Purpose is a concept that human brains use to organize their own actions. Things (or processes) in the real world don't intrinsically have purposes. WE assign purposes to them.
I pretty much agree. Except... The word purpose exists, and I don't want to give it up. For instance, I have purposes (goals) from time to time. When I get dressed in the morning, my purpose is to get ready for whatever I had planned to do that day. Sentient things each have their own purposes distinct from each other.
Discovering a Purpose, with a capital P is likely to be misguided. Yup. People often start with some ideal, or aesthetic which may not be shared by all and make achieveing that ideal their Purpose, and then define the world in Good/Evil terms where Good is that which aids their purported Universal Purpose and Evil as that which harms it. Seems very likely to be misguided. However when the capital P ( and capitals G and E ) is dropped, it seems logical. If my purpose is to start my car, shoving the key in the ignition is a good ( small g ) idea. Shoving a bananna in the ignition is a bad ( small b ) idea.
There's nothing wrong with goal oriented thinking. It's necessary to thinking and logic. Prolog programmers know this. Maybe general notions of purpose are necessary to logical thinking about a domain? Something to think about. However, universal Purpose based on an ideal - ech.. Very GIGO prone.
I am looking at the general thermodynamic trend toward entropy, and the fact that life seems to produce all the entropy it can, to make the hypothesis that the Purpose of life is to create entropy, and that other purposes are either subgoals pursuant to that Purpose, or will tend to be selected against over time by the process of evolution.
Anecdote: If I start the day thinking: How can I create the most disorder, I find that following this Purpose usually doesn't significantly change my behavior from what it would have been. When my behavior does deviate from what it would be if my purpose were the Purpose of creating the most entropy, I wonder why, usually finding that I have reasons for my behavior that I haven't considered and that I am actually creating as much entropy as I can, or at least trying to.
I'm not saying anyone should do anything. I am saying that after the fact it seems that life creates entropy on Purpose. Isn't that funny.
Ok, notwithstanding the number 42, and ignoring the more popular question 'What is the meaning of life?' ( which by the way has been long settled with the answer to be found in any dictionary under the entry for 'life' ), it seems that it might be interesting to consider 'What is the purpose of life?' since evolution pertains mostly to life here on Earth.
I'll venture that the purpose of life seems to me to be responsible for creating the most entropy possible. The prevalent M.O. seems to be for life to extract the Gibbs Free Energy from the environs to produce offspring, and then to die. By dying, one creates disorder, which is the purpose of life. However, by first creating offspring, the life form is responsible not only for the entropy directly created by it's own demise but indirectly for the disorder created by any offspring and their offspring. Use Gibbs Free Energy to Copy then Die.
Is there another strategy for producing entropy that could be more successful than life?
It would seem not, though I don't know for sure. Evolution has produced many variations on the theme, suited to different niches, but life seems to stick to this general gameplan.
I have a Wii. It's almost 100% used for watching Netflix. My first grader doesn't care for games, and though I was a gamer once, neither do I. I want something more computer like, yet dirt simple to hook up to the TV so I can watch Netflix, YouTube and do light Web Browsing, and maybe email checking.
Maybe there is already some kind of Roku thing that does it. I got YouTube vids running briefly though Opera which runs on Wii, but it wasn't smooth. I'd get some wireless keyboard to keep on the coffee table if this were done well.
I'll probably get some such device soon. I tend to really delay in getting devices unless it's bothering me a lot only upgrading when I have to - waiting means you get more when you finally plop down your money. Spring is here, so I'll at least wait till the winter TV watching season before updating my devices.
Having the ability to play games is a nice to have, but why would one need more gaming power than what the Wii offers already, ever? Higher res? Maybe. But I won't pay for it. I'll take it if it comes naturally because the current hardware has better performance for the same price, but although I do enjoy lil' flash games from time to time, 99.99% of the enjoyment I will ever get from playing a 3d game happened while playing Doom for the first time. I saw the third dimension on screen, and was duely wowed, and then it completely lost any appeal. It's been 16 years since I played Doom for the first time, and no 3d game has made me waste more than a few hours - including Doom which wasn't great other than that it was the first real 3D game. I played Wolfenstein before Doom, but it wasn't totally textured, so I count Doom as the first one I've played.
3D games suck for some reason, and it's been long enough that if it were going to change, it would have.
I was going to say that: Give a mouse like this as a pet, for MURDER!!!!! The mouse will go get mouse-plague and give it to it's owner by peeing on them.
If you have one of these mice, you can test lethal plagues to find a strain you are immune to, and then spread it to the rest of the world and be OMEGA MAN!
This is a good point. There ought to be at least a clause where they have to harvest the brain first. I agree with the GP that there are MANY things above dead that are not worth being. It would be long drawn out torture to be that way. I guess I'd still rather have my organs harvested Unit 731 style than live that way for years.
No FDA approval needed for Chaumurky. Just create a vector that will train someone's T-Cells to go for antigens specific to the target ( but not you ) and you can put some in each of your drinks. Have them select which one, and you both drink up. They become deathly allergic to themselves and die. You become allergic to them, but this doesn't cause a problem since you weren't going to eat them anyway.
If poisoning is suspected, they can test all they want. There is no poison.
This isn't for criminals trying to evade the cops. I wouldn't be surprised if 'the cops' can order them to bug specific IPs etc. This is for the legions who don't want a long-lived list of what they are searching for stored indefinately where it might - far in the future, and under unknowable different future circumstances be used against them.
More importantly Duck Duck Go is a simple way to escape your search bubble. This is a serious problem I've noticed most acutely with YouTube. Your craziness is validated and so magnified by others like you after a while.
The search bubble phenomenon is definately fractious. I'm not saying that fractiousness is good or bad, but one must be careful with things that can alter one's perception, including mass appeal, mental masturbation, and other drugs.
Nobody said the reflective layer was fully formed and functional, only that the boy can see in the dark like a cat.
Moreover it's not out of the realm of possibility that a fully formed and functional organ could appear because of a single mutation. By causing a single mutation, the dormant tooth producing genes in chickens have been made to produce teeth for instance.
It could be that a human ancestor had a fully formed reflective layer much like a cat's and that a single mutation activated the normally dormant genes in this boy.
Introversion is 'out of vogue' and People Skills are prized above all else because concensus is formed by those with the People Skills to bring the concensus around to whatever is favorable to them.
These 'People Skills' aren't really skills at all. They are merely a reflection of the amount of effort someone puts into manipulating the group.
If we desire to defeat the enemy, we must proportion our efforts to his powers of resistance. This is expressed by the product of two factors which cannot be separated, namely, the sum of available means and the strength of the Will. - Clausewitz
Because winning the battle to manipulate a group demands full application of means, one may not reserve means for other purposes or ulterior motivations such as 'being right' according to some measure other than consensus, or even spend effort towards silliness such as 'making sense'.
When the full will of your opponent is bent on victory, you must expend your means on warfare to defeat them. If you were a country, then you must be willing to metaphorically shut down the automobile factories so that they can make airplanes etc.
Those who put the most effort into a strategy are those who believe it is the most worthwhile way to expend their effort. Should they be emulated? Looking at just the winners one would have to say yes. But you would not necessarily be a winner. You would be just one more like them expending all your effort toward the strategy of the winner. It usually is the case that the winning strategy is more often a losing strategy. For instance, every few days millions of entrepreneurs employ the 'Buy Powerball Lotto Tickets' business plan. Most lose their dollar, but often one wins spectacularly. One could not outdo this business plan for potential to succeed, but it has an expected payoff less than one, and so is irrational.
Introverts have as much potential as anyone to manipulate people. That is they could deal with people if they saw it as the best way to achieve their true goals. If they saw it as being the best way to achieve their goals, then their Will would be to expend their effort in Politics rather than in solitary pursuits. This kind of interaction would not feel tedious or tiresome, or taxing, but rather interesting and invigorating. It is always invigorating to be able to excersise effort where you feel it is useful. It feels good to get something done.
But if the interaction feels unproductive, then it is a drain of resources away from pursuits that seem to stand a better chance of being worthwhile.
The effort to be successful in what is called 'People Skills' would make other pursuits requiring expendature of effort and means less feasible.
What good would it be to gain people skills at the expense of everything else? Those who have made this choice, obviously value people skills above 'everything else'.
Since this planet has a green sun, the photosynthetic life there can't be green, or it would reflect away all the light. They said the blue is all scattered away, meaning the plants would likely be red.
Obviously this planet is Gallifrey complete with red fields and Timelords, and TARDISes etc.
With TARDISes, 150 light years is no obsticle at all.
You can always exchange your gold to get dollars with which to pay the IRS.
Also, I wonder if gold lovers understand that the first thing that will happen should a gold standard be adopted is that gold's buying power would drop. This is because gold in banks would be lent out under the fractional reserve system creating perhaps 10 times as many chits redeemable for gold as actual gold in existence.
Frankly because of gold's 'quality' as a money and the fact that it can't be printed by a government as easily as a fiat currency I would not want to owe anybody gold. That is probably why you don't see gold banks prevalent nowadays. Gresham's law means I want to spend ( and get loans in ) the crappiest money.
If you don't like the dollar, then you can only knock it off it's spot by coming up with a crappier, yet competitively convenient, currency. Then people will use that instead.
As a libertarian he wants people to be free to choose the
currency they want to do business in.
They are. They can do business in any currency they wish to. They CHOOSE to do business in dollars.
Legal tender for all debts is no imposition at all since the dollar does not represent a fixed quantity of any other good. If I owe you one ounce of gold, then I can give you the current market value of that gold in dollars and my debt is settled. You are free to use those dollars to buy the gold, or not.
I always seem to see huge round stones on people's lawns used as decoration. The stones have a hole in the center and grooves cut sort of spiral like eminating therefrom. I believe in ancient times these were called milstones and used by a primitive race of Giants for currency because of their roundness and convenient hole through which a rope might be threaded .
I use HTTPS everywhere, but it sends me to an experimental search page for google that lacks the standard tabs. I mostly want standard tabs, so this is annoying.
Since when have territorial disputes ever been fair? You could go back to hominids fighting over antelope hunting grounds and it has never ever been fair and it will never ever be fair. If you're alive in this world your ancestors have been egregiously wronged, and they have also egregiously wronged someone else. If your ancestors had anything to do with what you deserve then you deserve a million bucks and a bullet in the brain simultaneously.
As an American whose ancestors largely wiped out the Natives, I can't hold the theft of lands in 1948 against the current crop of Jews. Neither do I think they deserve a damn thing for being victimized by the Nazis ( or for any other victimization they have endured over the centuries ).
If I were a Palestinian, the idea of living in a 'Jewish State' would be as unacceptable as the idea of living in a 'Christian or Islamic or Jewish State' is to me ( as an athiest ). However, I can't shake the feeling that if Palestinians had largely participated in democracy they wouldn't have ended up gerrymandered into ghettos as they seem to be now. The need to have a seperate Palestinian state seems as bigoted as the supposed need to have a Jewish state.
IMO, a better gesture than giving away the land where the Palestinians already lived would have been to give away Utah, and let the Jews fight it out with the Mormons;-P
Israel's security depends on it having lots-o-nukes. That, and having a bunch of weak tyrannys around them. Tyrants intent on converting oil wealth into paper and willing to do the dirty work of oppressing the locals so that development in the M.E. doesn't end up consuming the oil resource before it can be exported both keep Israel safe, and keep the West in oil for the time being. HELPING to oust Gaddaffi boggles my mind. Major WTF???
Then again doing stupid stuff may have value since it 'keeps em guessing'. I dunno.
You'd think the US would be trying to play everyone off each other with an eye to keeping the black stuff flowing and keeping everyone weak.
Hmm, so the workers own the shares, sounds great except that now what happens when someone gets fired? Do they get paid the value of their shares and told to go take a hike? How is the value of their shares determined? In what market if nobody can buy them, then they're worthless...
Maybe they have to find someone to switch jobs with ( since they won't be able to survive without a job in a guild ). Maybe they switch their spot in the McDonalds guild with someone in the Wal*Mart guild.
Sounds good, except that some companies would be more desirable than others to work for. Think of all the Doomed-Mart workers that would want to jump ship and work for a growing company like Wal-Mart. They could sell their spot in Doomed-Mart but then they would not be able to buy a spot in Wal-Mart for that price. If you worked for AltaVista as Google was taking over, you'd feel the same way perhaps. Maybe if different positions paid different salaries, you could sell your cube job at AltaVista and become the janitor at Google.
Marx was right that life's a bitch. Life's a bitch, then you die. That's all there is to it. There's no Life's a bitch and here's how we can fix it. Life's a bitch and you can't fix it. If someone says they can fix it they are full of shit, and are probably cleaning out all the money from your pockets.
The best that can be said of attempts to fix it is that the attempts usually put lots of us out of our misery.
Then you live your life as a segment in the GHC ( Global Human CentiPad ). You subsist on what you must.
How long until the brave new world of purpose bred humans, or the brave new world of niches which require humans to evolve to fit them?
I wouldn't worry too much about that though. Machines can be designed to fill such roles faster than humans can change their genetic makeup by evolving. Drugs may alter humans radically enough to be marginally useful in the short term however - jobs too boring to be done well by humans may be done a little better by humans on speed. Lives too meaningless for humans to endure might be endured by humans on antidepressive medication.
Though 'many can't go there, and many would rather die,'
'If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, 'they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.'
Slashdot Mirror
I pretty much agree. Except... The word purpose exists, and I don't want to give it up. For instance, I have purposes (goals) from time to time. When I get dressed in the morning, my purpose is to get ready for whatever I had planned to do that day. Sentient things each have their own purposes distinct from each other.
Discovering a Purpose, with a capital P is likely to be misguided. Yup. People often start with some ideal, or aesthetic which may not be shared by all and make achieveing that ideal their Purpose, and then define the world in Good/Evil terms where Good is that which aids their purported Universal Purpose and Evil as that which harms it. Seems very likely to be misguided. However when the capital P ( and capitals G and E ) is dropped, it seems logical. If my purpose is to start my car, shoving the key in the ignition is a good ( small g ) idea. Shoving a bananna in the ignition is a bad ( small b ) idea.
There's nothing wrong with goal oriented thinking. It's necessary to thinking and logic. Prolog programmers know this. Maybe general notions of purpose are necessary to logical thinking about a domain? Something to think about. However, universal Purpose based on an ideal - ech.. Very GIGO prone.
I am looking at the general thermodynamic trend toward entropy, and the fact that life seems to produce all the entropy it can, to make the hypothesis that the Purpose of life is to create entropy, and that other purposes are either subgoals pursuant to that Purpose, or will tend to be selected against over time by the process of evolution.
Anecdote: If I start the day thinking: How can I create the most disorder, I find that following this Purpose usually doesn't significantly change my behavior from what it would have been. When my behavior does deviate from what it would be if my purpose were the Purpose of creating the most entropy, I wonder why, usually finding that I have reasons for my behavior that I haven't considered and that I am actually creating as much entropy as I can, or at least trying to.
I'm not saying anyone should do anything. I am saying that after the fact it seems that life creates entropy on Purpose. Isn't that funny.
Ok, notwithstanding the number 42, and ignoring the more popular question 'What is the meaning of life?' ( which by the way has been long settled with the answer to be found in any dictionary under the entry for 'life' ), it seems that it might be interesting to consider 'What is the purpose of life?' since evolution pertains mostly to life here on Earth.
I'll venture that the purpose of life seems to me to be responsible for creating the most entropy possible. The prevalent M.O. seems to be for life to extract the Gibbs Free Energy from the environs to produce offspring, and then to die. By dying, one creates disorder, which is the purpose of life. However, by first creating offspring, the life form is responsible not only for the entropy directly created by it's own demise but indirectly for the disorder created by any offspring and their offspring. Use Gibbs Free Energy to Copy then Die.
Is there another strategy for producing entropy that could be more successful than life?
It would seem not, though I don't know for sure. Evolution has produced many variations on the theme, suited to different niches, but life seems to stick to this general gameplan.
I guess an old or cheap new computer running Windows might be what I want then, with a wireless keyboard and mouse.
I have a Wii. It's almost 100% used for watching Netflix. My first grader doesn't care for games, and though I was a gamer once, neither do I. I want something more computer like, yet dirt simple to hook up to the TV so I can watch Netflix, YouTube and do light Web Browsing, and maybe email checking.
Maybe there is already some kind of Roku thing that does it. I got YouTube vids running briefly though Opera which runs on Wii, but it wasn't smooth. I'd get some wireless keyboard to keep on the coffee table if this were done well.
I'll probably get some such device soon. I tend to really delay in getting devices unless it's bothering me a lot only upgrading when I have to - waiting means you get more when you finally plop down your money. Spring is here, so I'll at least wait till the winter TV watching season before updating my devices.
Having the ability to play games is a nice to have, but why would one need more gaming power than what the Wii offers already, ever? Higher res? Maybe. But I won't pay for it. I'll take it if it comes naturally because the current hardware has better performance for the same price, but although I do enjoy lil' flash games from time to time, 99.99% of the enjoyment I will ever get from playing a 3d game happened while playing Doom for the first time. I saw the third dimension on screen, and was duely wowed, and then it completely lost any appeal. It's been 16 years since I played Doom for the first time, and no 3d game has made me waste more than a few hours - including Doom which wasn't great other than that it was the first real 3D game. I played Wolfenstein before Doom, but it wasn't totally textured, so I count Doom as the first one I've played.
3D games suck for some reason, and it's been long enough that if it were going to change, it would have.
I was going to say that: Give a mouse like this as a pet, for MURDER!!!!! The mouse will go get mouse-plague and give it to it's owner by peeing on them.
If you have one of these mice, you can test lethal plagues to find a strain you are immune to, and then spread it to the rest of the world and be OMEGA MAN!
This is a good point. There ought to be at least a clause where they have to harvest the brain first. I agree with the GP that there are MANY things above dead that are not worth being. It would be long drawn out torture to be that way. I guess I'd still rather have my organs harvested Unit 731 style than live that way for years.
No FDA approval needed for Chaumurky. Just create a vector that will train someone's T-Cells to go for antigens specific to the target ( but not you ) and you can put some in each of your drinks. Have them select which one, and you both drink up. They become deathly allergic to themselves and die. You become allergic to them, but this doesn't cause a problem since you weren't going to eat them anyway.
If poisoning is suspected, they can test all they want. There is no poison.
This isn't for criminals trying to evade the cops. I wouldn't be surprised if 'the cops' can order them to bug specific IPs etc. This is for the legions who don't want a long-lived list of what they are searching for stored indefinately where it might - far in the future, and under unknowable different future circumstances be used against them.
More importantly Duck Duck Go is a simple way to escape your search bubble. This is a serious problem I've noticed most acutely with YouTube. Your craziness is validated and so magnified by others like you after a while.
The search bubble phenomenon is definately fractious. I'm not saying that fractiousness is good or bad, but one must be careful with things that can alter one's perception, including mass appeal, mental masturbation, and other drugs.
I really like your signature.
Soon, some 'Bad Guy' (TM) is going to make use of all this cheap-as-dirt RC/Robo tech for a crime, and ruin the fun for the rest of us.
That eye doctor seems like an educated imbicile.
Nobody said the reflective layer was fully formed and functional, only that the boy can see in the dark like a cat.
Moreover it's not out of the realm of possibility that a fully formed and functional organ could appear because of a single mutation. By causing a single mutation, the dormant tooth producing genes in chickens have been made to produce teeth for instance.
It could be that a human ancestor had a fully formed reflective layer much like a cat's and that a single mutation activated the normally dormant genes in this boy.
To me, not censoring the free content is more important than all the copyrighted content in existence.
That is, if I had to choose between censorship and deleting all copyrighted content from existence, I would choose to delete the copyrighted material.
Frankly, I think patients should have not only the right to view their medical records but to delete stuff from them.
Would you want some future fascist government rifling through them and deciding you were unfit and so must be gassed?
Introversion is 'out of vogue' and People Skills are prized above all else because concensus is formed by those with the People Skills to bring the concensus around to whatever is favorable to them.
These 'People Skills' aren't really skills at all. They are merely a reflection of the amount of effort someone puts into manipulating the group.
Because winning the battle to manipulate a group demands full application of means, one may not reserve means for other purposes or ulterior motivations such as 'being right' according to some measure other than consensus, or even spend effort towards silliness such as 'making sense'.
When the full will of your opponent is bent on victory, you must expend your means on warfare to defeat them. If you were a country, then you must be willing to metaphorically shut down the automobile factories so that they can make airplanes etc.
Those who put the most effort into a strategy are those who believe it is the most worthwhile way to expend their effort. Should they be emulated? Looking at just the winners one would have to say yes. But you would not necessarily be a winner. You would be just one more like them expending all your effort toward the strategy of the winner. It usually is the case that the winning strategy is more often a losing strategy. For instance, every few days millions of entrepreneurs employ the 'Buy Powerball Lotto Tickets' business plan. Most lose their dollar, but often one wins spectacularly. One could not outdo this business plan for potential to succeed, but it has an expected payoff less than one, and so is irrational.
Introverts have as much potential as anyone to manipulate people. That is they could deal with people if they saw it as the best way to achieve their true goals. If they saw it as being the best way to achieve their goals, then their Will would be to expend their effort in Politics rather than in solitary pursuits. This kind of interaction would not feel tedious or tiresome, or taxing, but rather interesting and invigorating. It is always invigorating to be able to excersise effort where you feel it is useful. It feels good to get something done.
But if the interaction feels unproductive, then it is a drain of resources away from pursuits that seem to stand a better chance of being worthwhile.
The effort to be successful in what is called 'People Skills' would make other pursuits requiring expendature of effort and means less feasible.
What good would it be to gain people skills at the expense of everything else? Those who have made this choice, obviously value people skills above 'everything else'.
Since this planet has a green sun, the photosynthetic life there can't be green, or it would reflect away all the light. They said the blue is all scattered away, meaning the plants would likely be red.
Obviously this planet is Gallifrey complete with red fields and Timelords, and TARDISes etc.
With TARDISes, 150 light years is no obsticle at all.
Because vaccination, where the population is largely immune, is an unmitigated harm to the vaccinee.
The rich don't need to hurt their kids for the sake of society like everyone else, instead they can pay a bounty to be exempt from the draft.
You can always exchange your gold to get dollars with which to pay the IRS.
Also, I wonder if gold lovers understand that the first thing that will happen should a gold standard be adopted is that gold's buying power would drop. This is because gold in banks would be lent out under the fractional reserve system creating perhaps 10 times as many chits redeemable for gold as actual gold in existence.
Frankly because of gold's 'quality' as a money and the fact that it can't be printed by a government as easily as a fiat currency I would not want to owe anybody gold. That is probably why you don't see gold banks prevalent nowadays. Gresham's law means I want to spend ( and get loans in ) the crappiest money.
If you don't like the dollar, then you can only knock it off it's spot by coming up with a crappier, yet competitively convenient, currency. Then people will use that instead.
They are. They can do business in any currency they wish to. They CHOOSE to do business in dollars.
Legal tender for all debts is no imposition at all since the dollar does not represent a fixed quantity of any other good. If I owe you one ounce of gold, then I can give you the current market value of that gold in dollars and my debt is settled. You are free to use those dollars to buy the gold, or not.
I always seem to see huge round stones on people's lawns used as decoration. The stones have a hole in the center and grooves cut sort of spiral like eminating therefrom. I believe in ancient times these were called milstones and used by a primitive race of Giants for currency because of their roundness and convenient hole through which a rope might be threaded .
I use HTTPS everywhere, but it sends me to an experimental search page for google that lacks the standard tabs. I mostly want standard tabs, so this is annoying.
n/t
Since when have territorial disputes ever been fair? You could go back to hominids fighting over antelope hunting grounds and it has never ever been fair and it will never ever be fair. If you're alive in this world your ancestors have been egregiously wronged, and they have also egregiously wronged someone else. If your ancestors had anything to do with what you deserve then you deserve a million bucks and a bullet in the brain simultaneously.
As an American whose ancestors largely wiped out the Natives, I can't hold the theft of lands in 1948 against the current crop of Jews. Neither do I think they deserve a damn thing for being victimized by the Nazis ( or for any other victimization they have endured over the centuries ).
If I were a Palestinian, the idea of living in a 'Jewish State' would be as unacceptable as the idea of living in a 'Christian or Islamic or Jewish State' is to me ( as an athiest ). However, I can't shake the feeling that if Palestinians had largely participated in democracy they wouldn't have ended up gerrymandered into ghettos as they seem to be now. The need to have a seperate Palestinian state seems as bigoted as the supposed need to have a Jewish state.
IMO, a better gesture than giving away the land where the Palestinians already lived would have been to give away Utah, and let the Jews fight it out with the Mormons ;-P
Israel's security depends on it having lots-o-nukes. That, and having a bunch of weak tyrannys around them. Tyrants intent on converting oil wealth into paper and willing to do the dirty work of oppressing the locals so that development in the M.E. doesn't end up consuming the oil resource before it can be exported both keep Israel safe, and keep the West in oil for the time being. HELPING to oust Gaddaffi boggles my mind. Major WTF???
Then again doing stupid stuff may have value since it 'keeps em guessing'. I dunno.
You'd think the US would be trying to play everyone off each other with an eye to keeping the black stuff flowing and keeping everyone weak.
Hmm, so the workers own the shares, sounds great except that now what happens when someone gets fired? Do they get paid the value of their shares and told to go take a hike? How is the value of their shares determined? In what market if nobody can buy them, then they're worthless...
Maybe they have to find someone to switch jobs with ( since they won't be able to survive without a job in a guild ). Maybe they switch their spot in the McDonalds guild with someone in the Wal*Mart guild.
Sounds good, except that some companies would be more desirable than others to work for. Think of all the Doomed-Mart workers that would want to jump ship and work for a growing company like Wal-Mart. They could sell their spot in Doomed-Mart but then they would not be able to buy a spot in Wal-Mart for that price. If you worked for AltaVista as Google was taking over, you'd feel the same way perhaps. Maybe if different positions paid different salaries, you could sell your cube job at AltaVista and become the janitor at Google.
Marx was right that life's a bitch. Life's a bitch, then you die. That's all there is to it. There's no Life's a bitch and here's how we can fix it. Life's a bitch and you can't fix it. If someone says they can fix it they are full of shit, and are probably cleaning out all the money from your pockets.
The best that can be said of attempts to fix it is that the attempts usually put lots of us out of our misery.
Then you live your life as a segment in the GHC ( Global Human CentiPad ). You subsist on what you must.
How long until the brave new world of purpose bred humans, or the brave new world of niches which require humans to evolve to fit them?
I wouldn't worry too much about that though. Machines can be designed to fill such roles faster than humans can change their genetic makeup by evolving. Drugs may alter humans radically enough to be marginally useful in the short term however - jobs too boring to be done well by humans may be done a little better by humans on speed. Lives too meaningless for humans to endure might be endured by humans on antidepressive medication.
Though 'many can't go there, and many would rather die,'
'If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, 'they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.'
Or maybe semi-intelligent Human CentiPads sooner than you think..