Once you have children your job is to give them the best chances in life you can. That's doesn't mean you have to stay in a job you hate. Actually by changing careers you can show them there's more than one way to do something.
Falcon Part of your responsibility is to care for your children. They cannot care for themselves. If you do not care for them, the state will take them away, and most of your loved ones will probably turn against you.
But as far as giving them the "best chance" possible? Best chance for *what?* Entering the next couple of higher rungs on the social/economic status ladder? Winning a Nobel prize? Reproducing?
We are so *not* at risk as individuals in developed countries of dying of hunger and exposure, but we still have a lot of the language that suggests that we are.
When I think of the interesting, courageous, successful and self-confident people I know, they report childhoods filled not with sacrifice, resentment and martyrdom, but with optimism, curiosity, life-long learning, travel, change, even risk (including periods of real poverty.)
I know, btw, that you are partially in agreement with me, but I still chafe against the language you used there. What do you mean by "best chances," anyway?
You think you're being anti-capitalist, but you are in fact participating in the strongest rhetoric which protects and reproduces capitalism: the desire for stability, understood in material terms.
The entire narrative you are participating in, that we sacrifice ourselves for the well-being of our families and sell our labor to create a secure future for them, is the narrative upon which the complicity with capitalism is ensured.
I refer you to the slogan of the Situationist International: "the society which has abolished all adventure makes its own abolition the greatest adventure." The way you abolish a society is, first and foremost, by dismantling its ideological shackles - and you're deeply in the grip of them. You cannot change material conditions and propagate ideological ones at the same time.
Incidentally, I left the soul-deadening IT track to enter a less prosperous, far more rewarding career path (via graduate school.) And as a "starving" academic, I started a family. It might have been harder if I had started the family before saving my soul, but I know my kid would have been miserable to have the guy I was then as a father.
I still disagree. I want my kids to live their childhood, as well, without being sheltered.
This mania for safety and security is soul-killing. As a child, I was able to explore areas on my own quite some distance without supervision. Children now enjoy almost no unsupervised time.
I want my child to be confident in a chaotic and dynamic environment, not anxious and trapped in a safe and static one. I think you need to critique your own values somewhat more - you may be surprised as to its origins.
Security is not the end-all and be-all, and the children from parents who made security the transcendent value behind all their choices have often chafed under the deadening resentment of that value system.
If we are here only to feed, clothe, and provide for a generation whose destiny is also to feed, clothe, and provide, then the species may as well wipe itself out. I want each generation to be selfish enough to live passionately. I don't subscribe to your ethics of martyrdom.
I have tried a variety of Google services, and generally abandoned them when I hit a wall with functionality. Google Docs (ahem. footnotes?), picasaweb, Blogger, calendar, their site making tool - I really tried to make them useful, but in each case, they fell short. I still use gmail, maps, and the search engine itself, and I love Google scholar.
Bjork is cooler than you know, first getting her start in the early Iceland punk scene and playing with the post-punk group KUKL, touring with Crass and Flux of Pink Indians before switching to a more ethereal sound later in her career. She's no Britney, and would have no real problems with a Grindcore remix of her material.
(I'm actually not really a fan of her work, but she's in the category of people I really respect even if I don't get into their work that much. Almost wish I liked it more than I do.)
The list can go on for a long, long time. I was unable to come up with watered-down quasi-equivalents to Joy Division, The Velvet Underground, Wilco, Sonic Youth, Talking Heads, The Stone Roses, etc. Have fun playing this parlor game! Joy Division - New Order The Velvet Underground - The Jesus and Mary Chain Sonic Youth - pretty much the entire 90s grunge trend Talking Heads - Talking Heads Magazine/The Fall - The Stone Roses
They found a way to make money off of something they are good at. There's nothing wrong with that, we all do that every day ( if we are lucky ). My "are they artists" test is this: if they would be doing pretty much the same thing they are doing creatively if they weren't getting a dime to do it, and had to work on the side to support it.
I don't know a lot of guys in their forties and fifties playing metal for fun. Most of the guys who played metal for fun as kids and stayed in music have moved on to blues, jazz, or something more experimental, or quit playing music altogether.
I don't think there's anything wrong with simply servicing a market with a product that it wants. But I wouldn't valorize it with the term "art." It's just a product, no more and no less.
They want kudos for reversing their stand after they found out it is profitable?
I'll tell you what, if they donate the proceeds of their next album to the people who have been harassed by the RIAA, then we can talk. Till then, there's no basis for "forgiveness," they're just pursuing the almighty buck.
It is not a subjective difference. It may be a difficult difference to recognize in many cases, and in other cases it is quite easy. But actually, the two terms are orthogonal to each other: a rock star may or may not be an artist.
In the case of Metallica, if they are artists, they are rather superficial ones. I'd almost hope that they are cynically continuing to pursue an effective money-maker as a kind of ongoing and fun job (I know some musicians, very well-known ones, actually, who feel exactly this way: they consider playing concerts for their fans a job, and they pretty much stopped identifying with their own music over a decade ago.) If their output is what they would be doing even if they weren't getting paid very much for it and had to teach on the side to support it, then I'd have to say they weren't very insightful or bright.
I know a lot of working artists. They do try to take care of their careers, get paid, often even protect against people using their work without their authorization. They do not necessarily see their art at some grand act of communication to the whole world, and do not always feel a responsibility to make their work accessible to everyone. Many, in fact, create work that most would find incomprehensible.
In a similar vein, they do not create for a market. If a market likes what they are doing, fine. But instead of identifying a market need and then seeking to use their skills to fill it, they pursue what compels them, often dwelling on very minute conceptual, aesthetic, or formal goals, and then seek a market for the results. Commissions occur when a would-be buyer in that market recognizes the value of what that artist is working on, and funds a version for themselves.
This, generally, is contemporary art practice in both the visual arts and in what could be called "art music". It has some similarities to some open source projects, doesn't it? Does it include Metallica? I would say probably not, though maybe I'm wrong. I think a group that churns out a well-established style predictably for a well-entrenched market is producing a predictable product. But perhaps they really are pursuing an inner vision or struggling with some formal problem. I'm not very interested in them at this point, any way.
But here's the thing: If Apple revoked all DRM tomorrow, you can still burn an audio CD of each of your DRM albums, and re-rip it in whatever format you like. So you're not ENTIRELY at Apple's mercy. This is true with the MSN Music files, too. And it's still crappy. And lossy.
Institutional power helps, of course. I'm an instructor. I grade papers and evaluate writing. And papers that abuse terms that have reasonably precise meanings will suffer accordingly.
I think the existence of this conversation indicates that it hasn't moved over, actually. No one argues that "hello" is really a term of surprise, or the corn really means what we now call "wheat." There are discourse communities: even a detail as minor as choosing the term "drapes" instead of "curtains" will raise eyebrows in some circles. And the almost reflexive "no, it doesn't" response to the misuse of "begging the question" tells me that it has become such a phrase that its abuse betrays the abuser.
Using "beg the question" incorrectly is not just semantic drift.
For one thing, it's pretentious. It pretends to be making a critique of a logical flaw that it isn't really make, and more broadly, it is acting more philosophical than it really is, evoking the rhetoric of philosophical discourse without the actual thought.
And it advertises middle-brow sensibilities, suggesting a semi-educated writer striving to be taken more seriously than they are. Those sorts of errors are red flags. That is how mastery of "standard English" functions: a marker of education and, I'm afraid, class and status.
The money is coming from the governments - and sometimes local governments, not national - of the places to which they are going.
It's more like your local school board ordering them, in some ways, or perhaps your state government. The taxes collected by the people who live there are going to the XOs, taxes directed to paying for educational expenses. Which means that they aren't spending that money on other things (such as teachers' salaries.)
I'm part Peruvian and I've lived there on and off, and worked throughout Latin America. I know what it's like in , and I know that $100 buys a lot of books and goes a decent way for other expenses.
I don't think a computer teaches them how to fish, particularly if it's broken. In fact, it's more like building a giant fish-sculpture for them to admire.
And Argentina and Brazil aren't really dependent on us, anyway.
I have books that are well over 100 years old in my collection, and I'm not by any means an archivist. I have hundreds of books around that are over 20 years old.
These include textbooks that my father gave me from his school days.
Not one of the various computers in my house is older than 6 years old.
More universal than free-things-being-abused (I have lots of gifts that were given to me that I treasure deeply), it is probably more universal that kids will break things, wherever they are, no matter how much they cost. Otherwise, I generally agree with you.
$100 doesnt buy much these days...there is a reason that laptops dont sell for under $450...they cost money One problem is it that $100 buys plenty in the places that a lot of these laptops are supposed to be going.
I think it was a flawed idea with a mediocre implementation: among the Slashdot crowd, however, the assumption that it is a great idea has something to do with things looking like nails when you're spending all your time in a hammer factory. $100+, in the economies to which these things are being deployed, can be used a lot more effectively in education, and in such a way that it circulates locally, rather than going to a US-based business.
Slashdot Mirror
Once you have children your job is to give them the best chances in life you can. That's doesn't mean you have to stay in a job you hate. Actually by changing careers you can show them there's more than one way to do something.
Falcon Part of your responsibility is to care for your children. They cannot care for themselves. If you do not care for them, the state will take them away, and most of your loved ones will probably turn against you.
But as far as giving them the "best chance" possible? Best chance for *what?* Entering the next couple of higher rungs on the social/economic status ladder? Winning a Nobel prize? Reproducing?
We are so *not* at risk as individuals in developed countries of dying of hunger and exposure, but we still have a lot of the language that suggests that we are.
When I think of the interesting, courageous, successful and self-confident people I know, they report childhoods filled not with sacrifice, resentment and martyrdom, but with optimism, curiosity, life-long learning, travel, change, even risk (including periods of real poverty.)
I know, btw, that you are partially in agreement with me, but I still chafe against the language you used there. What do you mean by "best chances," anyway?
You think you're being anti-capitalist, but you are in fact participating in the strongest rhetoric which protects and reproduces capitalism: the desire for stability, understood in material terms.
The entire narrative you are participating in, that we sacrifice ourselves for the well-being of our families and sell our labor to create a secure future for them, is the narrative upon which the complicity with capitalism is ensured.
I refer you to the slogan of the Situationist International: "the society which has abolished all adventure makes its own abolition the greatest adventure." The way you abolish a society is, first and foremost, by dismantling its ideological shackles - and you're deeply in the grip of them. You cannot change material conditions and propagate ideological ones at the same time.
Incidentally, I left the soul-deadening IT track to enter a less prosperous, far more rewarding career path (via graduate school.) And as a "starving" academic, I started a family. It might have been harder if I had started the family before saving my soul, but I know my kid would have been miserable to have the guy I was then as a father.
I still disagree. I want my kids to live their childhood, as well, without being sheltered.
This mania for safety and security is soul-killing. As a child, I was able to explore areas on my own quite some distance without supervision. Children now enjoy almost no unsupervised time.
I want my child to be confident in a chaotic and dynamic environment, not anxious and trapped in a safe and static one. I think you need to critique your own values somewhat more - you may be surprised as to its origins.
Security is not the end-all and be-all, and the children from parents who made security the transcendent value behind all their choices have often chafed under the deadening resentment of that value system.
If we are here only to feed, clothe, and provide for a generation whose destiny is also to feed, clothe, and provide, then the species may as well wipe itself out. I want each generation to be selfish enough to live passionately. I don't subscribe to your ethics of martyrdom.
And I do have a family, yes.
I've been reading this thread for the past 15 minutes, and it's all starting to look like a game of Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney.
I have tried a variety of Google services, and generally abandoned them when I hit a wall with functionality. Google Docs (ahem. footnotes?), picasaweb, Blogger, calendar, their site making tool - I really tried to make them useful, but in each case, they fell short. I still use gmail, maps, and the search engine itself, and I love Google scholar.
Bjork is cooler than you know, first getting her start in the early Iceland punk scene and playing with the post-punk group KUKL, touring with Crass and Flux of Pink Indians before switching to a more ethereal sound later in her career. She's no Britney, and would have no real problems with a Grindcore remix of her material.
(I'm actually not really a fan of her work, but she's in the category of people I really respect even if I don't get into their work that much. Almost wish I liked it more than I do.)
I have a lot more respect for Motorhead than for Metallica.
The list can go on for a long, long time.
I was unable to come up with watered-down quasi-equivalents to Joy Division, The Velvet Underground, Wilco, Sonic Youth, Talking Heads, The Stone Roses, etc. Have fun playing this parlor game! Joy Division - New Order
The Velvet Underground - The Jesus and Mary Chain
Sonic Youth - pretty much the entire 90s grunge trend
Talking Heads - Talking Heads
Magazine/The Fall - The Stone Roses
Google is the Neal Stephenson of companies. Promising starts, interesting ideas, and a chronic failure to finish.
I don't know a lot of guys in their forties and fifties playing metal for fun. Most of the guys who played metal for fun as kids and stayed in music have moved on to blues, jazz, or something more experimental, or quit playing music altogether.
I don't think there's anything wrong with simply servicing a market with a product that it wants. But I wouldn't valorize it with the term "art." It's just a product, no more and no less.
They want kudos for reversing their stand after they found out it is profitable?
I'll tell you what, if they donate the proceeds of their next album to the people who have been harassed by the RIAA, then we can talk. Till then, there's no basis for "forgiveness," they're just pursuing the almighty buck.
It is not a subjective difference. It may be a difficult difference to recognize in many cases, and in other cases it is quite easy. But actually, the two terms are orthogonal to each other: a rock star may or may not be an artist.
In the case of Metallica, if they are artists, they are rather superficial ones. I'd almost hope that they are cynically continuing to pursue an effective money-maker as a kind of ongoing and fun job (I know some musicians, very well-known ones, actually, who feel exactly this way: they consider playing concerts for their fans a job, and they pretty much stopped identifying with their own music over a decade ago.) If their output is what they would be doing even if they weren't getting paid very much for it and had to teach on the side to support it, then I'd have to say they weren't very insightful or bright.
You're both kind of wrong.
I know a lot of working artists. They do try to take care of their careers, get paid, often even protect against people using their work without their authorization. They do not necessarily see their art at some grand act of communication to the whole world, and do not always feel a responsibility to make their work accessible to everyone. Many, in fact, create work that most would find incomprehensible.
In a similar vein, they do not create for a market. If a market likes what they are doing, fine. But instead of identifying a market need and then seeking to use their skills to fill it, they pursue what compels them, often dwelling on very minute conceptual, aesthetic, or formal goals, and then seek a market for the results. Commissions occur when a would-be buyer in that market recognizes the value of what that artist is working on, and funds a version for themselves.
This, generally, is contemporary art practice in both the visual arts and in what could be called "art music". It has some similarities to some open source projects, doesn't it? Does it include Metallica? I would say probably not, though maybe I'm wrong. I think a group that churns out a well-established style predictably for a well-entrenched market is producing a predictable product. But perhaps they really are pursuing an inner vision or struggling with some formal problem. I'm not very interested in them at this point, any way.
There's a difference between CD -> audio compression loss, and CD -> audio compression -> CD -> audio compression loss.
Institutional power helps, of course. I'm an instructor. I grade papers and evaluate writing. And papers that abuse terms that have reasonably precise meanings will suffer accordingly.
I think the existence of this conversation indicates that it hasn't moved over, actually. No one argues that "hello" is really a term of surprise, or the corn really means what we now call "wheat." There are discourse communities: even a detail as minor as choosing the term "drapes" instead of "curtains" will raise eyebrows in some circles. And the almost reflexive "no, it doesn't" response to the misuse of "begging the question" tells me that it has become such a phrase that its abuse betrays the abuser.
Using "beg the question" incorrectly is not just semantic drift.
For one thing, it's pretentious. It pretends to be making a critique of a logical flaw that it isn't really make, and more broadly, it is acting more philosophical than it really is, evoking the rhetoric of philosophical discourse without the actual thought.
And it advertises middle-brow sensibilities, suggesting a semi-educated writer striving to be taken more seriously than they are. Those sorts of errors are red flags. That is how mastery of "standard English" functions: a marker of education and, I'm afraid, class and status.
The money is coming from the governments - and sometimes local governments, not national - of the places to which they are going.
It's more like your local school board ordering them, in some ways, or perhaps your state government. The taxes collected by the people who live there are going to the XOs, taxes directed to paying for educational expenses. Which means that they aren't spending that money on other things (such as teachers' salaries.)
I'm part Peruvian and I've lived there on and off, and worked throughout Latin America. I know what it's like in , and I know that $100 buys a lot of books and goes a decent way for other expenses.
I don't think a computer teaches them how to fish, particularly if it's broken. In fact, it's more like building a giant fish-sculpture for them to admire.
And Argentina and Brazil aren't really dependent on us, anyway.
I have books that are well over 100 years old in my collection, and I'm not by any means an archivist. I have hundreds of books around that are over 20 years old.
These include textbooks that my father gave me from his school days.
Not one of the various computers in my house is older than 6 years old.
More universal than free-things-being-abused (I have lots of gifts that were given to me that I treasure deeply), it is probably more universal that kids will break things, wherever they are, no matter how much they cost. Otherwise, I generally agree with you.
I think it was a flawed idea with a mediocre implementation: among the Slashdot crowd, however, the assumption that it is a great idea has something to do with things looking like nails when you're spending all your time in a hammer factory. $100+, in the economies to which these things are being deployed, can be used a lot more effectively in education, and in such a way that it circulates locally, rather than going to a US-based business.