solid defense against your enemies on your own home ground is a better option than trying to fight them on their ground.
SB
Because, you know, the phrase "people no longer have the stomach to do what needs to be done"
I've been watching and reading the current news tonight, and for some reason, that made me think of Malcolm Reynolds' quote from Firefly:
"Maybe that's why we lost."
Everyone can read into that what they want to, they will anyway. But I was thinking of voters, specifically.
SB
I'm looking for somewhere where I can come and work hard, like I am now, and it matters to the people living there.
Somewhere where dreams are alive. Where I can talk about space travel in a bar and people don't dismiss it because they are more interested in the latest sports scores.
Not bloody likely there's anywhere like that on this planet.
SB
Thanks for the links, I'll look when I find time. Working all the time right now :(
May I ask why you're "advertising"?
(I'm becoming an old curmudgeon, y'see, cynical and full of doubt)
(Counter: Come visit the Black Hills sometime)
SB
I'd love to visit, but my resources are pretty limited right now. If I were to move it'd take everything I can earn in six months. The job market here sucks, I'm struggling harder than I have in 20 years.
I'm not an engineer (I know, it's slashdot :) ) but a middle-aged jack of all trades geek. Fix everything from toilets to windows viruses to air tools to sharpening saw blades to lots more... still learning at 42 and not gonna stop :) living old skool.
I'm actually more interested in small towns, not much of a big city boy. The people are better, in my exp.
Don't recall the last time I ate at a McDonalds. Cooked for myself for a couple decades, eating out for me is fancy Italian for the fun with a lady :)
Pretty much a veg myself nowadays, meat is too expensive and wreaks havoc with my gut (getting older thing, there) plus just plain cheaper in farming country, I freeze and can stuff where I can.
Thanks tho, all input is welcome, I won't set the killer delete bit *g*
SB
Somehow I don't think the Chinese are crazy enough to try and blackmail a nuclear armed state.
Nuking China in response to economic blackmail would turn the entire world against the US. I hope that none of our politicians here are that crazy. If there are pols that crazy, we need to lock them up. Immediately.
SB
Positively refreshing, ain' it? :)
SB
Out of sheer curiosity (really *g*) just how hard is it to move from the US to NZ?
I'm not rich by any means, but I do have several good skillsets, know how to work hard and have moved and started a new life a couple times...
Reason? Well, I could say that I'm sick to death of the bullshit here in the US. That would be true. But mostly, I'm just ready for something different... I'm an independent sort, and am finding life here rather stifling.
SB
95%+ of humanity ;)
SB
Two problems with that approach that I can think of right off the top of my head:
1) How do you guarantee that the coins will still be there when you awaken? No guarantee even Lloyds is going to survive forever.
2) If a lot of people are being frozen and being revived using the same idea, that diminishes the value of your stash... :)
SB
Then 146 years after you are frozen, gold becomes a common commodity due to technology being able to retrieve it from deep in the earth's crust, or from asteroids, or it loses it's value completely to other rare metals or... ? ;)
I suspect that the most valuable thing a corpsicle could have after hundreds of years, assuming it could be revived and have full memory and faculties, would likely be first hand
knowledge of what society was like during it's previous existence. Only valuable to historians, perhaps, but when one considers what ancient texts can be worth...
SB
We will almost certainly figure out how to revive the body. But will we figure out how to revive the mind? Isn't consciousness an ongoing process, rather than a state? What happens if we stop that process completely, then try and restart it? Will the organism still be able to function mentally as who and what it was? Until we do manage to revive a corpsicle (yes, I've read Niven :) ) we won't know.
I've been an atheist all my life, and I don't believe in a "soul". But I do believe that what we call consciousness is a whole lot more complicated than a simple 'state' which we can store and retrieve like a VM OS; at least simply by freezing it. Perhaps there may be some way of recording state like in a VM, and playing it back into a revived body. But when one considers the amount of data that just a snapshot of the "state" of a human nervous system must contain, the barriers against recording it all fast enough that it is all in sync, and the fact that the human nervous system does not operate at all like a computer, I suspect that revival of the sort we're talking about here is probably impossible.
I think we're better off focusing our efforts on how to extend human life both thru medical means and technological augmentation.
This is a fun subject tho :)
Weirdly enough, my sig is appropriate :)
SB
It has been great hearing from you again. I'll have to call you sometime fairly soon. ,..
Contact me for right now at agroz@spe.midco.net, we'll go from there. I don't give out my contact info publicly anymore, but that's an address I can burn.
I've tried my little bit for trying to change mankind in my own way... by running for public office. It certainly gives you a different perspective on the whole concept of a representative republic when you try to become one of those representatives. It shocks me what I've actually voted for... with my very limited involvement in legislative franchise. I think I've done some good along the way, and I can only hope that I can continue to make some good in the future. ... ;) About frakking time, but too late.
I've had too many experiences with local politicians to believe that honesty or rationality matter much. Nationally... that's becoming apparent to just about everyone lately, I suspect
For myself, I thought DHS was a good idea in terms of executive department coordination/organization from desperate agencies that needed a unified voice with both the President and the U.S. Congress. The parts and pieces of DHS existed prior to 9/11, and those parts unfortunately didn't work well with each other. That part perhaps needed to be fixed. ...
More of the same does not fix what's broken with the existing system.
The granting of authority that really didn't exist previously, however, is one thing that I have not been comfortable with, and I do think that the Bush administration (reinforced by the Obama administration that doesn't want to dismantle any of this authority either) was out of line to even seek after this sort of authority. ....
Let's not mince words. I am sick of it. The misuse and mutation of freedom of communication in the name of profit is an abomination, for that there is no excuse (the current one is profit, there are others, but they all amount to manipulation of people for personal benefit).
Ditto for the ability of a government agency to restrict or control the communications infrastructure of its citizens. It does concern me that folks want to control something of this nature, and are apparently clueless over what it is that they want to get accomplished. ....
Just so. Reread Asimov's Robot series.
Rob, truth is no longer a value in this country, not on any sort of national discourse level. That has been true for many decades, but has made itself more evident with the advent of easy global communications and it's effect on commerce.
I apologize for the format of my reply but I don't have the energy nor time to care.
I have much more to say about this, but I am engaged in my own personal struggle for survival in a society that does not value honesty, and I'd be lying if I said I was winning.
Lucas actually pretty much hit the nail square on with Phantom Menace. I hate to admit that, but... ;)
Take care you and yours,
A
Like religion, it should perhaps be kept to oneself.
Unfortunately due to it's basic nature it cannot be.
Politics in and of itself is useless.
Problem solving isn't.
I'll leave the difference for you to decide. ...
Not quite.
Y'know, my ex-girlfriend thinks I am arrogant. She used to complain about the housework not being done, and call me arrogant when I said we could save time and money doing it this way, or that way.
But I got a lot more housework done than she ever did, by at least an order of magnitude. She'd talk about how it needed to be done, I just went and did it.
I've spent most of my 42 years doing things for myself. If I didn't know how to do it, I learned. Sometimes the hard way.
I'd make a very poor politician ;)
SB
Making your own unpublished porn is a lot more fun ;)
Damned slashdotters. Or should that be poor deprived idiots? I still can't decide which is more relevant ;)
SB
I would imagine that at this point the administrators of the DHS are feeling a bit overworked. Historically most new government departments generally get more than they bargained for. Might be the reason they feel they have to continue to hire more drones to deal with the paperwork and internal politics.
In the short run, the DHS is an organization that has no real usefulness, other than to generate more reports to satisfy politicians who cannot understand what is going on for themselves - or aren't willing to try.
In the long run, it's just more waste of taxpayers money, contributing to the death spiral of greedy stupidity that is destroying our country.
So be it. Nobody and nothing can change what is happening right now. No new administration, no new initiatives, nothing. The "leader of the free world" lasted less than a century, in it's role. Slightly more than two centuries overall, depending on when one takes the decay as having started. Me, I figure it started in the paranoia and 'general prosperity' after WWII (bread and circuses) , but others will differ.
Others will blame technology. Still others will blame the granting of rights to "minorities". Nowadays, many blame our (relatively) free immigration policies, ignoring the same which enabled their ancestors to come here and prosper. I see a lot of that sort of ignorance on the web.
Public education, the war on *, the existence of the war on *, the lack of a war on *, politicians (granted, we do elect them), funding for this or that or the lack of, etc.
The simple fact is that we as a species are a factitious bunch who can't agree on anything. That fact is reflected in many things, amongst them our religion and our social discourse (politics). As a species we have no long term goals; no long term cohesiveness.
Unless we can evolve, develop, or force that amongst ourselves, we will not survive this age. It's not likely that any of us living right now will see that happen. It never has been that way ;-/ but right now, with the explosion in easy, painless dissemination of knowledge thru electronic means, we can hope that within a few generations, some change might take place.
The invention of the printing press was just a precursor to what's happening now. What's happening now supersedes that by so far that there is simply no comparison.
So, like many science fiction "believers" over the decades, I am forced to conclude that the human race is not quite out of the womb.
I hope we can survive our birth. It's not going to be painless, it's not going to be easy, and it's not going to be over in any less than perhaps a hundred or more generations.
Living while it's happening sure as hell beats living during the Dark Ages, of that, I am sure :)
All of my life, that I can remember - and you do, certainly, Teancum, you remember me when I was in high school - I've taken the long view. I take it even more so, now. One cannot deny experience or knowledge.
Many hope that their words survive time; are read by people with the wisdom of centuries behind them. I hope that our mistakes in this age survive time, that future generations learn from them. If they don't, if our history does not survive, we are lost. If we truly are the only intelligent species within any reasonable contact time and distance, it would be a horrible tragedy if we don't survive long enough to pass our experiences on, and perhaps teach other fledgling species what not to do. For unless we manage to destroy all life on this planet, there will be other intelligences that follow us.
There's infinitely more to say, and little here.
SB
Wow. Sounds just like the experiences I have had with various flu viruses going all the way back to when I was a kid in the 70s.
I had a flu variant in '87 that knocked me out of college for almost two months. I lost almost thirty pounds - at the time I weighed about 175 at 6'2" - and after I was done with that I caught pneumonia and bronchitis and by the time I could function again had to start an entire semester of school over. It put me so far behind in school I never recovered from it.
There is nothing special about this latest version of the flu. Except the profits being reaped by the pharm companies in producing vaccines, and by the media in their scare stories, and attention deficit poliiticans who are using it as a platform for re-election.
What a silly bunch of paranoids our country has become.
Sure, the latest flu variant can kill people. So could all the others. H1 is hardly a "pandemic".
Silly, silly country. Eating itself.
SB
I'm now listening to White House people who are collecting salaries from MY taxdollars claiming fox is a "wing of the Republican party".
Fox News? A wing of the republican party?
Don't be absurd! /sarcasm
BTW, I'm not a democrat.
SB
would cry out in terror... silently.
Except for the calls to their ISPs...
SB
Given the moon's age and general geological stability, it's not likely any of these lava tubes are still active.
In any case, it'd be easy enough to land a small unmanned spacecraft there with seismometers and other sensors and determine whether or not the area in question is still active.
SB
For quite a while, now, in the US, justice has belonged to the rich, or those who could make their voices heard longest and loudest. Not to the people.
We are successfully exporting this to other countries. For the same reason.
Democracy? Don't make me laugh. WRT this subject, it hurts.
SB
Yeah, war sucks.
So the next time some tinpot dictator moron gets it in his head to go invade someone else, we'll send you over there to tell him how wrong he is. I'm sure he'll listen.
Grow up, son. The world isn't as nice a place as we'd all like it to be.
On a lighter note, good luck surviving marriage :)
SB
Indeed. Few people seem to understand this.
Using nuclear weapons on two cities at that point *saved* millions of lives; the lives the invasion would have cost on both sides, those that would have been killed in years of hostile occupation afterward...
There seem to be an awful lot of people nowadays who have not read the history of what Japan was doing before those bombs were dropped. The lives their invasions and conquests of surrounding countries cost literally will never be known in any certainty, but those numbers are certainly in the millions.
Contrast it with Germany, where the Allies had to penetrate clear to the capital and nearly destroy it before there was anything resembling a cease fire.
When your enemy brings that sort of war to you, you either have to kill them, or force them to surrender using terms they can understand, in this case, "We have the capability to kill your citizens en masse without endangering large numbers of our people. Surrender or face the consequences."
I think that we - and by "we" I include the Japanese people - can all be fortunate that the emperor had the sense to accept surrender terms after Nagasaki. Otherwise the cost in lives would have been much, much higher.
SB
If imbeciles didn't hire lawyers, what would all the two-bit lawyers do for a living? Please, someone think of the 2b lawyers! They have children too!
SB