There is a myth that is the twin of the myth of genius, and it’s the idea that best things in life “just growed that way.”
I don’t know about you, (tovarish – yes I’ve been reading The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress again? You got problem with that?) but most things that just grow are weeds.
So how did we get to this point where we have an entire culture believing that “natural” is better? Natural food, natural clothing, natural talent?
Part of it is a pendulum. For whatever reason, at least in Western culture (yes, I do have reason to think it’s not in other cultures, partly because by and large they don’t seem to have a concept of adolescence as a separate state and partly because they tend to be more conformist) it’s really important that whatever you’re doing not be “your father’s x.” So you get one generation with “new and improved” and “now with more xenon bloolon” and you get the next with “natural, straight from the soil and covered in cowpoo” fetishes.
But that’s only PARTLY true. Since the romantics with their love of “going back to” the medieval, while the pendulum swings, it’s been going back ever further into the “it just growed, so it’s better” territory.
And since the sixties, we’ve been howling down a path to “Noble savage is better” at least in the high culture.
There is a reason for this to be a myth of the high culture. The middle class, though in our place and time it’s waaaaaaaay better off than the upper class at any given time, still has to strive for stuff. Our kids, given neither the benefit of all the right contacts nor legacy placement at the ivy leagues, have to actually learn to read and work their tails off – even in schools that are supposed to keep them dumb, happy and useless – so we know that “just growed” is bs at some point. And, unless we’re G-d’s own snowflakes, at least in recent decades – like my generation’s and the next’s entire working lives – we’ve had to be nimble and smart and really good at what we do, and really hard workers to stay employed. (A lot of us have had more sporadic work histories, but those who are “solidly middle class” worked their behinds off, and kept working.)
But the upper class? Oh, that’s different. Between self esteem and the way the best schools tend to really want to find rich people exceptional – well, they’ve never had a bubble burst in their faces, and they think they’re all that.
Part of this is because schools want to make money. My mom and dad who were – btw—at the time stone cold broke (as in they bought our school books used or not at all, and we had to shift) discussed sending my brother and I [my brother was demonstrably smart from very early on. With me, they didn’t catch on I could do this school thing till fourteen – partly because the doctor who delivered them told them at best I’d be educable mentally retarded (because of birth issues) and so they should give up on ideas of having BOTH their kids go to college, and concentrate on teaching me housework and being nice, and maybe I’d find a nice man to marry me and support me. When they caught on my being top of class through ninth grade – rolls eyes – wasn’t just a fluke, they also realized that the schools were horrible and I could possibly do better.] to private school. I mean, if it was best for us, they’d have worked double jobs or found the money somehow. BUT dad who went public school and had many colleagues who were private said the only thing private school gave you was the certainty you were exceptional – because they wanted you to continue paying. In the meanwhile, the public school teachers had no reason to pass you if you didn’t know the material. Now, I realize that calculus is somewhat different in the states, but not for the very rich. Anyone think that the school teaching the presidential daughters will send them home with a bad report? Tell them that frankly they’re phoning it in? Do more than teach them lovely manners?
Colonel Kratman made a comment about us being ruled by the people who do best on IQ tests… Um… Not exactly. Not recently.
(The Colonel commented: Read it again, Sarah. _I_ said “Our world is being run by people who do very well on standardized tests, and then use those scores to get into the most highly regarded schools, which they they parley into positions of wealth and influence.” Someone else interpreted that as “best,” but “best is not what I said. — and he is right, but let it stand to mean that while he didn’t SAY that — for the purposes of the ruling class, they think this is doing “best” and that the schools are the best too. My purpose was not to counter his point so much as to illustrate how this is seen from above… even if I phrased it clumsily. I thought his comment was ironical and directed at how these people perceive themselves.)
Most of the admission tests aren’t IQ tests. Any semblance of proper evaluation is done away with by stuff like questions that involve interpreting texts “the right” – meaning ideologically left – way, as well as essays, which allow “evaluators” to fudge the requirements and let “the right” (again ideologically left, or very wealthy, or usually both) person in.
Very smart people can fake it. (Or people who had extensive training. I’ve known for twenty years the sort of book I should write to get madinsanepush and all the awards in the industry. I know this because I grew up under a Marxist regime, and I can see those markers very clearly. So why didn’t I do it? Well, I sometimes feel guilty about that, because, you know, if I had, the kids probably could have made it into top colleges, both on money and my reputation. I didn’t do it because I’m dumb as the rocks. No, really dumb. I didn’t do it because ultimately I couldn’t sleep with myself at night, and, worse, I couldn’t wake up with myself in the morning.) The middle smart people can be TAUGHT to fake it, though. And the average people can be fudged in.
Most of the upper crust seem to be average (at best. If we don’t ignore actors, it comes down a bit.) I can speculate on why, including the politics of marriage. But I won’t. However, between contacts and presenting themselves just the right way they can get into the best colleges, be wafted into the best jobs, etc.
This is not a 99% lament – bah, I don’t lament. I do. The OWSers think that shoulder to shoulder will change anything. The rest of us know work and application and knowledge does. The OWSers are the children of the 1% who are too dumb to make it up the ladder even with all the help and support – it’s merely a statement of fact.
It is also a statement of fact that due to being raised in cotton wool, lest their little egos get bruised, most of them have NO CLUE that they aren’t in fact the best and the brightest. (And because this touches on Malice or Incompetence in respect to the current running clique, let me say “both.” Their malice comes from thinking that the US is uniquely bad and if it is taken out, the world will flourish into a paradise and the sheer incompetence at living (aka stupidity) is revealed by the fact they believe that. These people with unique travel opportunities, money to buy all the books they want, etc, believe this counterfactual because it’s what they were told at school. Which is why I say they’re at BEST average intelligence even if they’re savants in some field or other – at least first generation money.)
So, they go through life thinking that if they can do all this effortless and without the least sweat, everyone can. “It just grows.”
In the same way, they think those poor people, down there, who clearly aren’t naturally as brilliant as they are need al sorts of help because, logically, we’re all born into a caste system where the natural is everything and if you didn’t “just grow” you’ll never make it.
Both the way these people are raised and the ease of putting them in charge and the fact they have no idea they didn’t just “grow” that way are a bad thing, and if not altered (oh, there’s a big alteration coming, one way or another. I hope it’s peaceful like the collapse of the Soviet Union – largely – was) it will lead to the destruction of Western Civ (No, not just us. Europe – Anglophonic and not – is afflicted with this in spades.) Both because they think they just growed that way and because they have no idea of their own limitations. So they think they’re the best, and clearly all those other pull people cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps either. (Curiously, after I started to write this, I went to facebook to check on someone, and Larry was posting about the concept of bootstraps and those who believe in it and those who don’t.)
From a food point of view, the concept of “natural is always better” drives me to screaming fits, because well… between a hydroponically grown lettuce and naturally grown hemlock, which is better for you? Even less insanely, all the babies killed by baby food since I’ve been a mom and paid attention, have been killed by “organic” baby food. You see, some bacteria resist the “natural” sterilization methods.
From the writing point of view it makes me want to shove heads in, because – frankly – no matter how “talented” you are (and I’ve mentioned before I’m not even sure I believe in talent as such, right? I mean, writing “talent” is a combination of so many inclinations and abilities, like facility with language, a fine observational eye for people’s behavior, etc.) you still need to shape what comes out naturally into what other people want to read. Very few of us want to listen to someone’s dream, right? With all the characters that go nowhere, etc. What comes out pre-first-draft, if you have a lot of practice (me) might be readable, but it still requires a lot of editing (plotline, not JUST typos) to be something others will pay to read.
People who think that the story should pour out fully finished, particularly before they’ve trained their subconscious well enough, and who run away screaming when their first book isn’t an instant success (or more likely mope, lament and act hard-done-by) bring up my “needs killing” reflex. First because they perpetuate the myth for the young and innocent (or either) and second because they are very annoying.
From the cultural point of view, the assumption which sneaks into a lot of artwork, that the unpolished (often urban) savage, feral and murderous, is better than the civilized human is the sort of insanity that brings down civilizations (and along the way it does things like discourage the young, create the idea of other civilizations as sort of open-air museums, and makes the west powerless before those who would take us back to the stone age.)
BUT more importantly, from the individual point of view, it sets artificial limits on people’s dreams. (If I thought the upper class were smarter, I’d think this was deliberate.) Kids will believe if they didn’t get into the best school; or if they don’t have all straight As; or if they’re not a marathoner the first time they try long distance running; or they don’t play like Beethoven after three lessons… well, that’s it. They’re not naturals. They’ll never get anywhere.
And, you know what, that’s nonsense. More than IQ, more than talent, more than natural advantages, contacts, whatever – the strongest determinant of someone being able to do something and do it well (by which I don’t mean be a millionaire from doing it. In case you didn’t catch the drift, this is not a meritocracy. But you can do well enough, if you’re really, really good.) is their determination to work really hard at it and to do what it takes.
I mean, you know, I keep reading – IN SPECIALIZED LINGUISTICS BOOKS – that if you aren’t a native of a language, you’ll never speak it well enough to UNDERSTAND all the nuances of phrase, and you for sure can never express yourself artistically in it.
This despite the fact I’m not even the TENTH ESL writer to make it professionally ahead of countless native speakers.
Now, did it take natural talent? Probably. For some reason English works better for me than any language I ever learned (my native language included.) It fits the pathways of my brain better, is the best way I can explain it
However – was it effortless? – no. I have mentioned before that I was coasting, not studying the first week of my English course, confident I could cram before the test, when the teacher called me to the blackboard and I was utterly humiliated, since I knew NOTHING. So, instead of cramming for the test, because the teacher was one of the tricky ones and I didn’t want to be embarrassed like that EVER again, I spent my evenings studying English grammar and vocab, and, halfway through the year, found a used copy of Dandelion Wine and read it with dictionary and notebook by my side, one to look up stuff, the other to make note of constructions. That summer, I read other books in English. By the beginning of the second year, I could think in written English (I couldn’t pronounce ANYTHING properly till my third year, when it clicked. Well, as properly as I ever will.)
But even then, even though as an exchange student in 12th grade, I spoke English better than a lot of natives, to write it for a living was something else again. I’m STILL training myself to get past a tendency to use latinate and “bookish” words and it’s done one step at a time and the only progress I notice is when I read stuff more than ten years old. I’m still working really hard.
Do I work harder than those who speak English natively? How do I know? I’m just me, behind my skull. For all I know I have it easy and other people are figuratively speaking breaking rock with their minds.
I just know I’m working as hard and as much as I can possibly do. Because I want to be as good a writer and as widely read as I can be. And I don’t expect to be a natural.
I don’t trust the upper class to know who or what is good or not. And I don’t expect to get anywhere simply by being present. In my experience, that’s not how life works. And even if it were, I’d make it work another way, rather than wait for a hand up or a hand out.
Oh, look at that, those are boots. And they have straps. And I’m pulling up.
According To Hoyt 
Read it again, Sarah. _I_ said “Our world is being run by people who do very well on standardized tests, and then use those scores to get into the most highly regarded schools, which they they parley into positions of wealth and influence.” Someone else interpreted that as “best,” but “best is not what I said.
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Standardized. Sorry, I apologize. I thought you said IQ — in which case this would still apply. The tests are actually being gamed, by and large. It’s an industry.
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The point wasn’t “standardized,” Sarah; it was “best.” I didn’t say, “best,” except insofar as they get into the “best” schools, thereby.
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Yes. I was just noting another point of divergence.
As for my main point I expressed it badly. What I’d meant to say was that you were making and ironical (I thought) comment on how they saw themselves.
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To some extent, yes, though it’s ironically directed against myself, too, or an earlier version of myself, anyway.
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Isn’t it directed at ALL younger versions of ourselves? Believing this stuff is sort of the way of the young. One of the things I didn’t mention, because it was too much of a digression into the realm of lost illusions, is that when Robert was little we fed him these extremely expensive “natural” baby foods. the same that five years later killed a kid, through imperfect pasteurization. Ick.
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Credulousness as an attribute of the young? If only it was only them. No, what I meant was that I do (immodestly) well on the usual standardized tests (PSAT, SAT, GRE, AFQT) and for many years I thought that meant I was just ever so bright. I still think I’m fairly bright, of course, but not because of the tests, in spite of them. And the crux of the change was noticing that there was no particular correlation between scores and non-nepotistic achievement.
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That. Plus the gits who are “geniuses” brought down my swollen pride. I also score well on those, plus the standard IQ tests — though my “IQ” is carried by verbal. Math is only slightly above normal (not that bad, considering the transposing I do with all digits) but visual is… uh… very not good. Which might correlate (negative scores correlate, right?) with how often I get lost. OTOH I do puzzles well and art passably for a relative beginner. So… Maybe it doesn’t correlate.
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I always did very well on multiple guess tests, but I always knew I was good at those types of tests. I did OK in school, but was no PBK or summa cum law like my daughter. And she does good on the standardized tests, but not as good as I did. And she can teach others, while I have no patience for that.
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If IQ tests measured what they were supposed to measure instead of a B+/A- slacker I’d’ve graduated first in my class in HS and probably college; and be running a company that’s changing the world instead of being a Minion III in a corporate machine.
That disconnect was visible at an early age and probably had something to do with why people always used to comment on how cynical I was for my age.
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Ahhh… Daniel. I empathize. When I was younger I was pretty sure that I’d make a bang-up Emperor of the World but it just didn’t happen. :-(
Then later I learned that I’m carrying a disqualifier around with me. It seems that every time I open my mouth it pops out… I talk like a blue collar worker from the East Side of Des Moines, Iowa. Just too much albatross to overcome, I guess. Ya think that maybe I could become maybe a minor king of someplace? Maybe? I’d settle for just a little ceremonial army. I wouldn’t need a fancy car as long as it has a good heater and starts in the winter and the State buys the gas. And of course a small stipend for life… say a few $ million a week… I’d say Luxembourg should be about the right size – and they already have a palace for me, don’t they?
;-D
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Perhaps you would have if they hadn’t taught you bad study habits.
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I’m also one of the ‘can do fairly well on standardized tests’ types.
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Well, actual “achievement” requires drive, initiative and follow through … which are not “intelligence” per se, and certainly not testable.
That said, I’m one of those people who can “pass” tests for things I don’t even know anything about. As an example, a year or so back I passed the FCC test for an amateur radio license without actually studying any of the material.
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Much worse than that; achievment increasingly requires one to sell his soul.
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This. That’s what I found, and couldn’t do. Eh. I’m not done yet. I’ll build under. (NOT udder, which I almost typed.)
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Ah, but ours is already so shopworn, eh Tom? ;-)
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Achievement is largely a matter of being “correct” and long has been in most of the world. It means carrying the correct class markers — accent, clothing, manners — so that when hired for an executive position by a law firm, bank, whatever, you carry scant risk of embarrassing the organization.
It means giving the correct answers when asked about abortion, gay marriage, the environment, AGW as well.
OF COURSE achievement means selling one’s soul! Read your history about selling your soul and the rewards received. It ain’t like your soul is worth all that much anyway, compared to three bedrooms in the suburbs and a company car. Or compared to a union shop steward to protect your workers’ rights and ensure your pension.
Some of you guys aren’t sufficiently cynical (a factor probably more important that your attitude toward government control is your willingness to sell your soul, or, in Franklin’s formulation: willingness to give up some liberty in exchange for temporary security.) First feed yourself and then talk Right or Wrong. What keeps a man alive? He feeds on others … MacHeath.
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What keeps a man human? He feeds himself and those who depend on him.
So far I’ve managed by being pigheaded. It’s not as easy as selling your soul, but I can sleep at night. (Except when I’m worried about money. But, hey, I PRAY a lot.)
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When I took my SATs I broke the 91st percentile. The funny thing is that i thought that I had bombed the test and wanted to take the test again. Essentially, the day I took the test I didn’t really care about the results because I figured that I wouldnt be able to college anyway. I never took any of the prep classes and my prep was showing up. Yet I did better than 90% of the people. I got lucky and was able to go to a low grade private univeristy becaus emy mother worked there, but still.
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I did pretty much the same, was caught skipping out of class on the day kids were taking the SAT and explained I wasn’t in class because I was on my way to take the SAT. So I went and took it, and got I believe the second highest score of my graduating class, which didn’t really mean anything to me other than it was something to rub in some yuppies face when they started getting snotty.
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It is tautological, an IQ Ouroboros. IQ tests were originally developed as predictors of who would do well in school, and calibrated according to that capability. The target is being drawn after the shots are fired.
The best schools are “best” because they allow graduates to tap into “Old Boy” networks, granting access to otherwise hard to come by opportunities.
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Sorry… I question your statement “the way of the young.” I have a friend who just turned 70 who has these sorts of blind spots. I think that perspective can be indoctrinated to the point that natural predilections of younger people get fused into the mental filter to the point that folks don’t grow out of them.
That is why we are where we are today. We are dealing with perpetual adolescents. Indeed, “teenagers” and tweens (when did *they* become a separate species?) are recent constructs, I argue a divide and conquer sort of programme designed to cultivate grown children as slaves of the state.
[I’m really loving “A Few Good Men” BTW. Some day I will explain what I mean when I say that a copy of Nat is sitting in on a park bench with two other men (Finch and Pendergast if you must know) all practicing the art of the awkward yet elegant conversation.]
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Does this “high culture” thing you’re talking about have anything to do with cannabis yogurt?
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Dear sir, you win the internet.
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Figures. After years of deliberate attempts failing I finally win from something completely off the cuff…
…[sarcasm] the only culture they’ve ever had was Lactobacillus Acidophilus [/sarcasm]…
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I think you’re probably right on that being the only culture a lot of our “betters” have…
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As is said about a regional overly-proud college city, “the only culture is in the biology lab.”
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One place I used to work, we said if there was a corporate culture, it was that stuff growing on something left in the cafeteria fridge.
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In response to buzzword compliance about open culture in the workplace I struggle not to start snarking about Dr Felming, and asking if antibiotic research is a new corporate growth target.
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I’ve often wondered about the “natural is best” concept, and where I agree that fresh apples taste better than wax ones, I never understood how anything could be considered “unnnatural” unless you are willing to do the joke about buying seafood from Innsmouth dealers. [brrrrr]
You may have hit it though. If the concept is “natural is best” in all things, you have support at a basic unthinking level to support the idea of natural leaders and natural serfs and natural lumpenproletariat, and that change from this, natural, condition can be resisted by any means.
Natural also means that there is no reason to have these constricting laws – there is no legislation that directs water to run downhill and any rule that directs it to flow uphill would be silly after all – since if it is “natural” to do these things, whatever they are, there is no point to legislate, set up “unnatural” rules, or obey restrictive cultural mores that, obviously, are the result of modern peoples being psychically twisted by unnatural living conditions.
(by the way, just typing that brings up connotations that make we want to wipe down with clorox wipes)
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… buying seafood from Innsmouth dealers …
You have just gotten “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fishmen” stuck in my head. Again.
In retaliation, I shall inflict it upon all of you:
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That was supposed to link to the fishmen video, but it linked to the whole playlist. Ah well, it’s a fun playlist. Here’s the actual “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fishmen” video:
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If ‘natural’ food was better we would all still be eating corn off those little finger-sized cobs.
Kind of reminds me of a hippy trying to explain to me one time why cocaine was good (natural) and crank bad (unnatural). Yep poison hemlock is natural too, and strychnine isn’t; they are both still poisons that’ll kill you just as dead, whether you ingest the natural one or the unnatural one.
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Bearcat — for some reason I read that “We’d all still be eating hippie”
Uh…
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Well, we don’t eat hippie because of the bad taste from patchouli oil.
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Tell that to The Thing That Only Eats Hippies!
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Need a LOT of barbeque sauce and pepper for that…
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If your planning on eating hippie, make sure and wash it thoroughly, and let soak overnight in saltwater, then rinse again before cooking.
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And as far as I know, Botulinum toxin (totally natural) is still the most highly toxic substance known.
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Yep, again I am reminded of the young girl pushing lotion at the mall kiosk who replied to my “No, my husband has allergies” with “But it’s all natural.” My reply as I walked away, “So’s poison ivy.”
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uh oh, Bob… you’re plugging into one of my story/novel starts… you tread on dangerous ground. Careful lest you end up thinking like me!!! 8-o
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Umm… the natural man (or woman) imho needs a civilizing influence. ;-) As for the natural artist or the natural scientist, etc. PFUI
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Before I make the statement below, let me make the disclaimer that I am NOT working as hard as i could. But…
Sadly, I am not able to work as hard as I would like to be able to, especially on intellectual things. While I consider myself passably smart, I quickly reach a burnout level if I try to do too much, even in one day. Fortunately, I pick things up quickly, so I don’t HAVE to work as hard as many others. When I was in school, even grade school, one or two subjects would always suffer at the expense of others. I finally learned to do a kind of round robin so I could keep them all up to a reasonable level.
I know people who have had two or three jobs. The times that I have tried to do such, I have gotten sick and had to drop one of them in order to keep the other (usually happens within a week). I can’t do such now, because of current circumstances, though I AM trying to work out some alternate income streams.
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We must be siblings from other mothers Wayne cause I do a round robin too– including the household chores. I also get sick easily (esp. now). ;-)
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I think at some point I MUST come to terms with the fact I’m no longer twenty and can’t work 18 hour days forever. Maybe. The illnesses aren’t helping, but I’m not SURE they’re effort-related.
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Ooh! Hey, that means I’m a fast learner– I hit 30 recently, and have been realizing that I can’t do five hour nights anymore!
…
More likely, I’m just a sleep wimp who’s always been a sleep wimp, I didn’t do five hour nights so well in the Navy, either. Many is the time that TrueBlue would take me out to the internet cafe, and when my character would start running into walls he’d come make sure I wasn’t drooling on my keyboard and my snores weren’t disturbing anyone….
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Geez I woke up three days ago with my right leg in pain. It is still in pain today– I have no idea what I did to myself. It had to have happened in my sleep. UGH–
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The problem is that I DON’T get sick easily, but if I approach the amount of work that I know a lot of other people do, something happens. If I try to do intellectual-type work too much, I get so messed up in the head that the thought of continuing makes me nauseous. And the huge problem with that is that I know it’s not an excessive amount. It has made me crazy in the past.
Right now, I’m wasting tons of energy trying to narrow down the directions I think of going to try to enhance my income, because I can’t properly evaluate the choices, and don’t know how to get started on some.
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Hummmm… if these “natural” people had an inkling of what they propose and defend, why do they eat carrots instead of Queen Anne’s Lace roots? Which meaning of the word “natural food” as applied to carrots is still a fair distance from being opposed to the genetic insertion into our food of oil based poisons and oil based herbicides that do not save the food crop involved from the designated pest organism, but simply eliminate the weaker members of the target species and lower the domesticated food plant’s “natural” capacity to compete.
Re “natural food” – a good book that covers the subject is “Gardening When It Counts” by Steve Solomon who points out that the food we eat is NOT “natural” by any stretch of the imagination, but the result of a long time alteration of “wild” plants (aka “weeds”) to suit our tastes and desires. Such domesticated “vegetables” can no longer compete with the “wild” plants.
So in the real world, there is no such thing as a “natural” veggie or food.
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I’ve had this discussion.
As best I can tell, those with coherent arguments have the limiting corner being what a plant can be induced to do on its own, with outsized notions of the risks involved in “pouring chemicals” onto a growing food source.
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Like, say the most caustic chemical known to man? It’s fine when it pours out of the sky, but if you pour it on yourself, that’s bad?
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Yeah! Do you know how many people die from hydroxylic acid inhalation every year? And do you realize how much of our food contains huge concentrations of that stuff, but the FDA flatly refuses to regulate it? It’s a scandal, I tell you!
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It’s illegal to add it to milk after the cow is milked, but the farmers can feed to the cow, and then it appears in the milk!
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For some reason I read this as adding cow to milk and thought “We are Masai now?”
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When they say pouring chemicals, they mean those they recognize as not naturally formed. That’s why the quote marks around it….
I think it’s silly, but there is some kind of rational setup for it, especially if you account for the lack of familiarity with the…difficulties… involved in growing enough food for ONE person, especially if conditions are NOT ideal.
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When I worked for a company that did ag flying as well as charter, my boss came in and said, “I need you to look up the MSDS on these.” One of the chemicals was a major brand-name pesticide and the other was one of the compounds approved for “organic” farms — a copper solution of some kind. So I dug up the data and the “organic” mix had more application warnings, a longer carry-over time (how long the chemical is effective and thus in this case how long you have to keep people and other animals out of the sprayed area), and worse potential effects than the eeeeeeevil synthetic stuff. So much for the whole “organic farming is better for the environment” argument.
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Our local spray guys love the organic guys– they get paid to show up two or three times more often, and the biggest difference is that it’s been way watered down.
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The allowable chemical applications vary by the particular “organic” certification, but as you note many of them allow some quite harmful chemicals.
At one time, there was an “organic” certification that allowed pyrethrins if derived from chrysanthemum seeds but not “synthetic” pyrethrins. (An insect neurotoxin most commonly found in flea treatments for pets).
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Welllll…. there’s “organic”, and then there’s organic. We don’t spray anything anywhere. We mostly got rid of the musk thistles by introducing musk thistle weevils – the larva of which ate the seeds. Now they’re just pretty purple flowers.
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I’ve artificially produced water in the lab. It’s a way of testing hydrogen.
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Who, exactly, is mass producing lab water from hydrogen to grow crops with?
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Every year thousands of high school children make water from hydrogen and then pour it down the sink. It’s hopelessly commingled with the supply.
(And I have met people who will argue that it’s Bad Stuff unlike natural water.)
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Keep in mind, these are the folks who– as I recently heard on the early, early morning news– suggest that people in Seattle not wash their cars so that there will be more water in Africa.
So, the only setup that would get on their radar would be the stuff being made for the purpose of pouring on crops.
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I once heard a botanist launch into a spontaneous mini-lecture to those listening to her; her thesis was “Plants are a**holes”. She pointed out how most plants produce toxins to harm either their predators (animals) or their competition (other plants), and that most of the plants we eat had the toxins bred out of them over many generations before they were safe for human consumption. The potato? Poisonous in its natural form. Apples? The seeds, if bitten into and chewed, contain cyanide — not enough to harm humans in the modern, cultivated variety, but it’s there nonetheless. Cassava root, eaten as a staple by millions of people? Very dangerous unless processed properly to remove the toxins. And so on, and so forth. Plants are a**holes, indeed.
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No offense, but I’d try to kill things that wanted to eat me for dinner.
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You know what that would make you to a greenie? More or less proving Robin’s point.
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Mostly objecting to the characterization of mortal self defense as being inherently objectionable.
Works great as standup, but hits fridge logic hard.
….fridge logic… topic is food…and folks who want to eat “natural,” which would theoretically remove fridges, too… pun not intended….
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As I recall her lecture (it’s been a while), the “a**holes” comment preceded not the discussion of plant self-defense (poisons to stop animals eating them) but the discussion of plant “biological warfare” (toxins to kill off the competition for sunlight & growing room). But since the only details I remembered were the ones about formerly-poisonous plants that we bred the toxins out of (mostly), those are the only details I mentioned.
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So was I, and I thought Robin and his botanist were being sarcastic (at least I’m pretty sure Robin was, possibly the botanist was one of those that objects to self-defense). Mostly greenies only object to humans practicing self-defense, anything else killing (whether for self-defense or not) is perfectly acceptable, after all ‘it’s natural.’
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Part of why I’m very hair-trigger about objecting to it.
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You know what that would make you to a greenie? More or less proving Robin’s point.
I now feel compelled to link the following video. Do note that it is a parody. That should be obvious, but, well, Muggeridge’s law and all that: I’ve seen some people seriously suggesting this sort of thing.
At any rate, enjoy the song:
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I like potatoes because nothing but flea beetles will eat the leaves – which means I can plant them pretty much anywhere without the rabbit fencing and such. and planting them outside of the anti-nature fences means the chickens and guineas can get to the flea beetles… heh heh heh.
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“People who think that the story should pour out fully finished, particularly before they’ve trained their subconscious well enough, and who run away screaming when their first book isn’t an instant success (or more likely mope, lament and act hard-done-by) bring up my “needs killing” reflex. ”
Pfew! Dodged that bullet!
In a file drawer I have over 100,000 words of a three novel series that was going along just fine – until I couldn’t figure out where it was going and how to get there. So now I’m thinking about re-titling it. I may call it “The Abandoned!!!” ;-D
And my first real submission to a real publisher (DAW) escaped the slush pile and went directly to the submissions editor only by virtue of some politicking at a World Con. Re said submission, the editor “was kind enough to not suggest that I find at least two full time jobs so I no longer have the time or energy to write.” that “novel” hit the rejection box so hard I heard the BANG and “PIIIING” halfway across the continent! ;-D
So here I am… still wasting computer monitor ink… and still trying to write something decent.
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I wonder how many of the “natural is best” crowd would be willing to cross the Royal Gorge bridge if all the cables had been replaced by hemp lines.
To extend Mr. Picray’s point further, modern grains are better than weeds, properly fermented beer is better than grain, and “beer” that is further tampered with by distilling into whiskey is the pinnacle of human achievement.
Take a look at National Geographic some time. Nature wants you dead.
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WRONG! It’s not the pinnacle of human achievment unless the grain is dried over peat fires and the resulting distillate aged in the proper barrels. Harrumph!
Though there is a not indefensible theory that even scotch owes its existence to God…
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Let’s face facts, scotch exists only because the Scots were too damned cheap to properly seal their drying-house floors or to distill the product more than once. Not that I would say no to a wee (or not-so-wee) dram.
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Blasphemy!
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I need a like button!
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I see you’re not arguing my basic point. I’ll just take comfort in the economic fact that bigots pay a price for their bigotry, and that there will be that much more tasty, tasty whiskey and bourbon for me. Because at the end of the day the only bad whiskey is the one I’m not drinking.
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Preach it!
Though it may consign me to the depths of heresy, those of Islay are better than others.
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As I have often said before, as a patriotic Canadian, if I wanted the taste of Scotch, I would drink cheap Canadian whisky and then suck on a corner of Northern Ontario for the peat flavour.
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I’d have more sympathy if I hadn’t been charged 8 dollars for a Molson Export in a bar in Montreal a few years ago …
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Yes, well, Montreal has a few things to answer for. Molson is one of them, and charging $8 for one is another.
For those of you who don’t know Molson’s beer, think ‘Budweiser, with the exciting bits removed to make it more palatable to bureaucrats.’
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No, think watered down Hamm’s.
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Never had Hamm’s, so I’ll have to take your word on that one.
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Believe me, your not missing much.
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But I like cheap Canadian whiskey….
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Cheap Canadian whiskey (7-7 and VO) were the only kinds of whiskey I ever smuggled aboard before a cruise… well… and the Vodka and beer…
Now I only drink Crown Royal and whatever beer the kids leave behind when they left for home… and cheap rot gut Kentucky bourbon in eggnog with nutmeg on top in December. The CR was purchased in December of ’02 and is still over half full, most of that having been purloined by the kids on visits.
My son is trying to upgrade my taste by leaving an open bottle of Elijah Craig in the cabinet… but now I don’t usually drink either while he’s switched to drinking used coal tar (aka Scotch.)
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Just be careful to about mixing your Crown Royal with your Royal Crown.
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A drink known as a Palindrome, according to Scot Morris.
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I’d say they mix perfectly with Crown Royal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqvLsLew-3Y
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At the prices Scotch goes for, I think the cheapness becomes “wise thrift.”
Vague excuse to tell a favorite story!
My wallet has velcro on it, because my grandmother– born to a Scottish immigrant and happily raised among his extended family– was invited by the son of one of their friends who had gone back to visit him, and she took her little velcro wallet. After some very careful shopping, she pulled it out to pay the man at the counter, and that velcro made enough noise to scare a cat.
The shopkeeper put on a huge grin, laughed and praised her for having a “prrrrrrrropher Scottish wallet, it skerrrrreeeeeeams when ye open it!”
I think of her every time I pull it out, which has the very thrifty double result of making me smile, and reminding me to watch what I spend it on. :)
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I wish to second the blogkeep’s motion for a like button.
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As I recall, bourbon makers in Kentucky use their product to cure the barrels which are then used to cure scotch whiskey.
They’re a bit off– while, yes, that is where the barrels go, that’s just because the barrels are so dang expensive. A quick search finds that a wide range of barrels are used (including some wine barrels) and the charring is an important part of the flavoring process.
If there is, in fact, a law that the barrels have to be new– I’d look sooner to someone feathering their nest than to an inherently higher quality of product. Kind of like how France tried to “defend” the quality of champagne… by requiring that it come from France… after American wine started wining a bunch of prizes….
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The law comes into play with the definition. You can age your whiskey is whatever kind of (food-grade, if you please) barrel you want, but if it isn’t a new, charred, white oak barrel you didn’t make bourbon. And I don’t think the claim that the first use of the barrel is the best. The reason European use bourbon barrels is because quite a bit of flavor gets left behind in the wood.
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With the caveat that I’m not really a big drinker, least of all of liquor (I do like good beers …), I once went with a friend to a lecture/tasting on Scotch. I think it was when we were tasting some Islay single malt and the guy leading asked the group what they tasted. From the back someone shouted “Bandaids!” The leader responded “Right!” and I knew that single malts were not going to be a big attraction to me ….
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Islay? Now Talisker I could see, given that it tends to make things numb.
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If I recall it was a reference to the iodine flavor from the sea-spray influenced peat. But it was some time ago.
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That sounds like Talisker.
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To this day we don’t know haw the american indians invented corn.
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I don’t think it’s that big of a mystery. We’ve narrowed down the wild precursor to one of three (IIRC) closely related grasses native to Central America. I’m sure the domestication process followed along similarly to wheat and barley in the Middle East. At some point a random mutation caused the maize to produce seed heads along the stem instead of at the top, the advantages of which are obvious. From there it makes sense to breed for height. Fast forward a few centuries and, viola, the makings of my family’s fortune.
The real mystery is nixtamalization (another new word for spell-check, and I spelled it correctly first time). Most of the nutrients in corn aren’t available to the human digestive tract, even when cooked. The natives somehow found out that by soaking the kernels in an alkaline solution the hulls softened (probably how it started). It also improved the bioavailability of the nutrients, meaning people could actually live on the stuff.
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Given the geology of the area where maize developed, I wonder if someone happened to use soak water or cooking water from a mineral spring, noticed that the final result tasted better or cooked better, and repeated the experiment.
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I was thinking wood ashes, but I think the area is rife with limestone. That might do it.
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Please pardon my spelling OCD, but I’ve seen this several times in the past few days, and it’s making me crazy: It’s voila, not viola. Viola is a slightly oversized violin, where voila is the French term that we generally use to mean, “There it is!”
Thanks for letting me get that out. Now we return to your regularly scheduled program.
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Also, Viola is the name of a Shakespeare character. Thank you Wayne, I have the same issue.
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Odd, I’ve always heard it pronounced, vy-o-la.
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No. It’s pronounced Vooahlah
I don’t normally make a fuss, since I suspect it’s now standard American English. But I die a little inside each time. Kind of like when people say capitol, when they mean capital. It’s fussy, but the image conjured up by “The army took tanks through the capitol” makes me want to rinse my brain in bleach.
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Stupid question, what does capitol mean then, I always assumed it was a British spelling of capital or something, (like grey and gray) because I have never seen used in any other way than your example.
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No. Capitol is the building in DC.
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Yup. And a few particular buildings made in imitation thereof, in some of the state capitals (note spelling).
And, of course, the citadel of ancient Rome on the Capitoline Hill. This usage of ‘capitol’ is, of course, the original, and comes ultimately from the Etruscan word meaning ‘place where Gauls come to buy gandersauce’.
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Origin:
1690–1700, Americanism; < Latin capitōlium temple of Jupiter on Capitoline hill, Rome, taken to be a derivative of caput head; replacing Middle English capitolie < Old North French
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/capitol
To me, "capitol" is the city/building where the National/State government is located/meets. Such as "Jefferson City is the State Capitol of Missouri." I've also seen it spelled State "capital" – a usage that given the root derivative word is in my view incorrect.
"Capital" is used in all other non-governmental usages, such as "Capital idea", capital investment, capital letter, etc
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What Michael said– I was taught Capitol for State, US Capitols. Capital letters, capital idea, capital is used for everything else. Must be an Americanism.
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I’ve also seen it spelled State “capital” – a usage that given the root derivative word is in my view incorrect.
No. ‘Capitol’ refers only to a building and never to a city. London is the capital of England; Paris is the capital of France; Washington, D.C., is the capital of the United States; Pierre is the capital of South Dakota. In every one of these cases, capital is spelt with an A, never with an O (except by Americans who have homophone trouble).
Quoth grammarist.com:
‘Capitol has two very specific definitions (outside ancient Rome): (1) a U.S. state legislature building, and (2) the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. State capitols are located in the capital cities of U.S. states, and the Capitol is located in the capital city of the U.S.’
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Yes, it’s used by Americans, but it’s WRONG.
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If the Capitol of England is in London, then London is the CAPITOL CITY of England because it CONTAINS the “Capitol.”. I rest my case.
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London doesn’t have a building called “the capitol.” So, revise your assumptions and start again, sir. (I have fish, and I know how to throw it.)
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“Yes, it’s used by Americans, but it’s WRONG.”
This is why I sometimes claim to speak American, not English.
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It’s still wrong in American English.
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Yep–I spoke American for years and then English in Canada and South Africa, and then back to American. ;-)
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Ummmm… ‘scuse me but you assume we don’t know the difference. I do and deliberately use “viola” because, a. I think it’s funny, and b. on Julie Czerneda’s sff.net newsgroup we did it that way for a long time. It was a shared group funny thing. (If you’re feeling masochistic, google “viola czerneda” ;-b
Remember – some write for a living, and some mangle words just to hear them scream. I’m a mangler.
;-D
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Oh, I’ve been known to do this for fun — BUT beware that at some point you’ll forget it’s fun… Also, it’s only funny if you add (or piano, or even guitar.)
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I know the difference, I just missed it. I thought it looked wrong, but spell check didn’t flag it and I didn’t bother to run it past google to make sure I was using the word I intended. Vowels have always given me trouble.
In penance I shall drop a book on my toes. I think “The Collected Wisdom of Barack Obama” meets with the severity of my offense.
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You could also try “Grammarians with a sense of humor, the complete collected works thereof.” ;)
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You do know that while ‘The Collected Wisdom of Barack Obama’ is the world’s shortest book, it is always printed together with 27,000 pages of federal regulations on how to implement it. I think your toes deserve — I was going to say a break, but that might be misconstrued.
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I only have the abridged version. I live in a condo, not a palace.
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Ah, so you have the 27,000 pages of regulations without the original wisdom?
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How could anyone tell?
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Eh… Yours just happened to be the instance that the spinning wheel of dysfunction stopped on “Can’t take it any more!” for me. But yes, the basic assumption is that the person typing it doesn’t know the difference. I did try to make it as un-abrasive as I could.
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Besides – Voila is French. Je ne parle pas francais. ;-D
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If you speak modern English, you’re spending half the time speaking French whether you like it or not. Deplorable but true.
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P.S. to which: ‘Viola’ isn’t any more English than ‘voilà’. If you want the English for voilà, it is ‘Lo!’
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Or, in some dialects, “… and Bob’s your uncle!”
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Ca n’est pas mon probleme, mon petit. Si tu voles jouer avec les paroles, il faut n’etre pas mechant. Tu n’es pas trop vieux pour aprendre.
(I probably misspelled the whole thing. But I can still speak it! What else is new. I misspell in all languages. These days I spell my maiden name “the Almeida” instead of “de Almeida.)
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Pas mal, Madame. On écrit «veux» et «apprendre», et surtout on dit «ma problème». Vous le faites mieux que moi; je ne parle pas un seul mot de français, seulement un petit peu de Montréalais.
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It seems to be a rule that anyone correcting someone else on a point of grammar will make a grammatical mistake themselves, so I’m extremely hesitant to write this in French since my French is so rusty with disuse. But I grew up speaking it at native-fluency levels, so…
En fait, le mot «problème» est masculin, donc «mon problème» est entièrement correct. Bien que notre hôte de blog soit une femme, l’adjectif possessif s’accorde avec l’objet, pas le sujet. Donc, «mon problème».
Et au lieu de «Ça n’est pas mon problème», il serait mieux de dire «Ce n’est pas mon problème». Les deux phrases sont grammaticalement correctes, mais le dernier tombe plus jentiment sur l’oreille que le premier.
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Well, there’s my mistake. It’s gentiment, not jentiment. :-)
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Um.. it’s possible probleme is feminine in Canadian French. I’ve noted such differences between Mexican and Castelian Spanish. It always gives me whip lash to hear Mexicans speak.
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It always gives me whip lash to hear Mexicans speak.
There are two big points involved in that– one is that Mexican Spanish is different, and two is that a lot of the Mexicans that you’ll meet in the states speak really, really bad Mexican Spanish. Like, my Marines that learned their abilities in that language from visiting Grandma in Mexico are more intelligible.
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Plus we had one professor who taught Mexican form of Spanish, who said that the Mexican form was actually a mix of a couple of languages (Aztec among them) which changed the language a lot.
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My first encounters with Spanish were from a northern New Mexican teacher, then a Mexican instructress, and then a Puerto Rican and a Galician. Apparently, I picked up the worst from each teacher. :)
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When we were in France, my wife laughed at my three decade old decayed French as much as the locals scorned it.
But she never had to eat anything that showed up at the restaurant table unexpectedly … no matter what stories she tells.
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Half the fun of going to a foreign country is finding a hole in the wall place and ordering by pointing randomly at the menu. Worked well in Nagasaki, not so much in Hong Kong.
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Ah, yes. Adventures in Foreign eating when you can’t read the menu. “The sauteed dog was good, but the cat stew was a sublime experience?”
I sed the point and ask what things were… if no English speakers were around, I’d either look around at other tables and point, or go upscale. I remember one restaurant where the place got an unexpected stage show as the waiter pantomimed the animal involved making appropriate noises. The waiter was vastly appreciated by all.
In most of the Asian places I ate, the food was pretty invariably noodles with chicken or fish. Beef was AWOL. Pig was fairly easy to discern. Ordering from the menu sight unseen could get you such delicacies as balut (Philippines – and it wasn’t bad!). :-D
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We did that in Prague on several occasions because for some reason, I could never pick up a word of Czech. Not even “thank you”.
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Never ask what you are eating. It spoils the fun and probably your appetite. If I had known what went in morsilla, I would never have found out how wonderful it was.
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I occasionally let my wife pick something from the menu for me because she knows what I will and won’t eat… (Someone else can have my hot peppers if we ever dine at the same table.. and if they’re raw, the green and red ones too.) She picked me something chickeny a couple of days ago at the Olive Garden… it was not bad at all!!! Tasty! Which is why I let her pick something as I always choose the boring stuff that I’ve had before. She travels a lot and knows what the foreign squiggles mean on the menu…
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Well, you’ve hit my hot buttons today.This “best schools” crap to me is just crap. The thing you get from the “best schools” are connections, based on what I have seen, not an education. But perhaps if my family had money maybe i’d seen it differently. But intelligece is not a guard against doing stupid things, you just are more clever in your rationalization. And a personal not to Sarah: you have my utmost respect in learning English. I don’t know how I would have learned it if it wasn’t my first langauage (not that I knoiw that well now).
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English was easy for me. German was nightmarishly difficult. Would I have stuck with German if the US had spoken it? Who knows? There are limits to the human will power ;)
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I took German my first year of College, I got a D. I had Spanish in HS,so I would have done better. (They didn’t have Portuguese)
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Few places do. I’m teaching the kids Portuguese — in all of our copious free time. What’s sad is how happy my mom is when older boy says two words in Portuguese at her. “Oh, he has such a good accent.” (And the vocabulary of a two year old. Never mind. We’ll get there.)
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Good for you. The only colleges that teach portuguese inLA are UCLA and USC. Even the local CC teach Chinese & Japanese. (To the colleges) You guys ever hear of Brazil? who will be as important as China and Japan?
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More important than China, I imagine. But Brazil is a lot like a super-intelligent crazy sheep — picking up on the stuff up thread. They’re brilliant and full of promise and useful stuff, but they are unable to keep from killing themselves in interesting ways. Maybe this time will be different, who knows?
I’ll note even my relatives who live there are way more energetic and crazier than the Portuguese branch. Something in the water, perhaps.
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And like China, Brazil is in love with hyper-inflation! I thought it was appropriate when they made their oil for plastic combs deal with China – denominated in the two country’s national currencies instead of the “petro-dollar.” Now we wait to see who out-inflates whom… ;-D
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However, with one kid going into Medicine (knock on wood and the creek don’t rise. we are navigating the process blind, and he might get tired of it and just go into chemistry and into the petroleum industry) and the other into aerospace (again, knocking on wood, since this is the genius who blows up tests by getting “blank mind syndrome.” The worst part is he gets it from me, only I learned to control it.) IF Brazil doesn’t blow itself up, Portuguese might be a great asset.
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If one travels in Brazil one is in danger of experiencing “zero shock”. In the early 70’s, IIRC, a beer cost 20,000 Cruzieros, or 20 “novo Cruzieros.
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I’m a stamp collector. I see it repeated in all the Latin American countries. Peru had a run in the 1980’s, I believe, that rivaled Weimar Germany. Argentina has done it several times since the 1960’s. It also seems to be something that happens in Africa and the far east. China went through it in the 1940’s. Marcos tried to do it in the Philippines, but failed, much as he failed in everything else.
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I recall my dad and my uncle going to Mexico to get my grandpa out of the hospital in the 80’s (I believe). They packed around a wallet full of 50,000 peso bills (about $20) at that time the exchange rate was something like 28 pesos=1 US cent.
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Argentina is doing it again. Exactly the same way as last time, including making noises about the Falklands.
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Only this time they lost their tall ship to a hedge fund!!! ;-D
They made the mistake of sailing it into a port that allowed the seizure of sovereign assets by defaulting states… and the hedge fund folks seized it and tossed the 300 +/- sailors off. When Ms K protested and demanded it back, the Hedge people said, “Sure. When you pay your bills!”
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No, I hadn’t heard that.
Is it time for the joke that Argentina’s Navy is thinking of calling their next battleship “Dolar Blue” because they wanted something they know will keep floating?
(“Dolar Blue” is the Argentine black market peso/dollar exchange rate, and is in contrast to the fixed official rate)
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There’s an interesting saying about that: “Brazil is the country of the future…and it always will be.”
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Yep. I will disclaim here that all the history I know about Brazil is from Brazilian novels. One of these days I’m going to write something about US, the Aspergers country, because you guys have NO idea how much more we think/write/read about our (and other) history than anyone else in the world. The best books on Portuguese History I’ve ever read are published in the US, for instance — and they’re available to laymen which is a switch from almost anywhere else. I’m sure there are books on Brazilian history, it’s just finding them systematically, etc, would be hard.
But the feeling I have of it is of eras of doing all the right moves, then suddenly and inexplicably throwing it all away. I realize the same can be said of the US, but the more … organized way of life allows us to recover faster. Or recover, at any rate.
That said, Brazil has a ton more future than Japan, just in demographic terms, and probably than China, which has been caught in a recursive loop for thousands of years.
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… China, which has been caught in a recursive loop for thousands of years.
I wonder what effect the quiet but widespread growth of Christianity in China in recent decades* is going to have on that recursive loop? It was the Christian ideas about the equality of all men that laid the foundation for the Declaration of Independence, for example.
* I don’t have any solid numbers to quote, but I’ve heard lots of stories, the kind where all the names are pseudonyms. And the impression I’ve gathered from the stories I’ve heard is that of smoldering coals underneath the floorboards of a building, slowly spreading a quiet, unnoticed fire. Eventually it will break through, at which point almost everyone will be surprised by how widespread the flames are — but at the moment, it’s still just under the surface, and not really visible. Yet. It’ll be fascinating to watch, though not necessarily comfortable to watch from up close, what happens when those flames start licking against the support beams of the house, which are the things holding up the aforementioned recursive loop. And now that my metaphor is so atrociously mixed that it’s going down in its own metaphorical flames, I should probably quit while I’m ahead**.
** Hey! Who yelled “too late!” out there in the crowd? I have a dead fish and I’m not afraid to use it!
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*Smile*
Christianity does have a way of changing terms, doesn’t it?
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I’m just speculating that a coherent and consistent history of Brazil could be difficult to find or write. Not only are they addicted to inflation, but also to also to revolution, and as you probably know, successful revolutions not only change the future, but also the past. But maybe they don’t have all that many of them… I’m perhaps swayed by the occurrence of one of them while I was there…
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I took German and Spanish back to back (as in 3rd hour and 4th hour), because language majors were supposed to take at least two semesters of a language outside of their primary. The Spanish prof finally sighed and told me that he could deal with Spanglish, but Deutschpañol was not working. When I forgot a word I’d flip to German instead of English, and did not realize it.
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In the Latin languages you might have got away with that most of the time… Of course, the word might be spelled the same, but you’d have to adjust the pronunciation… a bit… sometimes…
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Intelligence — or, more narrowly, the kind of focused cleverness involved in standardized tests or getting good at chess — is not a guard against doing stupid things. (It is positively correlated with making various sensible life decisions, but that does not make it a magic aegis.) But for doing some useful technically demanding things, focused cleverness does seem to be an important and rare prerequisite. Furthermore, SAT-like tests seem to be a tolerably good measure of it. (At least, they’re a tolerably good measure at the low end. In my experience the usual problem is not that someone clever gets a terrible SAT score, but that a clever person with an SAT score around 800 can be so much less clever than an extremely clever person who also has an SAT score around 800.) I’ve spent a lot of time working with software and algorithms and computer calculations, and with the people involved with them. It’s not too uncommon for someone technically frighteningly good at software to have been academically unsuccessful. It seems uncommon, though, for someone technically frighteningly good to have done poorly on the math SATs.
I’ve never worked with quant finance, but several times I’ve encountered folk-knowledge claims that a similar pattern holds in some subfields there. In a book (_The Poker Face of Wall Street_) which includes some of this folklore, I was amused by this observation on different kinds of intelligence:
I’m pretty good at focused cleverness, and I sometimes think how historically lucky I am that modern tech has created so many rewarding technically demanding practical niches for focused cleverness. I think in 1513 there were a few cryptographers and maybe a few astronomy/navigation/surveying specialists and, um, maybe not much else unless perhaps fields like architecture were much more technically demanding then. (“He designed a bridge that stayed up! Yay!!!!”)
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Does the SAT still measure this well since it was changed? I’m skeptical.
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About all I have heard about the changes in the new math SAT is that it has been renormed so that it’s significantly easier to pin the needle, but I don’t know how much that changed, and I don’t know about any other changes there might be. I have the impression it was not badly broken otherwise, mostly because reading people — including grouchy cynical technical people — involved with admissions, it sounded as though the bigger problems with changes in the new SAT were elsewhere, not in the changes within the math SAT.
For either SAT, old or new, I’m not trying to make a terribly high claim for the resolving power: my impression is something like a 100 point difference made a serious risk that two students would have trouble learning material at the same qualitative speed when competently taught, and 200 points made it a pretty safe bet. (Here by “qualitative speed” I mean something like given N weeks of H hours of study per week, most of one group of students will be able to learn something — e.g. facility working with Fourier transforms and all the calculus and linear algebra prerequisites — while few of the other will be able to come close.)
I expected the more controversial part of my claim was that to me the math SAT seemed to be a decent measure (or proxy measure, if you like) of something real, not just some arbitrary abstraction chosen by ETS and not just ability to do arbitrary makework in school. I claim that if you investigate someone who does particularly well on a freestyle-in-execution but objectively-specified objectively-scored hard-edged technical challenge (e.g., some of the ICFP programming contest problems, or Perl golf, or breaking a cryptosystem, or implementing a disk driver, or learning to play Pente or Othello and beating the rest of the class or a standard computer opponent) you may sometimes find the person had trouble in school, or was evaluated as unpromising by educators or parents or peers, but you’ll seldom find the person couldn’t get a good math SAT score. (And if you do, it’s more likely to be because of a weird horror story about their elementary math education than because of brokenness of the SAT.)
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Oh, it’s changed A LOT. I know it has an essay and I can tell you the prompts are interesting. That alone is a massive change.
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Mensa stopped taking ACT scores in 1989 and SAT scores in 1994. I was a local officer during that period, not part of the decision, but mailings from the national office were quite clear that the changes in the tests invalidated them as any sort of reliable IQ test.
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I don’t speak or write in English. I do both in English, American Variant, which seems to me to be a different language from the natal version and also from the other variants. I don’t think I told y’all about nearly being tossed out of an Australian restaurant when I asked for a “napkin.”.
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Eh. Try having your toddler ask for a knife in Portuguese in a US restaurant. (look it up, with sound if possible.)
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ROFL
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Can’t find an audio – is that a hard “c”?
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yep and the a is pronounced uh
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/gigglesnort Mia nossa…
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I’m not sure I overall agree with the notion that hard work always trumps “natural” talent. To be perhaps immodest–I take computer science classes, alongside a lot of people who, despite having fulfilled the prerequisites, and presumably worked hard in doing so, are not nearly so well-prepared for the class as I am. I spend very little time studying outside class, am in fact something akin to the biggest slacker most people will ever meet, and yet as regards actual achievement, in CS at least, I do much better than most others. I cannot claim any particular credit for this. As nearly as I can tell, it in fact comes naturally.
This is not true of many other areas, and it’s certainly not a statement that “natural talent” is a dominating factor for real achievement. But it is actually true that some people are innately more capable than others. The gap can be bridged by work habits, but it never fully disappears.
Of course, the related “natural foods” idea–at least, as a simple predicate whereby “natural” is equated to “good”–is ridiculous. (Though I can sympathize with being leery around food like much of what’s sold cheaply nowadays that never came any closer to “natural” than some rDNA cultures; but the fault with those things is not so much their origins as that they’re overwhelmingly not even trying to imitate proper food.)
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I’m not saying it always trumps natural talent — I’m saying natural talent alone is nothing. Note you’re taking classes, not just programming through knowing it “naturally”
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I’ll give you an exception where natural talent beats any amount of schooling: War. As JFC Fuller pointed out, the days of great generalship began to end when the days of formal military schooling began to ascend.
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Hmmmm, I have to think about that one. Part of the problem of course is arguing who/what was “great generalship” for which we could spend pages.
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Alexander, Hannibal, Scipio, Casear, Belisarius, Shaka, for starters. Napoleon and Wellington for some somewhat more moderns, though most of Napoleon’s Marshalate was quite good, too. Name some since then who were the equals of those. Please do NOT mention Rommel, who was a good leader and a fair tactician but, nowhere near in the same class.
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With the institutional constraints on who gets through to flag rank these days, how many folks in the profession of arms who have “great general” potential just chuck it all before they get past O-5 and go do something else?
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That’s quite possibly a factor, too, but Fuller noticed it about a century ago.
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I attended the AF Academy for a year, and got to know quite a few cadets well. Most of them that graduated left the service after their commitments were up. The ones that stayed in usually made it to O-5, and a small percentage of them made full Colonel. Three of my classmates made general officer, and one of those made 4-star rank. The ones that made general were good managers, not good leaders. I can’t speak for the Army or Marines, but I’m sure the same is true of the Navy. I’m convinced the Air Force and Navy don’t want good leaders in flag rank, but good managers. That may be necessary in today’s military, but if we ever get involved in another war, I want some Pattons, Bradleys, Clarks, Nimitz, and Fletchers, not a bunch of paper-pushers and budget jugglers.
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If I remember correctly, in the 3.25 years I was on the Carrier we went through 5 Captains (06). Of them, 4 were excellent leaders, and all around good officers who made at least 07 (Rear Admiral – lower half?). The 5th was the kind of officer you speak of – a great paper pusher and administrator! They seem to have made him a deal – if he’d retire they’d give him Rear Admiral in the reserves… which is what he did.
I don’t think you can generalize USAF to the Navy. There you have two completely different cultures. I read with some frequency where some officer or other commanding something or other (ship, base, etc) is being “Relieved due to losing his CO’s confidence in his ability to command”. Some of these have been 06’s, and I saw a lot of 06’s retire, and even more 05’s, and lately since the CdrInCheese “O” – there have been 07s and up “retiring.”
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Crazy alternate hypothesis.
Suppose the distribution of ‘latent’ Great Captains is more or less random. Such that more population means more latents.
Perhaps the wars have gotten bigger, shorter and fewer, per unit population, over the time frame in question?
Idea here being that fewer opportunities mean fewer develop.
Yes, endemic warfare in the Third World. Might not count if the screwed up stuff that keeps it Third World, also gets in the way of doing things with the talent even if it were to develop. Where are the rewards for doing more than needed to take care of one and one’s.
Yes, internal crime in the First World. Training the ability in such an environment might well lead in directions that do not result in the formal battlefield of war.
I dunno. I don’t have the numbers, and I’ve hardly thought and checked enough to be certain of my categories.
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Funny you should say that. In one area where I am _completely_ devoid of humility (I hope the only one), frankly, I’ve never met anybody, nor even heard of anybody, who can train troops as well as I can. Lots of different reasons for that. It’s possibly not insiginifcant that the guy who wrote Common Sense Training and I not only are both Boston Latin Alums, and both 10th Infantry Regiment vets, and both had our first overseas assignment at Fort Davis, Panama. Anyway, I mentioned this particular conceit once, to one of my law partners when I was still in practice. He thought about it and answered, “Nope. Somewhere, quite possibly in a little diseased village in Angola that nobody but its inhabitants ever heard of, squatting over a hole, there is someone with more natural talent than you have, who’s just never had the opportunity.” I thought about that for a bit and, once the pain went away, I had to admit, “Well…yeah…maybe…somewhere.”
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Well it was a decent example but for the fact that Angola would have given that guy an opportunity.
Maybe Tonga would have been a better example.
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The natural rejoinder to that is “Somebody has to be the best, why not me?”
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And here we insert “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray, which is pretty darned near the world’s first alt-history poem (except all the ones about guys/girls who got dumped and what might have been).
“Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.”
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Well, that’s the issue. Who were great leaders, who were great tacticians and who were great strategists? (Avoiding for the moment the argument about the intermediate skill of operational art).
Was good ol’ Gaius Julius Caesar more than a great leader and a fair tactician himself? I wouldn’t argue with you about Rommel who was a great corps commander tops. Frankly, I find a lot of parallels in Julius Caesar and Rommel, in that the impression both give me are commanders whose skill was being sure to be at the key point at the key moment and rallying their forces at the decisive moment.
Scipio and Wellington were good at figuring out how to match their forces strengths to the enemy’s weaknesses. They were good at the creation of favorable battles.
One can wonder about what happens when you take one of them out of their time and pull them forward or push them back. Napoleon at Tanenberg? Manstein during the Hundred Days? Rommel at Gaugemela?
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How about this as a definition? A great general is one who didn’t fight the last war.
Full disclosure: my only exposure to military history is a biography of Paul Lettow and the movies that get shown on Memorial Day.
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Defining greatness in a field commander is a toughie, for a lot of different reasons. One is that war is the art that subsumes all other arts and sciences, to include the plastic arts and music. Another is that you can’t take a simple idea like: who won? and give it much credence; there are too many other factors that can go into winning. Not least of these is luck. You can’t call someone other than great merely for losing, either. See above. And you can’t narrow it down to just one or a couple of the difference levels of war; the great commander deals with all of them, or at least the ones that matter at the time. And, above all, you can’t call someone modern great because modern propaganda machines insist he is.
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Ah, but Kali, the idea that “fighting the last war” is automatically bad can be deceiving. Some things in warfare change a great deal with new technology and some things do not. A fun exercise can be comparing the different rates of advance by armies in the field from … oh, say the Napoleonic era in Europe, to the rates of advance in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 (adding in trains), to WWI (especially the early advances in the first months of the Germans in Belgium and France) to that of WWII. You’d be surprised how close they remained over nearly a century and a half of what you’d think was astonishingly rapid technological progress.
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I can see the virtue of not tossing out tactics that have worked in the past–and that’s an interesting point about rates of movement–so as an absolute rule, “fighting the last war” doesn’t work. I suppose I meant greatness in the ability to read a current situation and adapt to it–ie, not fighting in trenches year after year, no cavalry charges against tanks, infantry squares against guerillas, etc
hmm, I seem to have picked up more from the movies than I thought.
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Oddly enough, it is still the doctrine of everybody who counts that you continue to improve positions when stationary / defending. This includes – oh, yes – connecting your fighting positions with…_trenches_. Which then become a mostly technical, tactical and log problem for the enemy to root you out of. So it isn’t the commander’s sole choice whether he’s stuck in trenches or not. Note that we got stuck in Korea, a third of a century after WW I.
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I didn’t mean for you to feel that I was saying you were “wrong”. Far from it. More that I wanted to point out that there are some constants in warfare. Among them, you point out the issue of combined arms – that some arms have advantages/disadvantages against others like cavalry, infantry and such, and that a force that has mixed elements does better than a force of all one type. This was something demonstrated as far back as Alexander and remains a constant.
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The “stalemate” of WWI was largely an issue that for a period of time defense dominated over the offense because weapons got very powerful relatively, while tactics and communications didn’t keep up. So attacks faltered from a lack of good communications with the attacking forces, artillery was powerful but difficult to shift quickly because of poor communications, etc. So for a short period, defense was “stronger” than attack. But those things are very ephemeral in warfare. At the very end of the war, the Germans perfected infiltration style tactics that broke the stalemate but too late for them.
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The problem was more complex than that, having attributes of tefchnology – not just MGs and wire, but at least as significant, artillery – logistics, field engineering, the superiority of wire communication over, say runners and pigeons, the superiority of rail over horse, etc. There was also something else that led to things bogging down enough for the troops to begin serious entrenchment, and I’m not sure that it’s widely understood (read, i am _very_ sure it is not widely understood). See, the size of a corps was set by the need for horse drawn wagons in the rear to be able to reach the point of the corps column, overnight. That set a finite limit to the size of a corps, such that it could only have two divisions, each generally of two brigades of two regiments. Two of anything doesn’t maneuver for crap; it bludgeons. And that bludgeoing against bludgeoning meant no one was moving anywhere. And so they started to dig, as we would today…
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Hmmm, Tom, a corps of two divisions (as opposed to a triangular corps?) as a factor in the German advance bogging down? That one escapes me.
I agree with the rest obviously, especially communications as my point was that in WWI attacking forces so quickly moved out of contact with their higher order leaders while defenders kept better comm’s through the attack.
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Well, contemplate why we have triangular organizations (or did, til the current organizational idiocy, which is about to be killed, I gather, Il hamdu ‘lilah.). With two you get a left and a right or a front and a rear. You do not get a fix, a maneuver, and an exploiter, say, for example. You also tend to get too much supervision of subordinates by superiors in the critical training period before the outbreak of war, which tends to diminish inititiative and innovativeness.
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Mr. Kratman:
That set a finite limit to the size of a corps, such that it could only have two divisions, each generally of two brigades of two regiments.
This is odd; it doesn’t graph at all well onto my understanding of the British Army’s organizational structure. A British division, at the outset of the war, had three brigades of four battalions each; the regiment was not a front-line unit but a recruiting and training unit. A regiment of the regular army had two battalions, of which one was normally used for Imperial service and the other kept at home in reserve; the divisions of the BEF were composed of the home battalions of many different regiments, thrown together almost at random in groups of twelve. Later in the war, infantry divisions were reduced from twelve battalions to nine.
Nor were corps limited to two divisions: the Canadian Corps, for instance, comprised four divisions, and ANZAC began with two divisions plus two cavalry brigades serving as corps troops, and was later augmented. I find it difficult to see how the British structure contributed to the kind of operational inflexibility you are talking about — yet the British had as much trouble as anyone mounting a useful offensive.
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Really talking about how the war began and was conducted in its early stages, and why it bogged down into a stalemate. Yes, eventually everyone (except us, long story) went to three regiments of three battalions. By then it was too late.
The BEF, however large it looms in Brit minds, was fairly small change in 1914. And I’m not sure any Canadian formations were in action in August through October, 1914. If you know of some…
The important players in France were the Huns and the Frogs. They were organized similarly, in a way that some like to call square, but was actually flat. This was also true of the BEF, which consisted of three corps of two divisions, each, plus the one cavalry division.
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P.S. to my last: I could not remember the corps structure of the BEF in 1914, so I had to look it up. There were six infantry divisions and five cavalry brigades, divided into two corps. In October 1914, enough reinforcements arrived to necessitate the formation of two new corps, but the average seems to have remained at around three divisions per corps.
What the French were doing at this time, of course, is another matter. I do know that the French Army was at least partly based on two-division corps, but then they had so many divisions that the army replaced the corps as the really important organizational unit. I’m not sure how an army of six divisions, for instance, in the circumstances of 1914, is less manoeuvrable if divided into three two-division corps than if divided into two three-division corps.
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Three corps of two divisions, and for much the same reasons; you had to be able to feed the front from the rear and horse drawn wagons could only get so far.
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Three corps of two divisions, and for much the same reasons;
My source is quite clear that III Corps was not formed until October, at which point additional divisions had arrived from Britain. The original order of battle, it says, called for six infantry divisions divided into two corps.
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No, formed 31 August, 1914, _brken_up_ in october, 1914. http://books.google.com/books?id=hzUZ-26KYQ4C&pg=PA86&lpg=PA86&dq=iii+corps+bef+1914&source=bl&ots=RtNGzQxeZT&sig=bnKJfgwkMX0_FScLfYZZ8ttu2lk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=eNFPUfzqJbXA4APbx4DoBQ&ved=0CE8Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=iii%20corps%20bef%201914&f=false
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No, formed 31 August, 1914, _brken_up_ in october, 1914.
Very good, Sir: the source you cited is definitely better than the one I had.
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Ah, but Kali, the idea that “fighting the last war” is automatically bad can be deceiving.
It’s useless for actual planning– when you unpack it, it just means “did something that worked last time but didn’t work this time,” while never including the stuff that worked both times. (Which would generally be most of it.)
There’s not a precise counter-version for “changed stuff that didn’t need changing and got folks killed doing it,” and I suspect even this company is too polite to use the language that would be suitable for discussing such hair-brained notions…..
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I’ve heard Hoyt use the word Obama many times here, without apologizing for it, so I figure the language is acceptable usage here.
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*lol*
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Not MANY times, and only when MAD. I usually call him less shocking things,with four letters.
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“The so called maximum-flow problem, or “max flow,” is one of the most basic problems in computer science: First solved during preparations for the Berlin airlift, it?s a component of many logistical problems and a staple of introductory courses on algorithms. ”
http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.aspx?NewsId=28450
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Really talking about how the war began and was conducted in its early stages, and why it bogged down into a stalemate.
Well, if you’re talking about that, it has very little to do with the T.O. of any of the armies involved. It was a fundamental deficiency of the Schlieffen Plan. In order to deliver superior numbers at the critical point on the front, they had to advance troops through Northern France significantly in excess of the capacity of the French road network. This analysis is by the late John Keegan:
‘For the “eight extra corps”, needed by Schlieffen as his plan’s clinching device, to arrive at the decisive place of action, they would actually have needed to march along the same roads as those occupied by the corps already existing: a simple impossibility.’
The result was that the German Army was not able to deliver enough troops to defeat the French, but more than enough to repel any French counterattack; which means that a stalemate at that point was inevitable. After both sides entrenched during that winter, I don’t believe details of corps organization could have made much difference, given the technical impossibility of maintaining communications during a large-scale engagement. No doubt you are right about the weakness of a ‘square’ or ‘flat’ formation, but I don’t see any point at which it made a material difference in practice.
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Sorry about this; I got lost in the nesting of comments. This was meant to be part of my long and boring exchange with Tom Kratman re corps organization.
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Yes it does, if those TOs prevent decisive maneuver. There were all kinds of flaws to the Schlieffen Plan, not least that, since the Germans knew they would have to depend on local forage, and couldn’t guarantee that the war would commence at a time of the year when forage would be available, they were simply linking their national fate to wishful thinking. As it turned out, though, there was forage, but not as much as ideally needed. The shortages particularly affected cavalry, which is to say, recon. Notwithstanding, though, if you look at the engagements, you will find a distressing lack of what we like to think of as maneuver, and a lot of bludgeoning. Why, for example, did they have to destroy the BEF through sheer bloody minded frontal attack? Nobody to maneuver. You can, if you wish, feel free to ignore every reason why everyone (but, again, us) went triangular. But maneuverability was the biggie for engagements at that level.
You’re doing something kind of odd, here, which is attributing to one thing, insufficient troops (which isn’t actually true), something that required a great many factors to bring about. One of those factors, generally missed, is that the formations themselves were badly designed to fight a battle of maneuver.
I’ve noticed with Keegan a distressing penchant for trying to win his case semantically, by redefining things. This got to be particularly obvious with his book on intelligence. In this case, it’s preposterous to argue for more troops on the roads than the roads could hold, when you never really get to that point. More troops on the roads doesn’t happen, because they starve before they get overcrowded. You’ll see this a lot with amateur criticisms of the Germans’ faiulure to designate a main effort – Moscow, presumptively – in 1941 and to throw everything into that. it is an _amateur’s_ criticism, because when the existing supply net is already maxed out, adding troops does not increase combat power.
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One of those factors, generally missed, is that the formations themselves were badly designed to fight a battle of maneuver.
On the other hand, if the formations on both sides were equally badly designed, that factor could not have been decisive for either side. And on the third hand, the density of troops on the front even in 1914 was so great that there was very little room for manouevre even if it had been tried. When the enemy’s position (on either side) is all front and no flank from the Channel to Switzerland, it’s not easy to find the necessary conditions for a battle of manoeuvre.
In this case, it’s preposterous to argue for more troops on the roads than the roads could hold, when you never really get to that point. More troops on the roads doesn’t happen, because they starve before they get overcrowded.
Nevertheless, Schlieffen was calling for an impossible density of troops to deliver his knockout blow before Paris. It’s academic whether they could have been fed or not, when it was not even physically possible for them to be sent where he needed them. Eventually, such numbers of troops were delivered to the front, and the transport network was sufficient to keep them supplied. It just wasn’t sufficient to carry all those troops and their equipment forward at one time. They were just supposed to — *POOF* — magically appear at the front when they were needed. One hears of the ‘angel of Mons’. Schlieffen would have needed a ‘magician of the Marne’.
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No, you’re missing the effect, which was, indeed, not decisive for either side, but tended to make both sides bog down.
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John Keegan was a fine chronicler and a good aggregator but he wasn’t an analyst at all unfortunately. The best he did at it was maybe Six Armies in Normandy and that had its weaknesses. He was very weak otherwise in the interplay between an armies’ doctrine, TOE and weapons and how each dictated the other.
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But of course, logistics hadn’t yet been recognized as as a science that was more important than troop dispositions and battle formations. You can have all the troops you need, and all the ammunition they need, but without the foundation of sound logistical planning and execution as the floor they stand on, they will be wasted and you will lose not only the battle, but the war.
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Picray, in WWI certainly logistics were understood for their dominance of all war and battle planning. The scale of logistics in WWI were certainly daunting but its importance was not ignored. Certain nationalities had more efficient staff organizations to carry them out of course.
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(sorry – this ended up being posted above this thread – it belongs here… in the corps org and the logistics discussion.)
“The so called maximum-flow problem, or “max flow,” is one of the most basic problems in computer science: First solved during preparations for the Berlin airlift, it?s a component of many logistical problems and a staple of introductory courses on algorithms. ”
http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.aspx?NewsId=28450
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Tom, I wonder if that has more to do with the quality of “formal military schooling” than talent vs schooling. I suspect that even those “born great generals” have some training/schooling if only from listening to old soldiers.
Mind you, I’m more of an “armchair Lieutenant” than anything. [Smile]
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Who did Shaka have to listen to in jumping from the stone age of war right into the classical age? Hannibal understudied Hamilcar…but Hamilcar never pulled off a Trasimene, a Trebia, or a Cannae.
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I’m thinking at least some of the cause of the loss of modern great generalships is schooling, but I am looking at it from a different direction. With schooling these days producing many more passable generals, the ‘natural’ ones end up going up against trained to be fairly good generals, whereas in the past those ‘schooled’ generals wouldn’t have been schooled and would have been much lower quality, while the ‘natural’ ones without schooling would have been very nearly as good as they are with it.
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Shaka is a great example as he, unlike say Alexander, was both an innovator in weapons/tactics and a great general. Alexander was a great leader, a great tactician and pulled off some impressive operations but used a weapon system and formation developed and perfected by others (e.g., Philip of Macedon).
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there is a school of thought that “certificationalism” blocks advancement of those people that have either the innate understanding of the subject, or have the toolbox to out-manouver their opponents, in favor of students who can respond with the textbook answer. I do not have the background to argue tactics and history well, but my understanding is that most of the generals you named understood the capabilities of their troops, weapons and enemies, and employed tactics to allow the fight to done on their terms. This is a flexibility that is not really countenanced in an established, credentialed organization. Jared Diamond (and I don’t agree fully with him but…) implied that a civilization is a response to a problem posed by the environment and neighbors. When it cannot change to answer changing conditions it fails. My understanding is that this is what is happening with these generals, in setting up situations that their opponents were unable to respond to effectively. Their greatness was also that they got a lot of people go agree to try it in the first place. For that they did have to understand the basics, and have some sort of standing. If Napoleon did not know what it took to load a cannon or provide transportation for 1000 of them, and further understood the power politics of the time, he would not have been able to try. Belisarius had background coming up through the military in the Byzantine Empire, and it was his successes that had Justinian assign him as far away as possible.
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I think the problem may lie in determining what learning may influence the process of becoming a great general. I’m certain that a background in following instructions without question would not lead to a great general, but one of having no discipline at all wouldn’t do so, either. It’s possible that a well-trained artist may acquire the traits necessary, whereas a street fighter would not.
Note: I’m not familiar enough with the various histories to have even well-developed hypotheses, but sometimes the observations of a total outsider may inspire a re-evaluation.
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“I’m certain that a background in following instructions without question would not lead to a great general,”
I’d disagree. One needs to learn how to follow orders before they can give them. Learning to obey orders, even when you may not agree with them, is part of the training. Especially in combat situations, you don’t have time to hold a debate.
This was one of the reasons that I thought the Frenchman Capt Jean Luc Peckhard was a bad captain. But of course, the Star Trek scripts followed the current business school memes when it came to management styles. When Capt Kirk was wrestling Klingons (and females – same thing), the model in vogue was top-down pyramid. Capt PC was the “consensus” model of management… which isn’t worth a darn in a military situation.
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But But … Star Fleet isn’t a military organization. It’s an exploration organization … that just happens to have ships with big guns. [Wink]
Seriously, toward the end Roddenberry got pretty liberal (and nutty) about Star Trek. Including the idea that Star Fleet wasn’t *really* a military organization. [Sad Smile]
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And they had no money. (Rolls eyes.)
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Of course, they certainly understood the concept of money in the original series (they certainly met enough characters who were interested in it), except that knowledge mysteriously disappeared by the fourth movie (Voyage Home).
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Well if you have replicators that can produce nearly anything you need there is no scarcity. Without scarcity there is no need to exchange (why trade my spear for your basket when we can both go to the replicator and I can get a basket and you can get a spear), so there’s no need for a medium of exchange. The real question in the Star Trek universe isn’t why the Federation didn’t have money, it’s why the Ferengi did.
The answer is that some time in the late 21st century the Milky Way ran into a massive cloud of Plotonium, which causes the abilities and memories of people and equipment to vary based on the needs of the story.
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Oh, there would still be need for money. First of all, possibly energy, because that replicator is going to take a lot of it (possibly not necessary – the technology might obviate the need for purchasing power from someone else). Second, personal services (not everyone will be willing to let machines do everything for them that a human can, if only for prestige purposes). And third, designs. People will want to be compensated for creating something new. Unless you throw out intellectual property protections, that means money. If you DO throw them out, it will stifle creativity, because a lot of people need to be able to point to something and say, “I created that” (and be able to prove it).
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Wayne, you’re making sense and in the Politically Correct World, that’s forbidden. [Wink]
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I think you’re extrapolating current cultural ideas beyond a discontinuity. The Federation obviously had no problem with energy. I gather from a system of fusion reactors, solar satellites, and annihilation plants. It is too cheap to meter.
I don’t see how a personal services industry would survive, why would you work for someone if you didn’t need to? The obvious exceptions would be for things like Starfleet and medical services, where the work would be its own compensation.
And that leads into innovation. Money doesn’t imply credit, modern corporations profit greatly from the inventions of their employees and the patents they buy. The ST universe has a robust information system, it’s not unreasonable to expect that credit would be attached to the patterns, that the puzzle involved, and the utility of whatever they created would be enough to motivate the Scotty types. For all we know the replicator would display “Pattern designed by Alan Smyth of London, Earth” every time Picard says “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot”
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Sorry, that would be the end of civilization. Humans don’t work if they don’t HAVE to.
As for why services — we’re social animals. There will ALWAYS be prestige markers. ALWAYS. And people willing to give you the ability to reach the prestige markers for creating prestige markers.
Which is good, because, see above. The “We just all do what we want to” society wouldn’t work. (I don’t mean in the lack of laws sense, but in the work sense.)
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Professor Reynolds provided an article link this morning proving this point: http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/165493/
There are things money cannot buy that fans will give away freely for a chance to be near their idols.
If there is no money, if replicators make everything you want, what about collectibles? Would an original printing of Fantastic Four #1 or Detective Comics #27 … or Pride and Prejudice still be desired … or would it be more valuable for being original?
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It would be the end of civilization as we know it, yes. And I would imagine the suicide rate outside of Starfleet would be pretty high. Prestige markers are part of why I don’t think many personal services would survive, not many people would take on the low-status markers of servant if they didn’t have to. There would be exceptions, such as Mr. Sisko’s restaurant in DS9, but it’s obvious that he loves running a restaurant. The waiters are a different story, I blame the plotonium. A more likely scenario would be that your food would be brought to you by robots or the owner’s family.
I’ll admit I don’t know you personally, but I gather that you would write even if you weren’t getting paid.
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Um… I always thought I would. And I do. I just have a tendency not to FINISH things. If I’d gotten paid earlier, I’d have finished a lot more stuff. I was telling Dan that the one message you could give your 20 year younger self and all that? I’d tell her “Finish the damn things. There WILL be a market.”
You’re not looking at it the right way. You see “servant” as low, but a lot of people view servant as aggregating the prestige of someone higher. There is NO ONE as snobbish as the servant of a nobleman. (No, seriously. Not the noblemen, their servants.)
And I know, from watching wanna be writers that wanna be authors will eat a lot of dirt and be flunkies, int he hopes of one day being THE bestsellers. (I was never good at this, which explains a lot.)
But I meant civilization would NOT exist. Not suicides, no. Just a slow devolution to doing nothing, not even cleaning your own place. They have all these theories of poverty that ASSUME people are naturally strivers, but I think only a small percentage is. Most of us, furnished with the minimum we need will NOT strive for more. Several minimum income schemes have proven that. It’s the evolutionarily favored mode. Don’t go and kill more mammoth if you’re already full.
Even those of us with drives to create or learn (or both) become unfocused and lost without a material guideline to our activity. We drift. It’s human.
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Leaves a body thinking on what might be the Federation version of crack. Thionite? Soma?
If it were not for the legal issues it might be fun to write a novel expressing the dark underbelly of Federation space. Make Data a Chandleresque detective … or perhaps more Mickey Spillanian. Or perhaps write him as a broken down android, rotting from the inside out in Earth’s toxic environment, unable to leave his residence and dependent on Wesley Crusher to do his legwork.
I suspect that replicators are so expensive to use that only Star Fleet can employ them (Star Fleet having a ready supply of matter-energy conversion ongoing in their warp engines.) In the ST:TNG episode in which Picard visited his brother, didn’t we learn the family had a vineyard? If replicator technology is widely available on planet, why on Earth would ANYONE exert the effort required to produce drinkable wine?????? Sure, it is an art, it is a form of self-expression.
It is also a he!! of a lot of work for an artisanal product with little actual market likely! Think about it: if replicators are everywhere, why maintain shipping and distribution systems? Would you go to the store if the essentially identical product was available in the replicator in your kitchen? Heck, you probably wouldn’t even bother with pizza delivery.
Nor would Sisko run a restaurant just for the pleasure of cooking. Restaurant cooking isn’t that much fun; customers aren’t that much of a delight to deal with and the regulatory hassles would drive a man mad. He runs a restaurant because he flippin’ has to in order to survive. Taking pleasure in it is a safety mechanism, a form of limited insanity.
Most of the Earth of the Federation would resemble America’s inner cities where the welfare flows and the primary occupation of the denizens is staving off boredom.
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Nor would Sisko run a restaurant just for the pleasure of cooking. Restaurant cooking isn’t that much fun; customers aren’t that much of a delight to deal with and the regulatory hassles would drive a man mad. He runs a restaurant because he flippin’ has to in order to survive. Taking pleasure in it is a safety mechanism, a form of limited insanity.
My folks could get easier jobs that paid better, and for dang sure have better retirement plans (ones that don’t involve dropping dead). They’re still ranchers, though.
There’s some portion of humanity that will do hard, dangerous work because…because. This can also be seen in a wide range of jobs that don’t have money involved, from parenting to volunteer work. (The real stuff, not the “not for profit but I’ve got 300 grand take-home” type stuff.)
The reward of being famous can be a big draw, the “someone’s got to do it” effect, and if the place is as totalitarian as I think, then regulation isn’t much of a problem because it’s handled invisibly. The only time it would show up would be during something like the Founder Crisis.
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I haven’t had any experience with servants, and I certainly don’t have a servile personality, so I will defer to your judgment. But there is still a non-monetary reward for the servants.
Money isn’t the only thing that encourages effort. In fact, if you expand the scope beyond the human species it isn’t even the most common. I think civilization would survive absent money because men want to get laid, and women are attracted to high-status males.
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Of course not. Money is man-made and simply the most efficient form of status-marker and trading chip we’ve come up with. But mates, material goods and prestige goods are ultimately what everyone works for. Some of us were warped early, but still, in our deranged way we’re pursuing the same goals as everyone else. Or, as Heinlein put it, everything from nuclear physics to literature. There’s only one game in town and we’re all in it. (Also, it’s rigged,but if you don’t play you can’t win.)
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Replicators seem limited in scale — certainly we’ve no evidence otherwise. Stipulating that, how do you build a starship?
If not limited in size, why not build planets?
Energy seems to come from matter/anti-matter conversion, controlled by dilithium crystals. How do you acquire dilithium crystals? Buy/barter or steal?
If there is no money how do people gamble? If you assert there would be no gambling you are postulating major change in human nature.
Finally, Star Fleet is a benignly fascist society and of course its members have no money. All things are provided by the Fleet while in service.
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I think the scale is limited by the energy input and the size of the replicating chamber. There is talk later in the franchise of industrial replicators, which I take to mean ones large enough to build roughly truck-sized objects. In that case starships would probably be built in a manner similar to how we currently build warships. Large sections would be replicated in extra-large replicators then fitted together in spacedock. Most of that work could be automated (Though one character makes reference to thanking the shipfitters at Utopia Planatia).
It’s debatable if there were replicators in TOS, Trouble with Tribbles had the Federation shipping grain in bulk, and Star Trek VI showed the Enterprise galley. Anyway, there are plenty of references to mining colonies, and it is possible that the Federation still had money. By TNG dilithium could be replicated. As for gambling, the common currency outside the Federation was latinum, which supposedly couldn’t be replicated. But the thrill of gambling comes from the risk. Absent money gambling would disappear, but that risk-seeking would simply subsume into other activities, such as (in approximate order of risk) mountain climbing, orbital skydiving, and picking a fight with Klingons.
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Even in TNG, they were not able to replicate living things. In the TOS episode, they were transporting seed wheat, which they would have not been able to replicate in the later series. As for dilithium, they did not replicate it – Geordi explained to Scotty that they recrystallized it within the warp chamber, they didn’t replicate it, or they would not need to do that.
No gambling? People gamble without money now. They do it for points, for dares, for sex, for any number of things. They’re in it for the win, not for simply the adrenaline rush.
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I think they do replicate it, because I think the -D lost their crystals a couple of times. I think the alignment process was a PITA, hence the recrystallization. Or they could simply mine it like they did in TOS and use recrystallization to extend supplies.
Sure, people gamble without money, but they’re the minority. Otherwise Gambler’s Anonymous would have the easiest treatment job in the world, simply set up a casino/betting parlor that didn’t take any money. A methadone clinic for thrill junkies. And if people gamble without money now, why would eliminating money eliminate gambling?
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Yep. There will NEVER be a society without money. Though if lockmar really can give us fusion in 9 years, we might have a very CHEAP society.
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I can’t remember where it was, but at one point I was involved in kludging a functional economy that had no “money” and worked alright with Star Trek canon.
It involved infinite energy– basically, from the warp drives– a basic allowance of stuff that might be considered scarce, like the time it takes to teleport (Nog mentioned that he used teleporter credits to go to Sisko’s restaurant) and a barter economy for intangibles, like “hand made” or “served by others.”
Heavy, heavy use, but no measurement, of the “because I want to” factor. I’m pretty sure that Ben Sisko would be a cook as long as he could afford to do it, never mind making any kind of profit (bad pun!) from it. That’s also what made him a pain when they were taking “needed steps” to fight the Founders.
There’s got to be a very big population of folks who make you want to cry for the sheer plant-like failure to make anything of themselves. :(
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However, “hand made” is kind of pointless as far as barter goes, unless there is a way to tell the difference. IN Star Trek, the replicators were not 100% perfect copies, and their sensors could (presumably) tell the difference, but if they were perfect, there would be no way to tell.
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That is assuming FAR more rationality on the part of humanity than I have seen evidence for; my mom once got her entire CowBelle’s club roaring drunk on one pitcher of screw drivers and two or three of orange juice. (She switched it to OJ to make sure folks were safe when driving home, not to try a sociology experiment.)
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And it appears that you’re all missing the hole, the HUGE GAPING hole in the Star Trek universe. Sure… replicators and no money, and essentially free energy. But TANSTAAFL!!!!!! The replicators would have to have MASSIVE stores of raw organic and inorganic base building blocks, elements, and chemicals to “replicate” that “tea, Earl Grey, hot.” or the chicken a la chocolate sauce. Somewhere in that ship would have been HUGE bins of raw elements and organics – but in no episode that I saw did they EVER refer to taking on supplies for the replicators. They never fill them up or have them run dry and need refilling… I may have missed something, since I didn’t watch EVERY ST or ST NG, so it’s possible that that was there – but like the science of military logistics, that just ain’t sexy!
Star Trek was NOT Science Fiction. It was pure fantasy.
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Replicators converted energy to matter. Let the “natural foods” cultists ponder <I<that.
Maybe the replicators were a development of 3D printing, so raw materials need only consist of toner. And, of course, Star Fleet toilets provided a ready source of organic raw materials to be reshaped into food.
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Sigh.
NOT “<I<that." … that.
There’s something wrong with this keyboard.
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I wonder whether there might be grant money available to fund a study on the correlation of coffee/sodas spewed through nose and keyboarding errors.
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EWWW. (But it had occurred to me.)
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Actually, there were references to raw materials being held in an energy buffer of some kind. Of course, the show’s creators didn’t think about the fact that if they could store that much energy without blowing up the ship, they could use the same technology for shields vastly superior to the ones they had.
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George O Smith’s _Venus Equalateral_ universe had matter replication. They wound up basing value on uniqueness and personal services. The Uniqueness was based on documentation, and the fact that they had discovered and incorporated into certified uniques certain super-transuranic materials that could not be scanned since they became unstable and would detonate. Sort of like the new generation Xerox machines that lock up and you need to get a tech in if you try to duplicate $20’s, but with a blast radius.
But the materials used were recycled constantly. If you had a piano and wanted to watch TV, you could just cycle the piano through the duplicator and make a a TV from the components. Better than a Murphy bed, in a way.
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BORG CAPTAIN: Surrender and be assimilated, or we will open fire. You have four seconds.
PICARD: Recommendations, Number One?
RIKER: We could ask Geordie to reconfigure the main deflector dish. That was a brilliant and original solution the last 37 times we used it as a deus ex machina. It’s the last thing they’ll expect.
TROI: I sense . . . plot tension. Probably involving a hack writer with sweaty palms.
PICARD: Shut up, Counsellor. All right, everyone. Meet me in my Ready Room, and we’ll set up a proper committee structure to look into potential alternatives. Preliminary report in . . . say . . . six months?
(The BORG CAPTAIN has been laughing uncontrollably. At this point he pulls himself together.)
BORG CAPTAIN: Oh, my aching diodes. . . . FIRE!!!
(Exterior, space: Shot of ENTERPRISE being blown into a million squillion bureaucratically correct smithereens.)
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Always enjoyed how they adapted, but never quite kept the adaptation from the last time it was used…
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The, “without question” was the important qualifier, there. One who follows orders without question is not likely to graduate to someone who is capable of giving orders, because he would be waiting for someone else to tell him what to do.
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This is something hat Sarah has touched on several times over the past several months. What you may not realize (though Sarah’s comment may have straightened it out), is that a lot of people apparently believe that “talent” or “genius” conveys an innate ability from the first moment that the person who has said “talent” attempts the thing. Such as the young child sitting down at the piano and plating a concerto without having taken any lessons, or the kid who learns to play chess for the first time and immediately plays at Grandmaster level (neither of which ever actually happens).
If people truly understood what “talent” should mean, they would understand that it still means that the person who is talented needs to work at it to achieve mastery of the subject, but it comes to them faster than it does other people, requires less work to achieve a given level, and generally that they can, if they work hard enough, achieve a level significantly higher than average people can in that field.
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Yup. It’s quite conceivable that I have talents I never developed; at any rate, if I have talents, I never developed them. But I was over 40 by the time I heard what I needed to be told as a small child. It was G. K. Chesterton who said it:
‘Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.’
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I’m not sure I overall agree with the notion that hard work always trumps “natural” talent. To be perhaps immodest–I take computer science classes, alongside a lot of people who, despite having fulfilled the prerequisites, and presumably worked hard in doing so, are not nearly so well-prepared for the class as I am. I spend very little time studying outside class, am in fact something akin to the biggest slacker most people will ever meet, and yet as regards actual achievement, in CS at least, I do much better than most others. I cannot claim any particular credit for this. As nearly as I can tell, it in fact comes naturally.
This is not true of many other areas, and it’s certainly not a statement that “natural talent” is a dominating factor for real achievement. But it is actually true that some people are innately more capable than others. The gap can be bridged by work habits, but it never fully disappears.
Of course, the related “natural foods” idea–at least, as a simple predicate whereby “natural” is equated to “good”–is ridiculous. (Though I can sympathize with being leery around food like much of what’s sold cheaply nowadays that never came any closer to “natural” than some rDNA cultures; but the fault with those things is not so much their origins as that they’re overwhelmingly not even trying to imitate proper food.)
I submitted this comment before, but I think it got eaten by the system. My apologies if it shows up twice.
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Liberals don’t use the words “nature” and “natural” accurately. (I know, big surprise.) Looked at evolutionarily, nothing is “unnatural,” since everything–and I mean everything–is produced by Mother Earth and Father Sun, including human intelligence. Humanity is 100% natural, product of the nature of cosmic evolution as expressed as Earth and the Solar System. Our ability to transform various configurations of organic and inorganic matter is a part of that nature. The attacks on “artificial” and genetically-modified foods, for instance, are just another item of the self-hating leftist agenda to undermine Mother Earth’s supreme creation: humanity. Ironic, yes?
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You mean the kinds of people who marvel at a beaver’s pile of sticks and rubble but think that Hoover Dam is “…One of the worst Faustian bargains humanity has made”?
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We have a lot of fun with the whole “natural” things at Debunkers. A friend of mine stole this from somewhere:
————–
If an orange had a real composition label, it would say this…
Water, glucose, fructose, galactose, phenolic glycosides, 6-deoxyaldohexoses (fuctose and rhamnose), saccharose, galacturonans, (1-4) linked D-galactopiranuronic acid, pectin, pectinic acids, polygalacturonic acids, pectinestarase, Citric Acid, L-Malic Acid, D-Isocitric Acid, Oxalic Acid, Succinic Acid, Malonic Acid, Quinic Acid, Tartaric Acid, Adipic Acid, 2-ketogluratic Acid, praline, asparagines, aspartic acid, serine, glutamic acid and arginine. oxidoreductases, transferases, hydrolases and lyases, isomerases and ligases, glucosilglucerides, Carotenoids, tetraterpenes, limonin, aslimonoic acid A-ring lactone, neohesperidosides, flavones (3-hydroxyflavanones, 3-dydroxyflavones, O-glycosyl, aglycones C-glycosylflavones, Anthocyanins, (hesperidin, naringin, poncirin, neoheriocitrin, neohesperidin, rhoifolin, rutin, diosmin, sinensetin, auranetin, tangeritin, hydroxyethylrutinosideres, nobiletin cyanidin-3-glucoside, cyanidina-3.5-diglucoside, peonidin-5-glucoside, delphinidin-3-glucoside, petunidin-3-glucoside, Vitamin C (Ascorbic Acid), Pholacine, Vitamin B6, Thiamine, Riboflavin, Biotin, Pantotenic acid, Vitamin A.
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Gonna steal this….
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That’s fair, I stole it without shame.
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See the result: http://mauser.livejournal.com/
They’ve added a nifty new spoiler tool over on LJ that you click to show the answer. I just got to try it.
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One advantage of the “natural” thinking is that you can ensure that the bright kids never learn good study habits because they are never given challenges.
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Yes! Someone recently conducted a study that revealed that students who are constantly praised for their smarts give up too easily and never buckle down when the going gets tough. They assume they can coast on their “natural talent.”
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I watched each of my kids hit that wall at different times, because they could fake it till a certain point and then it was “oh, no, we have to study?” — both of them in college. GAH. I hit it in 9th grade, but there were special circumstances. (Not constantly praised, but it was easy until then.)
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Sarah’s comment that “I do have reason to think it’s not in other cultures, partly because by and large they don’t seem to have a concept of adolescence as a separate state”, while not the main point of the article, is a really important point, I think.
I wonder if you can’t trace back a large portion of what’s dysfunctional about our society directly to the near-worship of adolescence in the U.S. (and the extension of adolescence from the teenage years all the way into the 30’s these days).
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Since the teenager was invented in the 1920s and re-invented in the 1950s to sell things, I’m inclined to agree with you. We have lost the markers that say “you’re now an adult. Act like one.” And when the cultural Powers That Be persuade people that adulthood is to be avoided at all costs, it makes it even worse.
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Sarah, you drive me crazy. I know your blog posts are not the product of well-honed focus, nor meant to be. I don’t see how they could be at the rate you dash them off. But you say enough in one blog post that I want to comment on a dozen different things for each blog post.
For instance natural foods. My wife was a chemist and she noted back in the 80’s that the chemists were finally learning a little humility, but the biologists were now going to take us places unimaginable and not necessarily good. She knew the chemist who created olestra based on the idea of chaining enough fats onto a molecule that the body couldn’t break it down. Then there’s all the versions of artificial sweeteners. Of course a simple minded person then concludes that natural is better and condemns tens of thousands of children to blindness by refusing to allow them to eat golden rice. Once I asked a vegetarian about a book advocating, “Eat low on the food chain.” Her explanation was that, for instance, cattle eat plants and we eat cattle, so we could benefit by eating what the cattle ate instead. Being a snot nosed, rude adolescent I replied, “but plants eat shit, so shouldn’t we eat shit?”
As for all the other things you (and your commenters) have said, I’ll just have to stop now.
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Her explanation was that, for instance, cattle eat plants and we eat cattle, so we could benefit by eating what the cattle ate instead. Being a snot nosed, rude adolescent I replied, “but plants eat shit, so shouldn’t we eat shit?”
Eating shit would be easier for us than digesting grass. Someone needs to tell these ‘low on the food chain’ folks that cows have four-chambered stomachs, continuously growing teeth, and symbiotic microbes in the gut that digest cellulose for them. Any human being who has these three features can be my guest and live on grass. Now pass me the A1 sauce; I feel the urge to thaw out a steak.
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YEP– I am a rancher’s daughter so I know a lot about cows (although it has been many many years since I lived near cows by choice.)
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Fun fact: The cow is the only animal that grows more intelligent when slaughtered and skinned. Leather couches perform slightly but significantly higher on IQ tests than live cattle. (Hollywood starlets who shill for PETA rank lower than either.)
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I started to laugh but then realized that it was true.
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“The cow is the only animal that grows more intelligent when slaughtered and skinned.”
There is at least one other: the domestic sheep. I have known rocks that were smarter than the average sheep.
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be honest, though, the rocks are less stubborn.
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I have known rocks that were smarter than the average sheep.
True, but rocks are also smarter than the average sheepskin. Sheepskins don’t get smart until you use them to write things on.
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A dead sheep has at least stopped trying to kill itself. Most cows don’t have the creativity for finding dumb ways to die that a sheep does, although they will keep walking into electrified water until physically blocked by the bodies…. (To be fair, my dad stepped in it, too; to be fair to dad, he threw himself backwards when it bit, and didn’t walk back in and stand there drinking. Cows die easier from electricity than people, thankfully.)
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Yes cows are very susceptible to electricity, I once knew of a guy who moved out from the city and had a couple cows held in with an electric fence. When his fencer went out he had the bright idea to hook it straight to 110 until he got a new fencer. (steady electricity, non-pulsing=bad idea) He managed to fry one of his cows and kill, then went and bought a new fencer.
Cows however seldom start keeling over in droves from heart attacks when they get frightened like sheep do.
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They also know how to back up when their heads are caught.
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This reminds me of a story from when I was a kid. A guy had some cows seperated out in a fenced pasture to be serviced by a stud. The electric fence charger burned out so he got the idea to use the rheostat off of his kids’ electric train set for the time being since he had to prep for the stud.
The stud showed up, and started servicing one of the cows that came into estrus, and the cow somehow managed to touch the live wire with her nose. This was understandably a shock to the bull, who then decided that he wasn’t going to risk that ever happening again, and proved thereafter to be averse to cows.
The owner of the bull wanted to sue the farmer for damages. Unfortunately the word got out that he was complaining that the farmer, “made my bull gay” and decided that he didn’t want to deal with that sort of ridicule and let it drop.
There is no moral to this story.
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There is no moral to this story.
Oh, but there is. I assure you that there is.
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The farmer had a pizza party. (‘Cause that’s about all the bull’s meat would be useful for.)
We usta have pigs… we’d buy a small bunch of about ten or so piggies and raise them for about 6 months and then sell/slaughter them. 1/10 was ours, 1/10 was for the mission/food pantry/whatever charity would use it best, and the other 8 were sold, custom or as a bunch.
Anyway, once we had this little guy that kept getting out. None of the others did – just the one. We adjusted the wire… put patio blocks under it so they couldn’t root dirt up and short to ground the wire… we tried ’bout everything and he was STILL getting out! So, I got me a chair and parked it around the corner of the barn and waited. Pretty soon, about as soon as the piggie thought we were gone, I watched him square off at the fence wire. He stood there like a Mind Control Guru just staring at the wire. Then he started gently pawing the ground like a bull in the Arena. He leaned forward, and leaned back. Then leeeaned forward, and leeeaned back. Then he took off like someone had hit him in the rear with a hot shot.
That piggie hit that fence running and squirted through it like he was greased and like it was plain wire! When he was about 15 feet outside of the fence, he stopped and just stood there for a few seconds, then SQUEALED like he was being murdered!!! Then he trotted off to do mischief.
He’d figured out that if he went through the fence fast enough, the pain of the shock wouldn’t hit him until he was well out… but he’d be out. I guess he figured the pain was worth the trip.
Now, that was one smart pig!
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Well, what did you do after you found out how he was escaping? Have him for lunch?
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Well, would you want him to reproduce?
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(laughing) I knew someone would ask… ;-D
“Have him for lunch?” Nooo… he was too small. We took down the electric fence and put up hog panels with a T post every 5 feet. The piggy’s days of freedom were over. But as the time for him to meet his sausage maker approached, we entertained thoughts of running him for public office… couldn’t be any worse than the humans sitting in the chairs, and probably a lot smarter!
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The punch line of the joke is “A pig like that you don’t eat all at once.”
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I was thinking of asking if they named him Wilbur, but decided too many people here would start wondering why I thought he should be named for Mr. Ed’s owner. And that would have really Strunk.
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That will do!
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IDK– Range cows are smart, resilient, and mean. ;-) You can leave them alone for months and then herd them out of the canyons and they are fat and sassy. I can’t say the same for sheep.
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True. But don’t ask me when we’re trying to get those same idiots out of the way of a forest fire, to the place we want to feed them, or otherwise HELP the idiots…..
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they go to where they feel safe ;-) even though it is not a good place (like a box canyon)
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reminds me of a few hoomans
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This is why God constantly compared people to sheep in the Bible, they were the dumbest animal he could think of.
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They also herd together and are easily panicked.
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The fact that the people He was talking to were sheepherders may also have had a little something to do with it.
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They’d know all this stuff, and how much work it takes just to keep the sheep from killing themselves for dumb reasons… and, just possibly, some of the folks would go “how many times have I looked at my neighbor’s problems and wondered how on earth he can’t see that he’s obviously doing X and Y wrong?”
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I have raised sheep… When Jesus/God referred to us as his sheep, he was NOT being nice or complementary.
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It’s the diet for a small planet bs. The planet is overpopulated, and humans must all eat starvation level.
BAH. Morons.
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Just tell them that if humans rationed our consumption to just enough to sustain us, then the population would be able to GROW more numerous on the same food resources. That should horrify them.
Clearly, if we eat up all the food, there can’t be more humans, and that’s their goal, right? /snark
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Jevon’s Paradox – the more efficient you make things, the greater your consumption ends up being.
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In our food supply, fruits and vegetables are actually more dangerous to eat than the meat supply, given the frequency of E. Coli contamination to produce.
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For fresh/raw, it’s all in the picking. No fruit with bird doo on it, nothing from the ground. If you’re going to cook it, must cook it hot enough to kill the bad stuff like E-coli.
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Plus a reminder for those who have suppressed immune systems. Fresh fruit and vegetables should be eaten in moderation because of harmful bacteria. When I was first dx’d and started on a cytoxan I was warned to eat only cooked fruits and veges. Most people can handle some of the bacteria– someone with an suppressed immune system can’t.
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” Once I asked a vegetarian about a book advocating, “Eat low on the food chain.” Her explanation was that, for instance, cattle eat plants and we eat cattle, so we could benefit by eating what the cattle ate instead.”
Vegetables aren’t food, vegetables are what food eats.
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Although if you aren’t eating nature’s multivitamin (liver), you might need to supplement your diet with a few vegetables here and there.
Liver, BTW, is delicious if properly prepared — if you think it tastes bitter, you haven’t had it properly prepared yet. The two key points to cooking liver properly are: 1) soak it in milk for an hour beforehand to draw out the bitterness, and 2) don’t overcook the liver or it turns to rubber.
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Liver tastes fine. It just has a starchy texture that I cannot swallow without gagging, no matter how it is cooked. Apparently my pharynx cannot tolerate glycogen. (All the other usual organ meats are fine by me, except tripe, which is not meat, but sausage casing with the sausage left out. Feh.)
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Tripe makes excellent dogfood, and IMHO that is about all it is good for. As my dad is fond of saying, you have a whole cow, why start in on the guts ;)
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Because you sent the meat in the discovery ships, and therefore are happy forever to be known as The Tripe Eaters. (The city dish in Porto is tripe and beans. And I can’t eat it anymore because I can’t eat the beans :( )
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So meat is not only murder, it is also an accessory to colonization? PETA’d have a field day with that. If any of them were bright enough to pick up a book, much less open it or read it.
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Nah. Portuguese can tan, so anyone/anything of Portuguese origin is immediately “oppressed” and gets a free pass. YAY.
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The historical illiteracy of the “people who don’t tan can’t be oppressed” idea is instantly demonstrable, to anyone who isn’t historically illiterate themselves, in just four words:
“No Irish Need Apply.”
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Also my Roman ancestors had very pale slaves. Bah. Where do you cut off the oppressed and oppressors? The only way to hold any branch of humanity harmless and any as universal oppressors is to be an ignorant fool. We’re all descended from slaves and their owners, rapists and their victims and saints and their friends, too. We’re all human.
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“We’re all human.”
Not me. Just about everyone I know has said sooner or later, “Mike, you’re something else.”
;-D
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Hopefully Mike, they don’t continue by saying “and when I find out what you are, I’m getting a hunting license for it”. [Wink]
Of course, I’m a dragon and I give dragon-hunters what they deserve. [Very Big Dragon Grin]
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Of course, I’m a dragon and I give dragon-hunters what they deserve.
At this point I believe it might be wise to point out that, contrary to rumour, I am not crunchy and good with ketchup.
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Who says that I’m going to *eat* dragon-hunters? [Very Very Big Dragon Grin]
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Use the dragon hunter as bait for the ‘real’ meal, no? ;)
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Hang on a sec … ** thumbing through wallet ** … I’m pretty sure I got a hunting license for that here somewhere …
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“Of course, I’m a dragon and I give dragon-hunters what they deserve. [Very Big Dragon Grin]”
REEELY? A dragon? I have a dragon story… it’s called “A Dragon and His Boy.” If you are pestered by dragon hunters perhaps you could get an idea or two from Charles? (Charles the dragon, of course.) He has lots of experience dealing with dragon hunters…
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Have you published it? Couldn’t find it on Amazon.
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Have I published it? Nope. which would explain why it’s not on Amazon… which brings up a question – do people publish short stories there? Do people BUY short stories there?
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Yep, people have published stories as ebooks on Amazon and others purchased them. It’s called Indy (or self-publishing).
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Not all of it. I’m about to do backlog and fantasy novels, too.
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Yep. Yep.
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99 cents? Is that why The Boss ‘o dis joint said to take my novella (Hamster Dan) to 2.99?
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No. 2.99 is your bottom price period. NOTHING exists under that. Selling a novella for 99 is just goofy.
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Well…. shoot! I have a BUCKET of short stories!!! Okay…y’all intrigued me and I went on Amazot dot gone and looked. I used the number of reviews as an indicator of sales, and it seems that the ones that were listed for $3 or more (except for the republished master authors and the kid’s ILLUSTRATED stories) were pretty much being ignored… or not, but so were the 99centers.
But doing a collection of shorts doesn’t look (to me) like it would be remunerative either… Hummmm…. anyone know a good illustrator? A long time ago I wrote a series of kids books called “The Bean Sisters” – and it was all about our two daughters and their covered wagon. (A yellow Radio Flyer type wagon with hoops and a cotton duck “covered wagon” cover) Sample titles included “The Bean Sisters Go to Church” (“…and on the way home they wondered why mommy and daddy laughed when Mom said that they were having “roast pastor for dinner.”). And “The Bean Sisters Go Shopping” (grocery store) and such like… I just wrote them for our kids – who enjoyed them a LOT (because after all – the books were about them!)
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DO NOT USE THE REVIEWS — are you daft? For some reason people don’t review short stories (not sure why.) For instance my darkship ones sell reliably well, but half almost no reviews.
WHY would you think of REVIEWS as an indicator. (Son, have you been out in the sun too long?)
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Our Beloved Hostess is correct – reviews are not a reliable way to judge interest or sales. Collections are the way to go – I generally see about three stories per collection, but four or five might be an option. Just keep your price between 2.99 and 4.99 and you’ll be fine.
Re: illustration, I know a few skilled illustrators personally, I have professional connections to a few more, and I live five miles from a university with an amazing illustration department. If there’s anything you need help with getting your books ready, just shoot me an email at editor aht dyck daht us.
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For short stories? Not worth it. Go to dreamstime. Click off photography in your search. Learn to letter.
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I got the impression he was considering a picture book…
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Oh! I keep forgetting Kindle Fire makes those possible. Sure.
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Sun? You have a Sun in these parts? Then why am I eating Vit D tabs like candy? Now all I gotta do is… ummmm…. what was it I was gonna do? I fergit… ;-D
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Cheater. Trading on your looks. ;-)
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Oh, I forgot – running away!
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Too late. You already got a fish athwart the back of the head.
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Launches back-seeking fish missile — it can do corners!
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+2 por the proper use of “athwart”… but then you ARE Portagee… Portagease… ummmm porta… ummm… PORTUGACE!!! AVAST you ….ummmm…. oh phooey! PTHPPPTHP! ;-D
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Tisk, tisk. Menudo (tripe stew) with garbanzo beans is the breakfast of champions.
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NOT Garbanzo — INFIDEL! — red beans!
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Feijão branco, gente! It’s the only right way.
Great, now I’m craving buchada and I just finished breakfast. Guess I need to make some additions to the grocery list.
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Red beans in . . . menudo . . . Really? *blinks* Really? I’ve never heard of red beans in menudo. Garbanzo beans or hominy, but never red beans. That sounds . . . odd.
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Not Menudo. Tripas com Feijao
THEY do white beans, but we always used red: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/emeril-lagasse/tripe-oporto-style-recipe/index.html
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We always had a couple of milk cows, and Dad bred them every other year (alternating). We’d raise the calf and slaughter it as a yearling. That provided meat until we slaughtered the next one. I’ve had all the different kinds of meat, including organ meat — liver, kidneys, stomach (tripe), etc. Did the same with pigs, and either cooked the intestines (chitterlings), or stuffed them for sausage. A lot of the idiocy about foods is the fact that most people have never been exposed to them as children, so they don’t consider them “food”. Our modern society for the most part is made up of crazy people and idiots (present company excepted, of course!).
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er… I can do a convincing immitation of either or both.
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Speaking as someone who often preps kids for standardized tests, the SAT/ACT/GRE/et cetera DO measure something definite. No one who starts off with an average or below-average score on a practice test is EVER going to get an 800 no matter how many “strategies and tricks” I teach to optimize his score — which leads me to believe that our so-called “betters” who populate Harvard, Yale, and the rest of the Ivy Leagues DO have IQ’s in the “bright” range at least.
HOWEVER, you are absolutely right that “standardized-test smarts” aren’t worth a hill of beans if they aren’t nurtured appropriately. If you don’t bother to ground yourself in REAL history, REAL philosophy, and the other liberal arts, the best your smarts will get you is the ability to RATIONALIZE your dumb ideas using pretty words. And THAT, my friends, is how you explain all those high-IQ folks who’ve convinced themselves that socialism is just peachy. It’s not that they aren’t intelligent; they just haven’t been educated in any GENUINE sense.
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You’d be amazed what the bottom SAT etc. those colleges take for legacies and special considerations…
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True enough. Still, I think there are quite a few naturally smart people among our Aristos. They’ve just been told their whole lives that they are extra-special snowflakes and have consequently failed to develop any wisdom or common sense.
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Also, there’s personality to take in account. A naturally compliant child will learn and BELIEVE a lot of things that just ain’t so.
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I have to wonder how many more people have to die from e.Coli in our ground beef before we learn to ignore the “natural” weenies and start irradiating our food stream. I say enough to these morons who learned everything they know about nuclear physics from the 1950’s monster movies they watched after school. Exposing food to the rays off of Cesium or Strontium (or whatever they’re using currently) does not make it “radioactive” or change it in any way, other than rendering all the bad stuff dead and harmless.
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They’re not anti-nuclear, they’re anti-progress. They yearn for a simpler time when peasants knew their place.
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And they’re the reason G-d gave me middle fingers!
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I prefer a good shillelagh. They say you can’t fix stupid, but I’m not too sure of that. Percussive maintenance is very effective.
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Has anyone found the death stats for people gagging to death and having allergic reactions to political speeches?
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I take great enjoyment in watching a green enviro type eating sun dried fruits or veggies and asking them how they like their irradiated food. It was after all produced by exposure to radiation from a thermonuclear reactor.
But then all energy is nuclear, either from fissile materials, by the harvesting of solar energy stored in various hydrocarbons, or tapping directly into energy created by solar driven wind or water cycles.
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I will name names and point fingers, here. I read Michael Pollan’s wonderful book “Botany of Desire.” The basic thesis is that not only do we shape plants, but that the plants we eat/consume/use can shape us. Not a problem, and well-written. Then I read his next book. And gave it away. His thesis: We should all be organic slow-food locavores, because anything else is bad for us. HOGWASH. I am perfectly happy to eat inorganic eggs, walnuts grown far away, and other foods shipped out of season, including frozen vegetables. His prescription is one for starvation, unemployment, and somebody in each household making housework their life’s work. Because it’s more charming. To him.
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Hear hear.
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I agree with you. I was just thinking this morning (as I pushed the button to grind my Sumatran coffee beans) that I refuse to give up electricity, and all the labor-saving devices it powers. He can live like that if he wants, but I’m not going to, and I’ll bet he doesn’t actually give up all the conveniences either.
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Inorganic eggs? Hummm…. perhaps made of copper or brass? ;-D
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Stone. They hatch little dragons. Stop. No. I’m NOT going to write that story. DEAL.
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Sarah R. R. Hoyt does have a certain ring to it, though.
(ducks and covers)
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Its the silly sea captain’s cap that I don’t see her wearing.
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slips a stone egg into Uncle Lar’s house to await the hour of its hatching
You do know that dragons are like ducklings — they imprint on the first thing they see?
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That wasn’t how it happened with Temeraire.
N.B.: film version is reportedly “in development” by Peter Jackson, once Hobbit is completed.
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That’s what they TOLD you.
0:)
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Too bad, my daughter would be delighted– I bought her some adorable little carved, polished, dyed stone “eggs” that she cherishes.
Look kinda like these, but you can see where they glued the stone together on the Princess’:
http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-image-stone-marble-egg-image7685556
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Oh, yeah. I was looking at these the other day.
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What…. you’re buying a picture? Haven’t priced them lately, but marble or stone or ceramic eggs are just the thing if you have an egg eating chicken in the hen house. They’ll try to peck it, and not be successful and stop eating eggs.
http://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/ceramic_nest_eggs.html
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My mom used those, and the wooden ones (they’re used for displaying egg cups) to “seed” nests for young hens, too.
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The ceramic ones used to be used to make chickens lay in the same nest every day, if there was an egg in it they would continue to lay in the same nest and ‘set’ on it.
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The old incandescent light bulbs worked just as well. We used the smaller size — 25 watts or so. We used the stone ones as well, but mostly to stop a rooster who was also an egg-stealer.
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He ate them? Or tried to sit them? (Grandma had roosters who did both.)
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And what appears to be a flaw in an uncut diamond turns out to be a very powerful little dragon . . . with a voracious appetite for metals and covered in impenetrable scales. Poor jeweler almost goes bankrupt the first day after it hatches. (Which sounds like something that would happen in one of my Murphy stories.)
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uh. Clifford Simak wrote something very similar…
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One of many modern expressions which makes me want to strangle its users:
“Grow a business”.
No.
Plants Grow. Fungi Grow. Animals Grow.
BUSINESSES ARE BUILT, USING A SHITPOT OF HARD LABOR.
I think you can guess *why* Modern Society dares not use the phrase “build a business”….
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I’ve built this business! (At this here word piano — an expression JUST learned from a Rex Stout book!)
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‘Word piano’. Bloody marvellous! Which book?
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Over My Dead Body. I don’t often steal, but I fully intend to steal that one early and often. It’s SO shiny.
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Given the age of Mr. Stout’s works I’d be more inclined to label it “resurrection” rather than theft.
Years ago RAH when queried about the similarities between his Martian flat cats and David Gerrold’s Tribbles immediately rattled off several references to earlier works where he’d mined a similar concept, polished the dust off, and taken it for his own.
We will however now be on the lookout for you channeling Archie Goodwin, not that it’s necessarily a bad thing come to think about it.
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LOL. I intend to mine Clifford Simak FIRST. The man tossed out so many concepts per book, that there’s novels buried in his novellas.
I’ve joked about writing something like Nero Wolfe in space (he’s an alien and has a smart-alec human jack of all trades assistant.)
Again, my problem is time. I’m putting my back list up ASAP and hoping that the books pay their way (as it were) so that I stop worrying about money so LOUDLY and can write more.
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Nero Wolfe is an AI, immobile and depending on others to provide data for processing, like RAH’s Mike needing Manny to act for him.
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Wait. Sarah’s son is kind of doing that one, with his Ninja Nun comic.
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Nero Wolfe in space? That’s what I thought Tuf Voyaging was, you know, back when George was readable …
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Then there was Asimov’s Wendell Urth, who was also explicitly supposed to be Nero Wolfe in space. Except, well, out of respect for the dead, I think it would be wise not to say anything more about Wendell Urth.
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There is lots of purely horrible doublethink out there that makes me angry, and especially after the “you didn’t build that” controversy it’s natural to be suspicious that “grow a business” is more of the same. I think, though, that “grow a business” not always politically motivated doublethink. In some business niches, anyway, it seems to be a useful way of thinking. I have never run a business, but I know people that have, I have read quite a lot about running small software-oriented businesses (the kind of businesses often discussed at news.ycombinator.com), and I set up a reasonably complicated open source software project (sbcl.org) and ran it for some years while many volunteers worked on it. Plenty of hard work is involved in getting anything done, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful to sometimes think of a complicated software project and the organization around it as growing rather than just being built or manufactured. In particular, making choices about procedures and technologies which support and encourage people working in certain ways feels more like making choices about gardening than like building a steam engine in a machine shop. Appreciating the importance of a source code control system (such as git or subversion) or of some kinds of testing and documentation practices feels more like appreciating the importance of good drainage or weeding regularly than appreciating the importance of a sharp tool bit. Running a complicated software project without source code control doesn’t reliably screw up any particular line of code or any particular feature, it makes it significantly harder to stop some kinds of confusion from getting out of control as work is done on the project over time. It can be hard to convey to people who’ve never worked on big complicated projects quite how much this kind of thing comes to matter as projects get more complicated, but it does, and successful commercial software enterprises seem to fuss about it as least as much as volunteer efforts do.
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La. Done per instrucziones.
Now at your Amazon Kindle Store – “Hamster Dan” by Michael E Picray – only $2.99!!!
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A very nice wanderant*, Ms. Hoyt (or Sarah, if you prefer). As usual. However, I think you’ve got one thing wrong, or at least incomplete. I think the “Noble savage is better” meme grew largely out of two complementary notions that were big in the 1960s. First there was a revival of interest in Amerind cultures because of the civil rights movement, which tried to make up for past bigotry and went too far, mutating into an idea that Amerind culture was better and more virtuous than it actually was. Second was a backlash against the byproducts of high technology, especially smog and other pollution of land, water, and air. We like to think (and mostly correctly) that modern environmentalism is new-age semireligious nonsense, but we need to remember that when the environmentalist movement started half a century ago, it was in response to some real problems. High technology really was poisoning the environment in some places, and the thought that “technology = bad, simple and natural = good” is an entirely understandable reaction to that.
———————————
* wanderant — something that starts as a rant about one subject and wanders off into a rant about one or more other subjects, while nevertheless remaining a single coherent piece of work.
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I’d probably believe this if the notion of the “noble savage” and “the simple life” didn’t show up in one of the characters in Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon, and which was strongly refuted by the man from the past (I think he was from the ’20s or ’30s – they released him from a stasis field). It’s probably true, however, that this belief became significantly more widespread during the time period you mention.
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Yeah, it’s an idea from the Romantics. And yes.
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See: Rousseau
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Thanks.
It’s time I stopped whining about how hard the written word is for me and do something about it.
I need to start taking my own advice. Stop taking the easy/worse path.
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I think persistence, thinking, hard work and not being afraid to fail multiple times is the key to success. It doesn’t matter how old or young you are. Just because you’re born into a lower, poorer class doesn’t mean you can’t succeed. It just might take longer to get there and there may be a lot of setbacks. Sometimes it’s hard to find live people to emulate so you have to be a loner until you meet kindred souls. However, libraries are still free and you can use them to access knowledge to better your life. I really can’t relate to the privileged class as they seem to want to take my hard earned money and give it to people who aren’t willing to work and make sacrifices to get ahead.
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Because this MAY be the 400th post on this article – thought I’d share that I have an article on my blog that has received almost 400 hits in the last 7 days – and in on the first page of returns on google… that may not be much for some of y’all but I usualloy get 7 or 8 hits a day on my blog… ;-D
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Ooops… messed that up. that would be almost 300 hits… ;-D
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Money is man-made and simply the most efficient form of status-marker and trading chip we’ve come up with.
A thought came to mind– Sisko’s has a LOT of aliens, some of which have to be from cultures that have money. Those cultures that have money would also have trade and a desire to increase that money… so while the Federation has no money and works on a satisfaction/barter/status sort of system, there are probably many layers of other gov’ts money being traded around. As collectibles, if nothing else.
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Sorry, I don’t buy the “there’s no money” and even they couldn’t keep it consistent through the series. (Of course, inconsistency about world building is shocking from ST, I know ;) )
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*laughs* I gotta try, anyways– especially if they “don’t have money” because the gaps are filled by a bunch of other things, like transporter credits and replicator credits. (Which, meditating on it, I don’t really have a problem with– beats having money handed out as an allowance, even if it ends up being used pretty much the same way in the long run.)
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But credits ARE money. That’s part of what I mean.
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The state of Washington disagrees– and, being in a contest with Oregon and Cali on who can be more liberal, I think they’re well-placed as stand-ins for the Federation.
I actually just found that out–for tax purposes, a “credit” cannot be counted the same as “money.” (My coffee shop just went to a very cool system where every $20 gift certificate gets the buyer a $5 credit of their own… and I then spent three days trying to access it, because while the certificates can be added directly to the loyalty card as cash, “credits” have to be treated like a coupon.
“Money” would be a unit of…whatever… that can be used for anything, while a “credit” would only be good to be redeemed for the thing it’s for, and of course trading stuff– or maybe “giving gifts” if we want to get REALLY into the I’m-not-using-the-word-so-it’s-not-there stuff– isn’t money, either.
Third or fourth thought— if it’s not physical, is it still money?
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Well, the term “Credits” have been used in SF as a term for “Money”. In the “real world”, the Credits would have to be redeemable for goods & services from various organizations/businesses/individuals to be considered the same as money.
Now a certain Star Fleet officer may know about “Federation Credits” but thanks to his “brain-washing” doesn’t think of it as money. [Wink]
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My dear husband has also suggested that, um, it’s Kirk and he’s talking to a woman when he says they don’t have money– why do you believe a word he says?
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Sorry but that was Picard and he was talking to a 21st century “barbarian” businessman.
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Didn’t Kirk pull the same thing in the movie where they went back in time and the Whale scientist had to buy him lunch?
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Don’t remember that scene but of course, Federation money wouldn’t work in the past and he didn’t have US currency.
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99% sure he was being cute and helpless; it was before the “selling his antique glasses” scene.
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You know, I liked Kirk in the original series but I come close to detesting the movie Kirk.
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I kinda fluxuate on how much of the movies I accept as cannon.
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Nah. It was the next movie, I think?
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Wiki says it was the ’86 movie with the whales; it also says that Picard did his little “we’ve moved beyond being like you greedy SOBs, we don’t have money” lecture in an episode in ’88. (I like Picard…but I think it’s good that I wasn’t in-universe, he can be very pompous.)
I hate wikipedia, but for something like this I think it’s acceptable:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_credit
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Yes, he did. The one who hitched a ride by grabbing him as the transporter was picking him up.
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Picard would also be my #1 example of someone that would be sticking very strictly to technicalities.
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Um. There is this.
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They are perhaps not money in the legal sense, but they are still money in the sense of trading value.
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*grumble grumble* tell that to me a half hour into fighting the computer system *grumble*
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“if it’s not physical, is it still money?”
If your paycheck is electronically deposited to your checking account and you use your ATM card to fill your gas tank and pick up a pizza on your way home from work, has any money changed hands?
Most money these days is not physical and never exists except as entries in ledgers.
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Value which has been previously represented by physical money, and which can be exchanged for physical money, has been changed– but I’ve been paid in barter, too. That doesn’t make half an hour of watching my kids money.
We call it money, and call the physical paper stuff “cash” to divide it, but folks also call pick-ups “trucks.” That doesn’t mean that they stop at the truck weight stations, or have a trucking license.
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You have it backwards, though. “Money” is a representation of value in a more conveniently exchanged form than barter. It represents the value accorded to the work of others based on a number of factors, and indexed to an average rate of conversion. If you insist on requiring physical pieces of paper or metal to call, “money”, then of course there can be a society with no money, but that hasn’t been the point of the discussion.
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No, “represent value” is what money DOES. The definitions that pop up range from “something generally accepted as a medium of exchange” through “commodity accepted by general consent as a medium of economic exchange.”
If there’s no commonly established value, it’s definitely not money, but the question still stands on if it still has to be a thing. (Or, at very least, the promise of a thing. To steal from “Making Money” by Sir Pratchett.)
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The context of the original statement, though, waaaayyyy back up there, was an implication that there would be no medium of exchange at all. Essentially, that everything was free. If you then turn around and interpret it to mean that there will be no bills or coins, you’re not talking about the same thing.
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Yeah, he said something like “people just work because they want to.”
Look… some services will always be necessary but not something you’d do of your own free will. (Okay, you might get good enough robots to care for incontinent bed bound patients, but I doubt it.)
People who envision this type of society are usually either hobbyist artists or hobbyist craftsmen. NOT the pro version. Why? Because sooner or later pros come across something they’d never finish except baby needs shoes. And when they do finish it, they’re often shocked to find it’s their best work. And yet, it would never have existed…
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Look… some services will always be necessary but not something you’d do of your own free will. (Okay, you might get good enough robots to care for incontinent bed bound patients, but I doubt it.)
Kinda solved in TOS, the Captain that was in the original pilot was totally disabled and just had a kind of rolling chair that took care of everything for him– and then he went into a telepathic holodeck with the lady that was horribly maimed before they put her back together wrong.
If there is anything that can still make folks incontinent and bedbound, you just put them in an industrial sized holodeck with some nerve monitors, and they’re able to move around as if they were perfectly fine because of the technobabble.
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Wiki says that Picard said this in First Contact:
“The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century. The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”
Keep in mind, this is Picard. He makes ME look like a dyed-in-the-wool cynic about the way things are “supposed to be.”
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That’s one of the ways of interpreting it, yes– and it’s still true if things like food, shelter and some basic travel/entertainment are all provided to everyone on demand.
It can be made to make sense if the Federation has no “money,” but they do issue, oh, two hours of holodeck, five units of replicator..whatever… and six teleporter trip units per day. If people wish to trade some of their own efforts for someone else’s labor, trade in alien currencies or whatever, they are allowed to, but the Federation doesn’t have a thing of set value made to be exchanged for goods or services from fellow citizens.
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If the defining trait of “money” was that it’s a representation of value that’s easier to use than straight barter, my gift card and coupons and such would be money rather than being worth X amount of money.
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And yes, they are money, just not in a government-issued form, and thereby come with restrictions on their use. They are money issued by a company, but which get around legal restrictions on printing one’s own money by not being declared as “legal tender for all transactions”.
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They’re not money, because they’re not accepted for common use; if anything, it’s a private contract. I give them money in exchange for a promise of things of that worth in the future.
(Just had a thought… gift cards are an even WORSE deal than usual, now, with inflation so crazy. The relative value shrinks fast.)
Even EBT cards, which have a dollar value, aren’t money– or they wouldn’t be traded for half the face value.
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The defining trait of money is that it is issued and controlled by the government. You could think of it as being “worth” X amount of gift cads, if that helps. The only salient distinction of money is that it is “legal tender for all debts, public and private” by order of the government.
The government hates competition; that is part of why FDR barred private ownership of gold.
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Let’s not get me started on FDR. :)
I know I’m not saying it very well, but if it’s not issued by the gov’t, and it’s not good for all things that are for sale, it’s at least debatable if it’s money or not.
A check isn’t money, for example– but it is a promise that if you give that to the bank, they’ll give you money. (That promise is broken with varying frequency– which is why most places in my area don’t take checks.) Ditto credit cards. And, now that it comes to mind, electronic funds are just a promise, too– the Cyrus thing shows that, right? Or banks that aren’t insured that go belly up. (and yes, I know the insurance is just another level of promise)
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Not long ago I read a persuasive argument that the United States no longer uses coins; that what we call coins are more properly called tokens as they contain no precious metal nor other such fixed store of value.
United Sates paper money lost any right to be exchanged for actual money forty or so years ago, with the withdrawal of Silver Certificates from circulation.
Arguably, therefore, what we pass around these days is not money and has not been at any point in your lifetime (and barely within my lifetime.)
We may call it money or cash, but that isn’t even as honest as calling that 3.2 equine urine they sell in cans “beer.”
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I considered getting into the weeds with that aspect, too, but Making Money kinda laid it out with their
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER NOTHING BUT SPOILER AFTER THIS
I WARNED YOU
SPOILER!!!!
Golem standard.
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I had to go check– Khan and his guys had taken over half the earth by the 90s, so electronic banking may have been…ah… greatly impacted. Especially by the whole “tens of thousands killed” part.
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Yes, this is all creative interpretation to make up for the inability of Star Trek Writers to do freaking research, even though trekkie fanboys would give just about anything below the neckline to have VOLUNTEERED their work in return for being listed in the credits at the end in ten-point type.
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No no no – Federation Credits are not money, StarFleet is not the military, and Ships Counselor is not the Political Officer.
See, all clear. No bad thought concepts at all.
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I sense…. *pursed lips, intense but unfocused gaze designed not to crack the makeup* I sense something dripping, thick and corrosive…or possibly… metallic?
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Proof positive the Busty Betazed was in fact the Big-E’s Political Officer: When her contribution the the tense standoff with the obviously furious forehead-bumps-of-the-week alien Captain was “I sense…Anger”, none of the bridge crew rolled their eyes, and not a snicker was heard.
Only someone backed by the power of the Fed’s equivalent to the KGB could command that degree of suspension of all of the natural human responses to blatant public stupidity.
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Really, truly, I was going to post last night that the real problem was lousy world building. In ST’s defense, Roddenberry had sufficient trouble getting set designers to make a world that looked alien that it seems unlikely he had leisure time for world building.
TNG and later shows also suffered from “but the writer is A Big Draw!” syndrome, where said writers then didn’t bother to find out what was already there. Even though there was a wide range of easy to get books that would tell them, like the Star Trek Encyclopedia…..
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