I admit to having used that same tactic, I don't miss a chance to post "Hitler was a vegetarian" comments.
No he wasn't: "Hitler's diet was primarily vegetarian throughout the latter part of his life; however, he didn't adopt a vegetarian diet for moral reasons, but because he suffered from gastric problems."
Insurance is supposed to protect doctors from malpractise lawsuits. Now many have been forced out of business due to the high cost of insurance premiums.
There's a better generalized criticism of libertarianism/capitalism; it appears that it will lead to a state where extant regulation is replaced with litigation. 6 of one, half dozen of the other, as far as I'm concerned.
And I am extremely pessimistic about the ability of the small investor to "keep an eye on things". I have invested for many years and follow my stocks closely, but I am often taken by surprize by events.
That's fine here and now, but in a libertarian world that shouldn't be able to happen. For example, it's reasonable that you insist on being able to inspect things (accounts, buildings, processes) yourself if they want you to invest.
Did you read him at all? He also made the obvious point that insurance would immediately come up for covering you from the most severe of liabilities. So if the company implodes to the extent that you were at risk of losing your house, you would be covered.
If it just does badly or does something wrong to the extent that you lose a bit beyond your investment, you should have kept a better eye on things.
It pretty much makes sense. The flaws in true capitalist ideals don't lie in that direction.
Well, once you need a 65th bit, you might as well go to 128 bits. You could go to 72 or 80 or something, but how might as well make sure you're not going to have to fuck around.
Whether or not people will really need a 65th bit is a good question; they alluded to Moore's law, which I don't recall talking about storage.
the conservative CSU/CDU is actually more like the US Democrats, while the SPD is somewhere to the left of that even.
Even to the left of the Democrats?! Wow!:-)
(I read a great quote once about the Canadian and American political spectra -- roughly: "In the US, the major parties are too far right to even consider suggesting universal healthcare. In Canada, they're too far left to even consider suggesting non-universal healthcare."
I thought it was a good summary; in Canada, unlike many of the more "socialist" countries like Finland, we have single-tier public-only healthcare. The only private care you can purchase is for very minor stuff, or by going to the US. Even suggesting that wealth should let you buy better health care is a big political no-no. Our most right-wing major party (the Conservatives, a merger of the former Alliance (formerly Reform) and the Progressive Conservatives) will tough most things, but not two-tier healthcare.
Well, and that's starting to be _the_ problem. All those failures are starting to pile up. I could do without them. I don't want to invite more of them.
Right. Then don't give them your address. It still doesn't excuse giving false information for website content, IMO. But I think I've hacked at that to death, and you won't be convinced. (Fair enough -- it's not that important to me, and it's really not *that* convincing.)
Holy shit. I never thought about that. I'm a linuxhead, but you're right; the few commercial bits of software that I've bought were all over my info. Fuckers.
And if you thought that newspaper registration forms were obnoxious
I didn't -- remember, I'm the one arguing that they're not that obnoxious.;-)
And those _will_ get bogus data and a disposable email address. Again, I've already paid money for their crap,
Well, my same thread of arguing would say that was your first mistake; you should have read/asked about the requirements for patching, etc.
If that's being egotistical, so be it. I'll keep calling it "consumer rights" instead.
Nope. It's not. I hadn't thought about commercial software, as I said, and the article is about online registrations, so that's what I was arguing about.
That was long and ranty, but still interesting. I'll hit a couple points.
With all those kind people already competing to make my life better, I hope you'll understand that I'm reluctant to get even more of them into the act;)
Sure; all of the examples that you cited are the failures. They are the people who may be trying to make your life better (or at least justifying their actions under that banner), but they're failing. But you don't even notice the things that succeed: grocery shelves and entire stores rearranged to improve flow and reduce your time shopping; improved traffic flow; better governance; smoother banking, etc., etc. Of course if you only look at the failures, you'll find them in spades.
All of this is very generous: It assumes that these people really believed or cared about your life. Most junkmailers don't.
Or in layman's terms, if anyone can possibly use stuff like my house number in a _statistic_, and not to burry me in even more junk mail, they better explain _how_. They better have a damn good explanation. So far I haven't seen any.
Show me something that asks for your house number. I can't remember the last time someone asked for that much detail. And anyway, reasonable or not, your remedy is still just to walk away.
It is very simple, if you don't want people to access information that you have without receiving monetary compensation, don't put it on the internet free for the taking.
They don't put it on the internet free for the taking! They put it on the internet behind an quid pro quo agreement, and you should honour it.
Remember when buggy shopping carts let you modify the price relatively easily? Well, they were putting stuff on the internet "free for the taking"...was that okay? (What if it was a "shopping cart" to buy data, rather than shipped product, so it's more similar?)
Just because an agreement is easy to circumvent doesn't make it okay to circumvent it.
If they don't like it, that is their problem. There is no requirement for me to fill the form in accurately and the more info they ask for the more likely I will fake some or all.
What do you mean "requirement"? Of course they can't force you, but they do "require" you to, otherwise they wouldn't put it in front of you.
I go to few of these sites that require this registration because filling out forms to access information such as general news is a waste of my time. If you consider me egotistical because of this, so be it (being considered egotistical would be a first for me), I don't really care about your opinion:)
Heh. No, you've misinterpreted me; I don't believe that thinking "filling out this form is a waste of my time" is egotistical at all! I think it's often correct. What I think is egotistical is making the judgement call that you know better than they do whether they're collecting the right data in the right way, and using that to justify giving them false data.
If the form is too long for the information you're trying to get, of course, fuck it, dont' bother. That's not ego, that's the market. But filling in fake details takes at least as long as filling in real details, since you have to make them up.
(Lest I sound like a market-will-fix-everything nut, I'm not. I think this is something the market can fix, but I think some things are not.)
So what are these people going to do baout people who simply visit their local library and read the paper for free? Ask for each viewers info? Their point is completely bogus. As most of their "news" is.
Huh? I'm not suggesting everybody should ask for info, and certainly not public libraries. I don't know where you got that idea.
Software piracy hurts someone. It means lost revenue. If I had pirated, say, KOTOR instead of buying it, Lucas Arts, Bioware and the retailer would have been cheating of some 40+ Euros. Worse yet, piracy hurts other software users. Budget decisions and genre decisions are based on how much money did the last game bring in.
Only, of course, if you would have bought the game in the first place.
Now let's look at newspaper registrations. _What_ legitimate revenue stream do they lose? (Again, keyword being: legitimate. Selling that data to spammers is not a revenue stream I'd want to support.)
But that's my original point: the legitimacy of their revenue streams is not your call to make.
Ultimately, making that call is both unethical and egotistical. It's unethical because if you're wrong, then you *are* depriving them of revenue. And even if it isn't revenue, it might be service improvements or corporate structure changes; there are more reasons to mine data than simple marketing. They might even be trying to make your life better!
And it's egotistical because you're assuming that you know better than they do whether they're collecting reasonable data, whether they're going to do reasonable things with it, and whether the data on the other side is worth it. You may or may not be right, but it's still egotistical to be so presumptuous.
Very difficult to do accurately. Probably a lot easier for an agency that doesn't care too much if they link you with a child molester or a terrorist.
Sure, but I thought we were talking about marketers. Now, unless they selling bomb kits or lollipops, I doubt they give a shit about those things.
If one is paranoid about the FBI getting one's registration info from the New York Times, well..I think that's a sign to get out of one's country, whichever country that should happen to be.;-)
Munging privacy-from-government and privacy-from-marketers is silly; they have different rules, goals and methods.
Not too often, but when I have a reasonable belief that they won't bother me too much with the info.
Yup, me too. Like newspapers.
It's true: If I want some single piece of content of dubious quality from a dubious site, I just might put in false details. I do use a hotmail address whenever I don't know a site ahead of time, but it's not exclusively a spamtrap. If they want my real address, I usually walk (err..click) away. But I can't remember the last time a site that I didn't trust asked me for personal details that I didn't want to give. Maybe that's unusual.
The problem with advertising being in washrooms is separate from (but related to) the problem with online subscriptions. Much of it is because many things are 90% to 99% publicly funded, and then some profit-driven body "donates" the last 1 to 10% to get their name plastered all over it. John Raulston Saul talks about this in On Equilibrium. The market should not have to correct that; it's publicly funded.
This is a problem we should deal with properly, too: When a body gets their name attached to anything that is majority-publicly-funded, the percentage of (capital and ongoing) costs paid for by the sponsors should be made clear.
In restaurants and bars and stuff, if it really bothers you, try complaining to the manager. You might be surprised how far a calm, well-reasoned complaint would go. (Thought to be honest, I like urinal/stall ads. They give me something to read. I wish they had more content.)
In malls: what do you expect?
On roads: lobby your city council for better beautification laws. It ain't hard to speak in front of your council, especially if they're discussing anything remotely related. It's fun, takes some balls, and you see how/whether you can make a difference. (I spoke to the Waterloo, ON City council about student housing.)
It's a lot of work, and not really worth it to me for advertising, but it's the Right Way. I
(And if it doesn't bother you enough to at least try the "right way" then things are probably working as they're supposed to.)
Some of the demands corporations (and governments, and other powerful organizations) are making today *are* unreasonable, if you ask me.
Can give me an example? (Privacy-related.) One where walking away isn't completely reasonable?
Maybe it's just the tinfoil beanie talking but I had the idea of them using post codes (zip codes) and other details to link up different profiles (or selling them on to other companies that will.
Why should you have multiple profiles in the first place?
Or do you mean on different sites?
Why do you think they'll do that? Did you read their privacy policy? Does it say they'll do that? Or did you assume it was bad? Or you don't trust them to follow their privacy policies?
The sceptic in me thinks that any kind of profile matching by something as vague as postal code, even if everyone was honest, is very very difficult, if not impossible.
And equating entering incorrect information to piracy is breathtaking in its illogicalness.
As another poster said, I didn't equate, I drew a comparison.
And why is it? What if the shareware author just wanted your email address? (There are some shareware packages where the licence says you just have to email the author, for example.) Then are they similar?
And even if it's not emailware, you're swapping something of value for something (presumably) copyright-protected. In the shareware case, it's money. In the normal subscription case, it's some limited demographic information. In both cases you have the ability to still get the copyrighted stuff without giving your something-of-value, and they're similarly unethical. (Not identically unethical, though!)
Hm, I don't know. Look at the whole picture: what safeguards are there that all of these businesses actually follow their privacy statements?
What difference does it make? They've offered you a deal: register, trust us, have our (copyrighted, possibly costly) content, or special privileges. You don't get to unilaterally modify that deal.
But more to the point: you have *exactly* the same trust that they won't sell their info as they have that you won't provide bogus info. You're contributing to the problem of mistrust that you are depending on. While that's not inconsistent, it certainly doesn't make for a better world.
(And finally, at least in Canada, and probably Europe, a company getting caught 'thinking "Oh, how will they ever know it was us?"' would get slaughtered.
And unless you give a different e-mail address to each registration place and then keep track of where spam is sent to, they're right: you can't know who did it.
No, but it only takes one person to do this, and do it quite convincingly. So, whether they think they won't get caught or not, there's a decent chance that they will. What effect that has depends largely on how active your society is at correcting it.
It seems to me that if you expect people to be held to a strict standard of honesty in their relationship with companies involved in marketing, you have to demand that same standard of honesty from the companies.
Yes, absolutely! But these aren't marketing companies we're talking about, they're newspapers. And I don't know about where you come from, but where I come from newspapers care about hteir reputation. If the G&M sold their web-subscriber list to spammers, there'd be hell to pay.
That is a responsibility marketing companies have, imho, not lived up to, and you can't be surprised when people grow suspicious of them.
Even if that were true (which I tend to agree with), and relevant (I don't think it is -- see above), it still doesn't give you the unilateral right to change the agreement on the table.
Punish them by not subscribing. Punish them by walking away. The agreement on the table is not unreasonable, and doesn't deserve civil disobedience. Save that for times when the agreement is unreasonable.
If another party has been dishonest, your remedy shouldn't be to be dishonest back, your remedy should be never to deal with them at all costs.. By continuing to deal with them, you give them all sorts of opportunities to continue to fuck with you and others. (For example, even if you're providing bogus data, this dishonest advertising company can turn around and count you as valid data to someone else, and at a cursory examination they'd be right.) Why would you let them do that?
It's more a matter that there is no point them having my details. What do they gain?
That's not your call to make, it's theirs. Obviously you're free to stop reading if you don't want to give details, but I don't think that makes bogus detais/bogus accounts any more ethical.
With great timeliness, the Globe and Mail (Canada) just started asking for a registration today. But it seemed to only ask for the polls. So then they also gain email-verified poll results.
The G&M is pretty well-respected, and it seems likely that their web-polls were getting spammed by political operatives, since they've been running many about the upcoming Federal election.
Bogus details is like pirating shareware. It isn't hard, it isn't murder, but it isn't right, either.
Of course, it depends somewhat on what kind of privacy protections your country has, and what data they ask for. I don't like giving out salary data. The G&M only asked for a postal code.
Yes, it's in the April edition of Scientific American. It's not "Affluent White Male Guilt", it's the inevitable freakout experienced by people who believe they have to make the best possible decision in any circumstance, when that's really not possible considering the amount of choice we're exposed to these days.
I've been cognizant of that aspect of things for a long time. I wrote a slashdot comment about it a couple years ago.
I don't feel guilty for the things I can't do. Or at least, not much. I feel guity for the things I can do, should do, and don't -- usually out of laziness or selfishness. There's nothing particularly wrong about that, either. The point is I should do more, do better, exercise the luck I've been granted, not that I should miraculously be able to make all good decisions all the time.
Once a choice has been made - don't worry about it. Your mental happiness is more valuable than the money you may or may not have saved, so if you're worrying, stop, and see if there's something that you'd prefer to be thinking about, rather than (ironically) wasting time worrying!
Woah. I don't feel guilty for not saving money! That has nothing to do with it. The kind of things I'm refering to are environmental, health and labour impact of my purchases.
Are you really lucky, or have you just been brainwashed by your hard working forefathers into appreciating those things in society which their efforts provided you an abundance of?
Brainwashed how? I don't understand how being brainwashed into appreciating things would make me feel guilty for not doing enough.
Ultimately, guilt for not doing enough is a lack of contentment and purpose. Maybe your 'gift' of intelligence will ensure you will never be content and never have a satisfying purpose.
I have some lack of purpose, but I don't think more than anyone else does. And I wouldn't call myself "not contented". I didn't say that at all.
Maybe that lack of satisfaction is nothing more than an important trait which grants populations an evolutionary edge over their neighbours.
Again, it's not discontent, and it's not dissatisfaction. Not with my own life, anyway. If you want to apply the term to something, then dissatisfaction with my world, I guess. Might be evolutionarily useful, yes. But I think it's also rational and reasonable.
Of course none of this addresses purpose, but it does address using reason, why you need to find a purpose, but you can't find one.
Cool. Thanks for the reply. 1% is certainly a different ballgame from 5%, and your remarks on the analyses are interesting. I remember taking a M-B test a long time ago on a dial-up BBS. I can't remember what it said I was...maybe I'l try to take it again some time.
The differences in the web-representation vs. global-representation of the types is interesting, too.
The right way to do it is to sceptically read the "type summaries" first, sort them into "yes", "no" and "maybe", then see what you get and whether you thought it matched.
Is it luck, or is it the benefits of hard work from your parents & grandparents?
Sure, it's their hard work. But that doesn't make it any less "luck" that those are the people I was born to. They didn't have luck, they had hard work. But my benefitting from their hard work is indeed luck.
Do you see what I mean? I understand your point; if you assume I was to be born to my parents, and them to my grandparents, all nice and deterministically, of course it's just their hard work paying off for me.
but if you assume that I was a random 'soul' to be assigned a random body and mind, in a random place at a random time, I got an awfully lucky draw.
Guilt? What is so fucking great about you that you need to feel guilt about it?
I didn't say I was great. I said I was lucky, and that I didn't feel like I was doing enough with that luck.
You sound just like every other upper middle class, slightly educated loser who went to some liberal arts college and learned to hate himself.
Didn't go to a liberal arts school. Didn't learn to hate myself. Don't hate myself. Have a nagging sense of guilt that I don't do enough with the life I've landed.
If you are doing well in life it is because you *earned* it. There is no luck. There are plenty of fucking idiots who were born to vast wealth who did absolutely nothing with it and drank or coked themselves into a pit.
Depends how you define "doing well", but certainly there's plenty of luck to the fact that I'm "doing well" financially.
Last hint: YOU ARE NOT SPECIAL!
I never said I was special. I don't particularly believe that I'm special. And I think you've made a fairly big mistaken assumption about my basis for comparison about being "lucky". I was not comparing myself to other Canadians or even other Westerners. I was comparing myself to the world.
So shut the fuck up and stop telling us all how superior you are.
I never said I was superior, either. Just lucky. Got that? Here, one more time: lucky.
Slashdot Mirror
No he wasn't: "Hitler's diet was primarily vegetarian throughout the latter part of his life; however, he didn't adopt a vegetarian diet for moral reasons, but because he suffered from gastric problems."
-Rob
It's called a spoiled ballot, and you don't count it.
-Rob
-Rob
Did you read him at all? He also made the obvious point that insurance would immediately come up for covering you from the most severe of liabilities. So if the company implodes to the extent that you were at risk of losing your house, you would be covered.
If it just does badly or does something wrong to the extent that you lose a bit beyond your investment, you should have kept a better eye on things.
It pretty much makes sense. The flaws in true capitalist ideals don't lie in that direction.
Well, once you need a 65th bit, you might as well go to 128 bits. You could go to 72 or 80 or something, but how might as well make sure you're not going to have to fuck around.
Whether or not people will really need a 65th bit is a good question; they alluded to Moore's law, which I don't recall talking about storage.
-Rob
-Rob
(I read a great quote once about the Canadian and American political spectra -- roughly: "In the US, the major parties are too far right to even consider suggesting universal healthcare. In Canada, they're too far left to even consider suggesting non-universal healthcare."
I thought it was a good summary; in Canada, unlike many of the more "socialist" countries like Finland, we have single-tier public-only healthcare. The only private care you can purchase is for very minor stuff, or by going to the US. Even suggesting that wealth should let you buy better health care is a big political no-no. Our most right-wing major party (the Conservatives, a merger of the former Alliance (formerly Reform) and the Progressive Conservatives) will tough most things, but not two-tier healthcare.
-Rob
Cheers,
Rob
Cheers,
Rob
All of this is very generous: It assumes that these people really believed or cared about your life. Most junkmailers don't.Show me something that asks for your house number. I can't remember the last time someone asked for that much detail. And anyway, reasonable or not, your remedy is still just to walk away.
-Rob
Remember when buggy shopping carts let you modify the price relatively easily? Well, they were putting stuff on the internet "free for the taking"...was that okay? (What if it was a "shopping cart" to buy data, rather than shipped product, so it's more similar?)
Just because an agreement is easy to circumvent doesn't make it okay to circumvent it.What do you mean "requirement"? Of course they can't force you, but they do "require" you to, otherwise they wouldn't put it in front of you.Heh. No, you've misinterpreted me; I don't believe that thinking "filling out this form is a waste of my time" is egotistical at all! I think it's often correct. What I think is egotistical is making the judgement call that you know better than they do whether they're collecting the right data in the right way, and using that to justify giving them false data.
If the form is too long for the information you're trying to get, of course, fuck it, dont' bother. That's not ego, that's the market. But filling in fake details takes at least as long as filling in real details, since you have to make them up.
(Lest I sound like a market-will-fix-everything nut, I'm not. I think this is something the market can fix, but I think some things are not.)
-Rob
-Rob
Ultimately, making that call is both unethical and egotistical. It's unethical because if you're wrong, then you *are* depriving them of revenue. And even if it isn't revenue, it might be service improvements or corporate structure changes; there are more reasons to mine data than simple marketing. They might even be trying to make your life better!
And it's egotistical because you're assuming that you know better than they do whether they're collecting reasonable data, whether they're going to do reasonable things with it, and whether the data on the other side is worth it. You may or may not be right, but it's still egotistical to be so presumptuous.
(Methinks that'll attract some ire.)
-Rob
If one is paranoid about the FBI getting one's registration info from the New York Times, well..I think that's a sign to get out of one's country, whichever country that should happen to be.
Munging privacy-from-government and privacy-from-marketers is silly; they have different rules, goals and methods.
-Rob
It's true: If I want some single piece of content of dubious quality from a dubious site, I just might put in false details. I do use a hotmail address whenever I don't know a site ahead of time, but it's not exclusively a spamtrap. If they want my real address, I usually walk (err..click) away. But I can't remember the last time a site that I didn't trust asked me for personal details that I didn't want to give. Maybe that's unusual.
The problem with advertising being in washrooms is separate from (but related to) the problem with online subscriptions. Much of it is because many things are 90% to 99% publicly funded, and then some profit-driven body "donates" the last 1 to 10% to get their name plastered all over it. John Raulston Saul talks about this in On Equilibrium. The market should not have to correct that; it's publicly funded.
This is a problem we should deal with properly, too: When a body gets their name attached to anything that is majority-publicly-funded, the percentage of (capital and ongoing) costs paid for by the sponsors should be made clear.
In restaurants and bars and stuff, if it really bothers you, try complaining to the manager. You might be surprised how far a calm, well-reasoned complaint would go. (Thought to be honest, I like urinal/stall ads. They give me something to read. I wish they had more content.)
In malls: what do you expect?
On roads: lobby your city council for better beautification laws. It ain't hard to speak in front of your council, especially if they're discussing anything remotely related. It's fun, takes some balls, and you see how/whether you can make a difference. (I spoke to the Waterloo, ON City council about student housing.)
It's a lot of work, and not really worth it to me for advertising, but it's the Right Way. I
(And if it doesn't bother you enough to at least try the "right way" then things are probably working as they're supposed to.)Can give me an example? (Privacy-related.) One where walking away isn't completely reasonable?
-Rob
Or do you mean on different sites?
Why do you think they'll do that? Did you read their privacy policy? Does it say they'll do that? Or did you assume it was bad? Or you don't trust them to follow their privacy policies?
The sceptic in me thinks that any kind of profile matching by something as vague as postal code, even if everyone was honest, is very very difficult, if not impossible.
-Rob
And why is it? What if the shareware author just wanted your email address? (There are some shareware packages where the licence says you just have to email the author, for example.) Then are they similar?
And even if it's not emailware, you're swapping something of value for something (presumably) copyright-protected. In the shareware case, it's money. In the normal subscription case, it's some limited demographic information. In both cases you have the ability to still get the copyrighted stuff without giving your something-of-value, and they're similarly unethical. (Not identically unethical, though!)
-Rob
But more to the point: you have *exactly* the same trust that they won't sell their info as they have that you won't provide bogus info. You're contributing to the problem of mistrust that you are depending on. While that's not inconsistent, it certainly doesn't make for a better world.
(And finally, at least in Canada, and probably Europe, a company getting caught 'thinking "Oh, how will they ever know it was us?"' would get slaughtered.No, but it only takes one person to do this, and do it quite convincingly. So, whether they think they won't get caught or not, there's a decent chance that they will. What effect that has depends largely on how active your society is at correcting it.Yes, absolutely! But these aren't marketing companies we're talking about, they're newspapers. And I don't know about where you come from, but where I come from newspapers care about hteir reputation. If the G&M sold their web-subscriber list to spammers, there'd be hell to pay.Even if that were true (which I tend to agree with), and relevant (I don't think it is -- see above), it still doesn't give you the unilateral right to change the agreement on the table.
Punish them by not subscribing. Punish them by walking away. The agreement on the table is not unreasonable, and doesn't deserve civil disobedience. Save that for times when the agreement is unreasonable.
If another party has been dishonest, your remedy shouldn't be to be dishonest back, your remedy should be never to deal with them at all costs.. By continuing to deal with them, you give them all sorts of opportunities to continue to fuck with you and others. (For example, even if you're providing bogus data, this dishonest advertising company can turn around and count you as valid data to someone else, and at a cursory examination they'd be right.) Why would you let them do that?
-Rob
That's deep. Well put.
With great timeliness, the Globe and Mail (Canada) just started asking for a registration today. But it seemed to only ask for the polls. So then they also gain email-verified poll results.
The G&M is pretty well-respected, and it seems likely that their web-polls were getting spammed by political operatives, since they've been running many about the upcoming Federal election.
Bogus details is like pirating shareware. It isn't hard, it isn't murder, but it isn't right, either.
Of course, it depends somewhat on what kind of privacy protections your country has, and what data they ask for. I don't like giving out salary data. The G&M only asked for a postal code.
-Rob
I don't feel guilty for the things I can't do. Or at least, not much. I feel guity for the things I can do, should do, and don't -- usually out of laziness or selfishness. There's nothing particularly wrong about that, either. The point is I should do more, do better, exercise the luck I've been granted, not that I should miraculously be able to make all good decisions all the time.Woah. I don't feel guilty for not saving money! That has nothing to do with it. The kind of things I'm refering to are environmental, health and labour impact of my purchases.
-Rob
Cool. Thanks for the reply. 1% is certainly a different ballgame from 5%, and your remarks on the analyses are interesting. I remember taking a M-B test a long time ago on a dial-up BBS. I can't remember what it said I was...maybe I'l try to take it again some time.
The differences in the web-representation vs. global-representation of the types is interesting, too.
The right way to do it is to sceptically read the "type summaries" first, sort them into "yes", "no" and "maybe", then see what you get and whether you thought it matched.
-Rob
Do you see what I mean? I understand your point; if you assume I was to be born to my parents, and them to my grandparents, all nice and deterministically, of course it's just their hard work paying off for me.
but if you assume that I was a random 'soul' to be assigned a random body and mind, in a random place at a random time, I got an awfully lucky draw.
Depends how you define "doing well", but certainly there's plenty of luck to the fact that I'm "doing well" financially. I never said I was special. I don't particularly believe that I'm special.
And I think you've made a fairly big mistaken assumption about my basis for comparison about being "lucky". I was not comparing myself to other Canadians or even other Westerners. I was comparing myself to the world.
I never said I was superior, either. Just lucky.
Got that? Here, one more time: lucky.
(Perhaps IHBT. That's fine.)