I was going to take the day off today. I’m trying to finish a short story, which – for whatever reason, but probably mostly because it’s been so long since I wrote short stories – is taking me forever. So I thought “I’ll put up a holding pattern and go write my story.”
Only…
I was reading the comments and Foxfier had the dime drop on her, for part of the reason that the Jewish people were hated and suspected of everything and “otherized” throughout most of history. I’ve “known” this for some time, but had never articulated it and its implications fully.
We won’t go into the theological reasons, or why it suited the Roman Empire once it became Christian to put the blame for the execution of Jesus on the Jews. Those are obvious, as is why it stuck throughout the middle ages. Besides, if you guys get into another religious argument, I’ll stop this blog, come back there and give you whatfor.
What we’ll go into instead is what Foxfier said: They lived by different rules. A lot of their rules allowed them to escape the general maladies of their fellow citizens in what for lack of a better term we’ll call “dark ages Europe” – between the decadence of the Roman Empire of the West and soap coming into common use.
Their food rules kept them from eating (too) contaminated meat; the cleanliness rules kept them and their children as clean as it was possible to be in the middle of filth; even their strange habit of teaching their women to read and their general dislike of physical violence from husband to wife, made them live better. In a world where healing knowledge was generally kept by the woman in the family, a woman who could read had not only her own notes, but those of her mother and grandmother for things she might not have faced before.
No population likes strangers in their midst. That’s a human thing. We’re tribal. But the pervasive anti-Semitism throughout history, starting with the Romans, had another origin. “The Man is Hiding The Stash.”
When people in your midst live by blatantly different rules, which you know – because you’re tribal, and of course, your tribe must be RIGHT – are self evidently stupid, and yet SOMEHOW those rules allow them to in general live better than you, the fault must not be with your tribes rules. The other tribe amidst yours MUST be cheating. The man is hiding the stash.
It is probably the reason for the strong anti-Mormon prejudice, too. I’m not Mormon. I do have a lot of friends who are. Leaving aside the more uh…fringe sects of the religion (every religion has fringe sects and some are very weird and leaving aside theology altogether, because one man’s religion is another man’s belly laugh) Mormons live among us, as modern people, except they have these WEIRD rules. Like, they don’t drink alcohol, or coffee. Like, they have a home evening a week where the family is supposed to commune and share and you know, spend time together. Their kids tend to dress better (Robert is routinely mistaken for Mormon) or at least more traditionally. They tend to be more polite. Mormons have a strong community that comes through for their members in time of need. And in general – though of course there are exceptions — they have this way of doing well in life. Which, of course, must be due to double dealing and stealing because it couldn’t be the way they’re taught to live their life, which is conducive to doing well.
Leaving aside religions, this applies to practically everything else. Even the terms we use “privileged childhood” or “underprivileged background” “gifted child” – all of it assumes that what makes for success or failure is something external to us and vaguely unfair.
We’ll start with gifted children. I was identified was such early on. I’m actually weird, and I blame it on at least three instances of brain damage, because my verbal reasoning is very high, my math is a little higher than average (except for digit switching) but my visual spatial reasoning is next to non-existence. The other day I shocked the boy who does 3-D puzzles for fun and who’d nagged me into buying him a new form of the rubik’s cube that the only way I could even solve one of the basic of those was by removing the stickers and placing them in a solid block per side. I spent hours in my youth trying to solve it, because well… I was supposed to be “smart” and all my friends could do this in seconds. Never happened.
Anyway, so I got to see this from both sides. Yes, give me an assignment where I could bs my way, and I could totally do it with no effort. Give me a math assignment and it was easy, except that I had to keep track of digits so six didn’t become nine, and so that I didn’t scramble digits in a multiple-digit number. This required effort. If I did what came naturally I failed every math test. (This also happened if I was stressed or mildly ill.) Give me something with a visual base, like… the periodic table, and it took me days to get to where people got in minutes.
Yet, I kept consistently at the top of the class, because it never occurred to me there was an out. I never thought I could say “I don’t have the gift to do this, so I can’t do it.” I never thought of it, because my mother would scream for DAYS if I brought home anything below a B. And heck, depending on class distribution of grades, sometimes if I brought home a B.
I suppose from the outside it looked like being “gifted.” I just wafted on the breezes of my high intelligence or something.
At one point, later on, I was tutoring kids who were having issues with their school work. A lot of them were what I would call “gifted” – i.e. high IQ – and nine times out of ten, curing their school issues consisted of telling them that they still had to study. It was just the effort required was far less than other people had to put out. But it wouldn’t look that way from the inside. (Yes, there were other factors. Teachers tend to prefer normal-high-iq kids, and kids who are genuinely brilliant discomfit them. Also, I know having raised the boy-genius, kids who are brilliant still lack enough knowledge of the world to make informed decisions/opinions, so what they come up with can often seem morally aberrant or just appalling, and it takes time to trace it back and figure out where they went wrong. Few teachers have that kind of time, even if they knew HOW to trace it back. So to the kids it looks like they’re being discriminated against for no reason.)
And one of the times I’ve been most furious in recent times was when trying to give words of comfort to a starting writer, about how at least he didn’t need to go through the insane mill of the publishing houses and the push system, how he should stop the nonsense with trying to get published by tiny and increasingly shadier presses, and instead just put stuff up there and learn from his failures as well as his successes. I was told that I was “lucky” enough to get traditionally published and therefore I didn’t understand his “need” to see his books on a shelf in a store. Lucky. Like the failure of my first three books, which was held against me personally, even though the first book came out one month after nine eleven. Like, the seventeen proposals (with seventeen beginnings) I had to write to get back on the saddle. Like the year I had to write six books, and incidentally, none of them made it onto the shelves of regular bookstores.
Lucky. Not insane work. Lucky.
All of this is relevant, not from the POV of “humans suck, they discriminate against those who are different” (If you thought you were being born into a race of angels, I have news for you – you are human. Your mind might conceive of things angelic, but you were built on the common clay of an ape, which brings us things such as tribalism, because at one time they helped your ancestors survive, so you could be here, now.) but because the success and failure of – not just an individual, but a species – depends on such things: on “hardware in the head” – culture, that is.
The bourgeois culture that replaced the aristocratic mind set gave us a belief in striving, keeping your nose clean, working hard, saving, being innovative in how you did the work. Not only was cleanliness next to godliness, but so was thrift and good manners, and tidy apparel, and industriousness.
At one time, as hard as it is to believe now, those bourgeois virtues meant that you were a good person; and those who succeeded were universally regarded to have been living right.
Was this true? No more than any other human myth. A lot of the people who succeeded were given a leg up, or cut some shady deal or used the favor of the government to insure against competition.
That’s human. BUT in general, if you applied those virtues you did better than if you didn’t. It might mean you still didn’t do spectacularly well. In a society in which the solving of a rubik’s cube was essential to holding down a job, I’d still be unemployed forever. But being cleanly and working hard, and striving, might allow me to eventually have a cottage industry of refurbishing used rubik’s cubes. I’d never occupy the executive suite, but I’d succeed, to the limit of my abilities.
Why is this relevant? Because since WWI and markedly since the sixties, when creative control and media control were enough to propagate this unified myth, we’ve been tearing this idea to shreds.
If in movie or sitcom or book I hear of an executive who lives a clean life, is married to his first wife, has a passel of clean, cheerful kids, goes to church and is nice to animals – I know I’m going to find out he’s secretly a Satanist Mass Murderer. In the same way, the unclean beggar in the corner or the thuggish young man are always some sort of secular saints who have suffered.
I am sure there are some homeless people who are there through no fault of their own (but most of the time they are there because of mental illness or addictions. The first is arguably not their fault. The second not so much.) And I’m sure some young thugs just need love and understanding.
I’m also sure the number of those people per million could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In the same way, some clean-living executives might really be Satanist mass murderers. In about the same proportions as saintly vagrants, I’d say.
Now, some executives – maybe a lot of them – might be crooked. But part of that is the culture nowadays which assumes that to get ahead you have to stab others in the back. (I’ve actually found the best way to get ahead is to help backward and pay it forward, but maybe that’s just me.) This means a lot of companies, particularly big corporations which, by virtue of size, are more divorced from economic laws than small businesses, end up fostering this kind of culture. (Until the small startup eats their lunch.)
However, if you have a small child, and you need to entrust her to someone for two hours, who would you pick? The executive in a suit coming out of an office, or the homeless guy who reeks from a distance, talking to phantom people at the corner?
If you picked the second, you’ve lost all contact to reality. Yet the movies, most books and ninety percent of the TV programming would make you believe that was the way to go.
The built-up image of society in our heads is of a world where if you’re not crooked you’ll never get ahead, therefore the crookedness is ASSUMED if you succeed. At the other end if you’re a complete failure, you MUST be saintly.
The problem is that we, as humans, are too likely to justify ourselves that way. It’s all “they were lucky.” Never “I didn’t work hard enough.” (And if you’re wondering if I should take my own medicine? I do. I did. Actually that was the mechanism that kept me from suspecting the publishing world was rigged for the longest time. But finally the fact that the population is NOT uniformly left leaning but that 99% of the books that go mega bestseller have to be at least marginally left leaning sort of broke through that. You can be paranoid, and yet they still might be out to get you. The fact that the control is breaking and sort of validating my perceptions helps. For instance, one of the best ways to break out as indie is military sf. It’s even better than romance. BUT before it wouldn’t even make it on the shelves, except from Baen. No, I still haven’t written my mega bestseller. Part of this is a fear of flying – more on that later – and part of it is breaking through the structures that supported my mid list existence [my own daily life arrangements, I mean.] More on that later also, probably.)
To have an ingrained system, propagated uniformly by TV and movies and books and newspapers, and all means of mass communication that there’s something wrong with spectacular successes and that failure by itself anoints you as “good” is precisely the wrong message to send. To either people coming anew to this country or those whose parents aren’t the best model (the children of the fractured families of the twentieth century) we’re saying “fail. Glory in failure. It means you’re good.” We’re also incidentally promulgating the lower class lifestyle of promiscuity, indiscriminate spending, violence and dependency as the way to be. This is what makes you “authentic”.
Is it any wonder they look at the alien tribe – we used to call them civilized men – who is clean, law abiding, keeps stable relationships, raises clean-cut kids, as somehow cheating, when that tribe succeeds?
The fact is that the rules for doing well in life haven’t changed that much throughout time. Sometimes societies just forget them and promulgate instead the rules of the crab bucket and the idea that failure means you’re good. It always ends in tears.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.”
– Robert A. Heinlein.
According To Hoyt 
Being a conservative Catholic, I utterly disagree with Mormon theology, but I’ve had a good friend who’s a Mormon, and every Mormon I’ve ever met has been great. Their culture is doing a lot of things right.
…which isn’t too surprising, when you realize that it’s the one truly American religion. People say that folks up in the Appalachian mountains preserve the King’s English (not really true, but with a kernel of a point), and Mormonism has preserved a lot of goof stuff from American culture c. 1880.
It’s no surprise that it’s a rapidly growing religion. While I would, of course, like each and every Mormon to come to Rome, on a purely sociological level they strike me as a really good force. My hunch is that secular humanism is writing its own death warrant between low birth rates, abortion, late family formation, and more, and the Earth of 2300 will be divided between African and Asian Catholics and Western Hemisphere Mormons (I think that Islam is going to implode and not be worth talking about in 200 years, but that’s another story).
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You might be right, although secular humanists might defect to Islam. I know that sounds weird, but… it’s my gut feeling.
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Why should it sound weird? The Jesus freaks in the 70’s came from the hippies from the 60’s. What is weird about thinking that it could happen again between two cultures with similar worldviews (progressivism and Islam)?
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Not all of them. This secular humanist is quite happy with his religion and is likely to respond to demands of “convert or die” with “you first.”
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yes, but you’re not from the LEFT side of the spectrum. I should have specified. I think LEFTIST secular humanists will find a home in Islam.
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People of the left. Salt of the universities. You know, morons.
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Which makes a warped sort of sense. If they convert to Christianity, they are automatically the bad guys, even if they join a far left UCC or Unitarian Universalist congregation (and I’m going by the UCC and UU self-definitions of their being Christian). And being Jewish? Nope, too many rules and again, they are joining the oppressors.
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It happens. A lot of left-leaning girls marry Islamic guys, and convert. Either they find out the truth and get out, or they find out that Islamic marriages in the US are often a way to have nookie and then dump the stupid foreigner; or they find out the truth and convince themselves that they really really want to be with the Allah crowd. Happens a lot with Hispanic girls too, oddly.
Then there’s the Episcopalian female priest (in Oregon or Washington State) who was proclaiming herself to be Muslim and Christian also (and Buddhist, I think), and was totally shocked when her female bishop decided this really was a reason to lower the boom.
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Well, the woman who thought she could be a Muslim, a Christian and a Buddhist all at the same time obviously went to the school of the White Queen, as have so many do these days. What do contradictions mean if they get in the way of the right and proper? Who cares for logic? It is found difficult and abandoned. From Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There:
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The Left has become largely reactionary, defining itself in opposition to conservatives and Christian values. This leaves them adherents to a philosophy fundamentally devoid of substance and lacking resistance to aggressive ideologies for which they lack antibodies. This means any top-down charismatic philosophy not containing Christian precepts, such as communism or Islamism.
With foundations based on sand they are prey to the first strong wave of any incoming tide, convinced only that they must not grab ahold of the one anchor which offers them self-determination (the one that is weighted with self-responsibility.)
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I was assigned to a base in Utah for nearly three years, and I loved living here, and very much liked the Mormons that I knew – neighbors, coworkers, friends, the lot. Yes, they are kind of square, especially in the eyes of hip urban sophisticates, and the theology is a load of pure 19th century tosh, but I loved that they were family- and community-oriented, that ZCMI had the best-evah! housewares departments and you could readily purchase bulk quantities of basic foodstuffs everywhere, that all the older neighborhoods were laid out with bearing fruit trees and vegetable gardens.
The only thing that was hard to take was lime jello. I never was able to handle that.
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I can’t handle jello at all– lime jello is not good either. ;-) Yep, it was at every event.
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In CO they seem to go in for chocolate chip cookies. I can’t enjoy them now, unfortunately.
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I could handle chocolate chip cookies. lol– Did I say that recently I started to have problems with potatoes and tomatoes. Sigh… BTW thanks for the recipes about Brussels sprouts and cauliflower. It has really helped my digestive tract.
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If you like cauliflower I would mention that I have been coming across a number of roasted cauliflower recipes lately. The simplest is cauliflower sliced into planks, brushed with olive oil and then baked – flipping at what you guess to be mid point – until tender and showing some brown. (Haven’t tried it yet the cauliflower available locally have been … freckled and sad.) If, when we try them, they turn out decently would you want a heads up?
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Thanks — I have tried a roasted vegetable dish (cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, onions, and anything else that I want to get rid of in my fridge). I put a little oil on the bottom (very light) and then sprinkle the top with olive oil, pepper, and salt. Yep — good. Leave in the oven at a low temp for about 40 minutes more or less.
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Thanks.
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oops– oh yea, a heads up… and so far the roasted vegetable recipes have tasted good over here.
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Dear of dearie me, yes, the southern church pot-luck suppers. When I first arrived in very small town in eastern Tennessee I encountered this particular cultural tradition — with its endless variety of congealed salads of all sorts in the most amazingly garish colors.
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I was up in Iowa, near the Lutefisk Line (the MN border) when I discovered “a Jello,” taverns (aka sloppy joes), and “lunch”. “Lunch” is the small meal between dinner and supper, small being a relative term.
Growing up in Texas, I learned early the importance of having the proper casserole dishes for church/temple functions, funerals, and other important social events. Going to college in Georgia only confirmed the need for having at least two Pyrex or Corning Ware dishes suitable for public display. :)
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When I was an exchange student, I was invited to speak at a variety of civic organizations. Jello salads prospered in Ohio in the eighties. I even learned to like some of them — but weirdly I don’t MAKE any. (The combination of sweet-salty that Americans like took me the longest time to get used to, and I just realized I’ve come to like it. Hence my goat-cheese-strawberry salads. Odd.)
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Hence my goat-cheese-strawberry salads.?
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Salad with goat cheese balls (rolled in egg and almond flour and flash-fried) and sliced strawberries. Balsamic vinaigrette dressing.
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There’s another high-birth-rate group you’ve left out: traditionalist evangelical Protestants. I know a couple families in the Houston area with eight and seven children respectively, and neither of them are seen as all that odd in their church. A bit more blessed than others (who are “only” having three or four kids), but not all that odd.
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… in their respective churches, I should say. They live on opposite sides of Houston, and both families go to a church near their house.
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God has divided mankind into two groups:
1. Those who believe that the most powerful biological force is the tendency of a population to be dominated by its most quickly reproducing members. (the Darwinians)
2. Those who are actually reproducing. (the non-Darwinians)
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I see it all the time: those who most urge the teaching of evolution in schools are least able to draw practical implications from it.
No, we are not evolving toward a woman who contracepts for her entire life!
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Agreed. To think a woman who never has a child will have something to do with evolution is mind boggling to me. lol
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Sure she does. She’s a Dead End.
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That evolution is about as probable as hemophiliac women.
The problen is that they are reverse-cuckoos; instead of planting their eggs in others’ nests, they raid others’ nests to plant their ideas.
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Frank, I’m puzzled. Are you trying to make a comment about religious people and a belief in the theory of evolution? Snark or otherwise?
Because I find the 2 million people who protested against GMO and Monsanto far more frightening that people who might object to Darwinian evolution. And I say that as a person who has for many years debunked Young Earth Creationists, Intelligent Design and the rest of the anti-evolution zoo.
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SPQR, just pointing out the irony.
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Before the financial crisis hit, there was a flurry of fertility in Wall Street families. My hyperlinked comment about that seems stuck in the moderation queue.
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Islam can survive on very, very little in some of the worst places on earth. This means that whenever the rest of the world weakens morally and mentally it comes forth like a plague.
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Being a conservative Mormon, I would return your invitation by hoping that you will come to Salt Lake City!
Seriously though, I do enjoy your comments and what you add to the spicy stew that is this comment file.
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tjic (@tjic) | May 26, 2013 at 11:39 am
> My hunch is that secular humanism is writing its own death warrant between low birth rates, abortion, late family formation, and more,
One small problem with that logic: If all that is so, then why is the percentage of the Earth’s (and the US’s population) who identifies with the (secular-humanist, among other things) Left *at 50%+ of the population, and growing*?
I don’t know what the solution is for the increasing number of Leftists; but it sure-as-hell isn’t “low birth-rate, abortion, late family formation”, et cetera, et so on, et so forth.
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No. The solution is to stop crooked polls and elections. Seriously.
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Good luck with that.
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Treason. Death Penalty or exile for attempted (or successful) election theft.
I can dream, can’t I?
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I figure if purple fingers work for Benares and Kabul, they should work for the West coast too, at least. I can dream.
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Yep.
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I can suggest which finger to dye, too.
But doesn’t this dis-enfranchise the Handless-American Community?
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We shall dye their noses.
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… we’re saying “fail. Glory in failure. It means you’re good.”
There’s a different (and good) message about failure, which sometimes gets confused with this (terrible) message about failure. The good one is, “Don’t be afraid to fail. If you’re doing hard things, you’re going to succeed sometimes and fail sometimes. If you never fail, then you’re just doing easy things. But everything truly worth doing is hard to do, so unless you get over your fear of failure, you’re never going to do anything truly worth doing.”
The kind of failure talked about in that terribly “failure means you’re good” message is drug addiction, being unable to hold down a job, that kind of thing. Whereas the kind of failure talked about in the “failure means you’re trying hard things” is, say, Edison finding a thousand ways that won’t work.
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Yes. I realized while listening to the Writing Superstars speeches that part (PART) of what has kept me in the mid list is this fear of failure. Justified at one time, but not now when there are subsidiary channels to go through. Though I’ll still feel more risk inclined once the kids are out of the house and self-sufficient ;)
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Staring college tuition(s) in the face is guaranteed to make just about any parent go “Ulp!”
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That’s what the Air Force is for.
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Seconded!
What’s the old sailor joke…. Each service, you join for a different reason. The AF for quality of life, the Navy for travel, the MC for tough guy points, and the Army because nobody else is ever in the @#%$!@$ recruiting office.
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*snort I picked the right service then– because I wanted to travel.
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Same.
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I wanted to work on nuclear reactors and have an actual bed. 1.2 out of 2 isn’t bad.
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“Wanting to travel”: A two-year tour in Panama where I was a member of the Southern Command honor guard and a courier of sensitive personnel records (visited every country below the US/Mexican border, including some of the fly-specks in the Caribbean where there was a US Embassy with Air Force members attached); a year in Vietnam where in addition to R&R in Hawaii, I also visited Australia (3 days), Singapore (3 HOURS), Thailand (2 days), Okinawa (2 days), Korea (5 days) and Laos (classified); three different tours to Germany, where DW and I visited something like 14 different countries; and a tour in England with NATO, where I ended up in Norway for two days and in Denmark for a day. I also belong to that small percentage (almost minuscule) of Air Force people what been shot at, and had the honor of shooting back. That’s augmented by tours in Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Washington, DC, and South Carolina in the States. After all that travel, I miss it!
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I prefer the joke about how each service interprets “Secure a building”.
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*evil laughter*
Gads, memories of tying down equipment in the middle of Death Valley….
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When I was teaching at the Air Force base, (English) we had “students” from all the services. At some point or other the navy people would pull me aside and warn me that all flyboys were pervs. Then the airforce would pull me aside… It was funny.
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Did you eventually notice that 90% of all the guys are perves?
(And about 5-20% more of that age category, ditto.)
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I thought it was the Coasties.
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My exposure to them is limited to one former classmate, so my impression is that they’re all a bit older than the just-recently-legal bunch.
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I resemble that remark. :-)
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I was expecting more reaction to that comment!
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Why did yu expect a greater reaction? based on a life time of observation, women seem to want “perv’s.” Or, at least “bad boys,” based on who they (generic) date. Believe it or not, men pay a lot of attention to who attracts women. Men don’t marry expecting a woman to change to suit him, but women do. Then, they complain that the guy they married isn’t attentive enough (or at all), doesn’t care about anniversaries/birthdays, etc. I don’t understand why. You knew what he was like when you married him.
In the meantime, the guys like you (generic) say you want to marry, are ignored, left, right and center. All because they’re not: handsome enough, sexy (will say/do anything to get into your pants), or spend money freely enough.
Men will change, as a group, when women stop acting like idiots, and pay attention to what men are really like. Hits you, dropkick his worthless ass. Doesn’t remember the things important to you, find one that will. Respects you as a woman _and_ a Human Being, decide if that’s important enough to marry him.
There’s a rare few men (and boys) out there like women claim they want, because we were taught to see women as ladies and Humans. Deserving of not only basic respect (for any Human Being), but because they make us better men. Just as children make us better people.
Leaving the grease spot on the floor for someone else to clean up. (just like a bachelor :-)).
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Sure it looks like that from the dating pool– the gals who aren’t dumb enough to date jerks while being shocked that they’re jerks get married and STAY there, while the guys who are just trying to get sex (either by being a jerk, or by being a dish-rag “nice guy”) STAY there as well.
The sample changes greatly when the folks doing the smart thing have a relatively small probability of staying in the population that’s being sampled.
While a cousin to the “all guys are perves” joke is “men marry a woman expecting her to never change, women marry a man hoping to change him,” I’m a little startled to see someone trying to promote the male part of it as a VIRTUE!
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As the shy quiet person who wondered for years what was wrong with her, because no one *ever* asked her out, I say to you, “Shut up.”
On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 10:49 AM, According To Hoyt wrote:
> ** > Walter Daniels commented: “Why did yu expect a greater reaction? based > on a life time of observation, women seem to want “perv’s.” Or, at least > “bad boys,” based on who they (generic) date. Believe it or not, men pay a > lot of attention to who attracts women. Men don’t marry expecti” >
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Here too– I rarely dated until I joined the Navy– I was 27 then.
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Plus I also wondered what was wrong with me.
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Ditto. I’m a geek, but I didn’t look that bad.
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I would presume that she expected more men to either deny the allegation (because they don’t wish to be perceived as such, whether they are or not), or to make joking responses like mine.
While it appears that women like the jerks in the dating pool, that is largely a false appearance, which is largely due to indicators of desirable male nature being suppressed in today’s society, among the population of those who are not like that, so the “bad boys” appear to have the attributes of strength and determination which women tend to be attracted to, leading them to gravitate to the ones who treat them badly. Some women figure this out and look a little deeper into the man’s behavior before connecting with him, but still, the signals for the man to act deferential and weak are a powerful influence.
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Couple the fact that women’s cyclical variations predispose them to be most attracted to the “worst” sort of men when at their most fertile with the fact that social cues for “dominant” males are badly skewed toward arrogant pricks and you get dysfunctional mating at its worst.
Sure – men are pervs. So are women, except their perversions (e.g., exhibitionism) are more accepted socially. Being human means being broken, being broken means being a perv from somebody‘s perspective.
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Being human means being broken, being broken means being a perv from somebody‘s perspective.
Good point.
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Throwing out an obvious target like that, I expected at least a handful of mock-outraged responses…in both directions. (thus, the over 100% perverse rate for non-sailors)
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Then, they complain that the guy they married isn’t attentive enough (or at all), doesn’t care about anniversaries/birthdays, etc. I don’t understand why. You knew what he was like when you married him.
A family member received flowers from her beau regularly before marriage, once they were married she received not a one. I suspect this is paralleled by the woman who always appeared done-up before marriage and then ‘let herself go’. Problems will arise if you expect courtship behavior forever, almost as much as if you attempt to continue the courtship behavior forever.
I am sorry that your experience has taught you that women want ‘pervs.’ The Spouse is not a ‘perv’. It is one of the attributes that I found attractive at the beginning and has remained so throughout our relationship.
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I will always maintain that sailors have the reputation they deserve. That being said, I met some wonderful Christians during my enlistment.
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By now sailors think they have to uphold tradition by drinking like fish and partying like, well, a bunch of drunk sailors. ;) Or so I’ve been assured by a Marine.
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I only did that one year I was in the Navy– after a few toilet god experiences, I limited my drinks to one or two a night. ;-)
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I broke tradition by becoming Mormon in C school. It solidified my weird status when I got on my ship.
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Just a note– no alcohol has passed my lips in a decade– due to issues with medications. ;-)
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In the middle of Vietnam, I was offered a coveted spot in the Air Force, but picked the Marines because I wanted to score tough guy points. Then I volunteered for Vietnam…twice…so I could kill some commies for my mommy. They were pretty dangerous decisions, made without a speck of brains, but it all worked out okay. Talk about *lucky*….
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I thought Marines were never lucky, just **** good. (Any appearance of less than being d*** good is simply a failure to understand how awesome they are.)
Must be true, my Marines at school told me so. ;p
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all my Marine friends say the same.
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I always have a soft spot for guys who will start talking the logistics of invading hell to regroup.
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YES
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I had the distinct pleasure of being the ONLY Air Force person the Marines decided to include in whatever defenses were necessary to defend our site in Germany. We were a mixed bunch — 60% Air Force, 38% Army, and 2% Marines. Great duty! (That was because I was the only guy in the Air Force stationed there that could life a box of grenades, throw it on my shoulder, and walk the perimeter. Grenades are HEAVY)
Truthfully, if a war broke out, we were all supposed to “bug out” and try to reach Switzerland. The minute hostilities began, our jobs ended. Most of us decided the best thing to do was to try to reach the Netherlands ahead of the Soviets, and make our way to England. Lots of late-night discussions while working 2nd shift.
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I really miss those “what if” sort of talks…..
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Reminds me of the year in Korea, during the North Korean’s semi-annual national unity game of chicken, which happened about every six months or so, year in and year out. The old hands were pretty darned blase about it, but the baby airmen were usually pretty freaked the first time or two. One of my own airman underlings was getting very panicky about AFKN’s plans in case of a Nork Invasion, until I outlined to her my own plan, which involved me collecting up my bicycle, and issued armament … and a bolt cutter. See, the bolt-cutter was so that I could ‘liberate’ additional bicycle/s. I had a map and a compass, and in the event of fecal materiel impacting the oscillating air-moving device, I was heading south to Pusan with anyone I could convince to come with me, hopefully to include a KATUSA as translator.
I never claimed it was a good plan, or even a practical one, but it was a plan, and I was determined to carry it through, if neccessary … which my baby troop seemed to find enormously reassuring.
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Failure is fine – as a process of learning. But too often people take a failure and turn it into a lifestyle. they are afraid of committing a failure because they feel failing is a severe character defect, instead of merely one of the cobblestones in the pathway to success. I made the mistake, when my children were small, of holding them to the standard of success, rather than the process of learning by mistakes (one’s own as well as others).
Fortunately. I eventually realized I was setting them up for failure as a permanent flaw than merely a steppingstone.
But all the great success stories are stories of failure after failure after failure – until eventually achieving success. Edison, Lincoln and others exemplify the principle.
But our society is foster the same mistake I made early on. And apparently recognizing failure is itself a failure, which that can’t admit.
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That’s something I still struggle with – considering a mistake or failure in something as a moral failing on my part.
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I’m immune to the feeling that failure means that there is something wrong with me, personally. No idea why. Maybe because I make fairly big mistakes frequently. I just figure out what went wrong, either fix it or bypass it, and go on.
I am, however, very risk-averse at this point, because making a big try and a big failure would be very difficult on everyone in the family.
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I really don’t believe risk aversion and fear-of-failure are alike. Risk aversion – as in the example you gave – has to do with minimizing the negatives in an endeavor. Yes, it can also mean a person is generally unwilling to try new things.
But fear of failure is simply an unwillingness to try *because* you might fail.
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The NASA mantra: When Failure is Not an Option, Doing Nothing is.
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“Until the small startup eats their lunch.”
Which is why the political arm of Big Business, AKA the Democrat party, was so adamant to pass Obamacare. As long as that law exists no company will ever grow beyond 50 employees, there’s no way the marginal employee will add enough value to cover the costs of providing healthcare (or paying the tax) for the entire company. That means they’ll never be in a position to eat the big boys’ lunch. Right now the best course for entrepreneurial success is to build a company that one of the big boys is willing to buy for gigabucks.
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Yep.
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Lunch will be eaten. The big companies that cannot not overcome thier own tendency toward mediocrity will find that they are not as secure as they thought they were. Companies will grow, just not the ways that the big boys became big.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-57584424/how-to-stop-the-mediocrity-pandemic/
http://www.ecnmag.com/blogs/2013/05/fire-human-resources
The only thing the employee limit is going to do is change the definition and distribution of employees. Consider the NEST thermostat where a company with 20 or so employees makes millions of the things simply because they can farm everything out. Obamacare will only A. increase offshoring and B. accelerate things that are already happening.
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The problem with big companyies is that more than likely they will be run by people from the Ivy Covered Snob Factories. The same environment that give us our progressives in politics. The environment that creates things like this:
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/seven_rules_for_managing_creat.html
Now this cused quite a stir accross the internet when many people wer insulted by it, but I’m sure the author still has no clue why it did.
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I’m afraid that you do not understand that when you add a double negative it is a positive– so you just said big companies can overcome their mediocrity–
You just need to use “cannot” for the negative..
Sorry pet peeve that really adds humor to some discussions.
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Typo I really need to edit my edits. Sometimes I start a sentence one way and rethink.
I think that this is the way it should read:
The big companies that cannot overcome their own tendency toward mediocrity will find that they are not as secure as they thought they were.
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NP– I point it out because I was sure that you didn’t (not?) mean to do it. ;-)
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Does that make a half-negative imaginary? As in:
Bob was sure it was(sqrt(not)) sqrt(not) completed –> Bob was sure it wasn’t completed? :-P
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umm– I was giving him the option to positive or negative functions. lol NOT You make this up yourself? (half-negative imaginary?) Puts you in the mad-scientist category, I guess.
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Oh, just playing around with some ideas that were suggested by a (batty IMO) interpretation of quantum physics. They claim that it all makes sense, without having to deal with Many-Worlds, if you interpret the wavefunction’s second-order character as a generalization of the laws of basic logic to include complex values.
I was thinking: “Okay, but that only works if you generalize everything else that follows from logic like “events happening”, or “this holds” to include things like “events un-happening, or happening 90 degrees out of phase, and things being negatively true”
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YES– I actually understood until you got to events unhappening and then my brain hiccupped. ;-) I remember Red Dwarf treating with this one in one of their episodes and it was hilarious. People fullgrown growing to baby, and talking backwards. etc. etc. I think imho that even though time might not be linear if you hit another dimension or world, I am of the opinion that the idea is more theory than practical. ;-)
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No, it won’t. Do you really think NEST is any threat to Honeywell? They only produce one product. Depending on how much of their current structure is managerial overhead, they could grow to a line of three or four different products before running into the Obama barrier. That isn’t going to be enough to really challenge the established players, who will be using their not-insignificant R&D departments to add the desirable features currently found in the NEST in a way that doesn’t violate patents.
Yes, large companies are, more often than not, run by the less than brilliant. The number of executive donations to Obama is evidence enough of that. But an established company isn’t going out of business unless there’s a competitor their customers can flock to. The fewer companies in an industry, the higher the tolerance for stupidity in the sector. And new, potentially disruptive, technologies are less likely to live up to their potential if a small company cannot grow, using that technology, to challenge the existing power structure.
As long as we have Obamacare we will see a corporate ecosystem similar to the Cretaceous. Small mammals will scurry around in the undergrowth, competing with one another for resources, and occasionally being obliterated by the dinosaurs.
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The other possibility is that game changing innovations will come from outside. Obamacare is a US only thingie.
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That is true, but historically the rest of the world has lagged far behind the US when it comes to innovation. And it’s not like the rest of the world is that much better off. In fact, when compared to the problems Europe is having with their immigrant populations and transfer payments, China is having with their housing bubble, and India has with their social structure, I think we’re still the best place for innovation. Which is scary.
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Well, unless things proceed towards bad here and the result is a smart-and-innovative diaspora.
See the Ottoman Turks and what they accomplished through accepting the exiled Spanish Jews.
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But where would we go? If things got so bad here that the bright and innovative felt the need to leave, the rest of the world would be in flames – in many cases quite literally. I guess there’s Canada, but it’s not like that’s another country or anything ;)
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I’ve had a few friends head to Australia. I don’t know enough to guess how that place will do if/when a collapse happens.
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They’re a little too close to China, one of the aforementioned places to literally go up in flames, for my comfort. Plus, every time there’s a new regime in China they get expansionist.
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That’s partly what I meant, the other thing is that ALL the progressives I know thing that OZ is the one place that will escape unscathed. Even without verifying their work, I suspect that’s wrong, because that crowd usually is.
I’d say the biggest problem is that they’ll get — r perhaps are getting, I don’t know — the equivalent of Californicated.
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I talk to someone from OZ daily because we share the same disease. I suspect that they are very close to being Californicated from what she says.
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Not well. Better than Europe, for sure, but not well.
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Sub-orbit, stepping to orbit, from there to the bases at L2, then Luna City, from whence we head out to the Kuiper Belt with Mars Orbital with its elevators down to Burroughs Metro and Heinlein City, and… What? We’re getting there sooner or later; why not?
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Before he started focusing on anime, Stephen Den Beste started a series of posts about why we won’t see space colonies soon. He never finished it, but his basic thesis is that we simply don’t know how to build them. Not just the physical engineering, but the environmental and social engineering are nowhere near ready to support people actually living off-planet.
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OTOH, I have heard several times that a lot of NASA types really liked Babylon 5 because they said that if you substituted fission for fusion the tech was there to build a B5 today if money was no object…. mostly on what it would cost to move the materials around.
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I have my doubts about that. According to the specs B5 has a linear density of around 1 million tons per meter. That’s a lot of “weight” to put on the central structure.
And there’s still the question of how to keep people alive in that thing. The example Den Beste uses is hair. People and animals will be constantly shedding. What do you do with it? Here on Earth it’s broken down by fungi. Do you have a compost section dedicated to breaking down hair?
Then there’s the social aspect. B5 has the advantage of cheap and easy transportation, so Earth Alliance can send the personnel necessary to keep the station operating, and readily replace people who die/quit. Our colony, especially if we’re using it to escape Earth, won’t have that luxury.
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Which is part of my point about the cost of moving materials. That includes people.
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Well sure. Physics is easy when you have infinite frictionless surfaces, massless pulleys, point charges, and spherical cows uniformly distributed with milk.
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And both sides of this discussion are missing the real point. No we probably could not put a real self sufficient colony in space right now but, if we don’t make thee attempt we will never learn how. There will be mistakes, people will die needlessly. Suck it up buttercup, the only way to do successful colonies if to have failures
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But that’s BS. Our species never knows these things till we need them. And the first attempts are often half-assed.
You know why we won’t have space colonies? Because the population is already falling — and the young people population is cratering. We might have elected to join the dodo.
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We have decades of work to do before we arrive at half-assed.
Right now our (as a species) space program is roughly equivalent to primitive dugout canoes. Getting off the planet would be the voyages of discovery. It can’t be done with the technology we have. Maybe in a couple dozen years we’ll be able to do it the same way the Polynesians colonized the Pacific: By trial and error and massive casualties. Eventually we’ll get there, but not soon enough to do you and I any good.
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Seriously Jeff I disagree– In 1960 our technology was nothing near what we have here, and yet we had a man on the moon and had several moon launches. Then our government (and others) took over space and we piddled it…. I have a lot of excitement over the privatization that is going on with space travel. It changes everything.
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Actually, the technology was pretty much the same as what we have now. Today’s stuff does pretty much the same, it’s just lighter and cheaper. The basics, things like engines, life support systems, computers, haven’t really changed.
Getting stuff to other planets isn’t that hard, it’s just a matter of thrust and timing. Getting that stuff back isn’t that much harder, you just need more thrust. We’ve extended the period we know how to keep people alive in space (with a secure line of communication) from hours to months. But that’s still a long way from keeping people alive indefinitely independent from Earth.
I think this conveys pretty well the difference in scale between going to the Moon and going to Mars. To extend my analogy, the Apollo program was paddling across the lagoon. It’s a long way from there to crossing the Atlantic.
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We could have done it 30 years ago if we had the will to do so, but politicians don’t want to do something like that, and private industry has never seen the availability of profits in a short enough term.
Your point about hair – it could be recycled in something like a septic tank, or it could simply be burned and turned into CO2 for the plants. A true colony will have the capacity for solutions that are not available to the small vehicles we have now. With a large solar mirror, there are few wastes that cannot be recycled in the heat you can produce from that.
Our main problems are cost of lifting the materials, and if we jump to the moon first, with mining facilities and duty rotation, we can alleviate much of that cost.
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Yes, the population is falling. That is because evolution is selecting for refusal to abort and contracept whether from laziness or morals or love of children, or medical problems that prevent contraception from working, or whatever factors are producing large families nowadays. One of those is resistance to the anti-population crowds’ nostrums. It may take a while, but it will go back up.
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Publishing from the eighties on. Six companies. Barriers to entry through the roof. They were HORRIBLE at what they did, but until indie they were also the only game in town, so where could people (readers OR writers) go?
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And where would indie be if Amazon had never gotten above 50 employees?
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They would probably be a modified conglomerate, contracting with each other to provide goods and services which none of the individual companies could.
For example: One company provides an Internet presence, utilizing independent contractors for times when their development team is not big enough. Another company provides QA services to the first. Each Warehouse is an independent company, providing space and distribution, and so on.
In fact, they have some things in common with the above model now, by allowing many companies to sell things through their common interface.
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So – a modified Cell type organizational format? Each cell having 1-49 members. And each member may – or may not – either be a member or interact with another Cell. I guess the dodge on this is that the members are employed for X-1 hours (X = 40 hours), and employed for the other hour by another Cell.
Company A = 49 members
Member 20 works 39 hours
Member 20 works for Company B for I hour
and so on.
That way you can have a plethora of casually related (via cross-employment) companies, none large enough to trigger the Obamacare penalties.
Or the members of Company A can be contractors to A, and leaders of their specific companies, also comprised of a certain number of ‘contractors’.
I’m not current on either labor or tax laws, so I don’t know how to get around the limitation that contractors by definition provide their own resources/tools. Unless a modified Lease/Purchase arrangement can be fashioned (somewhat like the real estate arrangement).
Any ideas on this?
BTW, on this format, the first level of 49 employees/contractors would open up to an additional 2000+ employees/contractors and then it grows exponentially.
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Well, what about starting two companies. Company A hires contractors at a premium while Company B offers the resources the contractors need with a discount for Company A contractors that matches the premium paid?
See, this is what I was talking about in a earlier thread with Americans being too goram clever. How about instead of spending all this brainpower trying to figure ways around it we just REPEAL THE %^(&*^%&% MOTHER (^&&*)(*& GOAT (*&)*&^(* LAW? Ahem. Sorry.
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Because the American way is to innovate within the existing rules until the rules become so onerous that revolution is the only possible innovation.
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Which is pretty blinking stupid. I mean, we know what the problem is, why not fix it now rather than wait until the wheels come completely off the wagon?
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It’s hardly obvious that “what needs to be done” is obvious. I mean, sure, it’s obvious to you and me, though we may differ on some of the details. But the rest of the country? The (for lack of a better term) majority? Destructive indoctrination in the form of education and popular culture have lulled them into a stupor, part whistling past the graveyard, part eating of lotus blossoms, part a good helping of learned helplessness. What needs to be done will be painful for a lot of people, and no one wants to be the bad guy. No one wants to wear the black hat. And black hat is certainly what it will be. People advocating for rational spending limits, the curbing of an over-zealous and over-reaching government, and a return to our historical roots will be accused of everything from racism to baby-eating. Or of pushing little old ladies off cliffs. They’ll be othered so hard it’ll make their heads spin. Doesn’t change what needs to be done, it’s done with an eye towards making the personal costs for doing it so high that you’ll never get a majority of people behind it.
b) Tradition. Americans have a habit of convincing themselves that what needs to be done… doesn’t really have to be done after all. We have a history of waiting until we get really pasted and knocked to the mat before getting up, and doing what has to be done. Unfortunately, things here have been changing on an incremental basis, so a good number of people keep adjusting to the new normal unaware that it leaves them defenseless against error and poorer both in monetary and spiritual / intellectual senses.
Of course, anything that can’t last forever… won’t. It just may hardcore suck for everyone when it all comes down.
As Jefferson said: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
Bah. I’m in a foul mood this morning. Not even a passel of kittens can shake me from it. In fact, they may well be exacerbating it.
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Keep in mind that this is pretty much in a nutshell the view of the AGW wolf-criers. “The problem is obvious, the solution is simple.”
To all I say: Pray consider the possibility that you might be wrong.
BTW: If a passel of kittens can’t shake you from the foul mood you probably aren’t cooking them right. Try wrapping each in bacon.
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But that’s part of the problem too. We allow that we could be wrong. We give people the benefit of the doubt. But the ideological forces arrayed against things like limited government and personal responsibility are absolutely convinced that they are correct, and that any break with them isn’t born of reason or a different perspective, but from the fact that you are an intolerant bastard whose only objection to their plans cannot be based upon reason, but on the fact that you are a (insert your Bulverism of choice here). Disagreement with the established wisdom is not a difference of opinion. It’s unforgivable heresy.
Incidentally, the mention of AGW has raised my rage score by 0.5. I imagine if this goes on, I shall spontaneously grow hair, which will then immediately turn yellow and spiky.
Either that or my head will explode, Scanners style.
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Pictures of yellow, spiky hair.
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Of course…
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And naturally, an img tag won’t work in comments. So…
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Well, it looks good on you. (RUNS.)
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If you’re as big a bada** as Goku, you don’t have to worry about anyone’s opinion of your looks.
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Weeell, Goku is not normally blonde, but becomes one when he is in Super Saiyan mode — every Saiyan who goes into this mode becomes spikey blonds.
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Because they have erred is no reason for us to replicate their mistake. It is every reason to act to limit the damage posed by such wrong-headedness.
I am confident of my capacity for error, therefore I take steps, build in circuit-breakers and check my work. As they are confident of their incapacity for error we must force them to take measures limiting the risk posed by their lack of humility. That is justifiable self-defense, which does not mandate abandoning our own humility.
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Because it’s far easier for individuals and small groups to innovate than it is to try to gather together to make major changes to the existing order.
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“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
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I wasn’t disputing your point, but rather illustrating it. You can be VERY incompetent indeed provided you keep the competition non-viable.
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I know, I was simply stating the obvious. It’s a bad habit.
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Do franchises count against the mother company’s employee count? People can be very ingenious and innovative when it comes to developing ways to getting around restrictions. We don’t really know what will happen when the old paths are shut down. Consider the present dominance of Amazon. Three decades ago, when we saw the mega-book stores overtaking the small and independents, who would have seen it.
Meanwhile, the unions are beginning to get mad because they have realized that they are actually not going to have their benefit packages protected by the Affordable Care Act. Things change…dynamic analysis might be mistaken in its conclusions, but one thing you can be certain of is that static analysis will be wrong.
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Honeywell _might_ be able to find ways around the patent problem, but will they? History says that once a company reaches a certain point/size, it solidifies. GM being a great example. The problem being that innovation is *change,* and management in big companies *hates* change. Only if it guarantees that there is ZERO risk, will it be accepted. Which, since there cannot be a guarantee of zero risk, it’s destroyed.
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Nest, by itself, no. But the barriers to entry for product development are dropping as we speak. The tools are cheaper and acess to resources is morphing in ways that are probably as revolutionayry as it was in 1840 or so. Yes Honeywell could develop a similar thermostat. If somebody sees the need. If sales doesn’t miss the drop in amonst a dozen different similar products. If they don’t stay stuck to the old price point. If the their Business Investement committe approves the project. Or a lot different things that need to happen in big company all happen, before the product life cycle has run it’s course and Honeywell is right back where they are started. Big companies, unless they really work to foster innovative people, don’t work in a short life cycle, high innovation environment. Been there, done that. Lost my job trying to be the odd nail sticking up too far and pursuing excellence rather than mediocrity.
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Which is why they work to keep the environment low-innovation. You know, I just picked Honeywell as the generic Nest competitor off the top of my head based on walking through Lowe’s, imagine my surprise when I found this. Yet another example of the barriers big companies can erect against small competitors.
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Honeywell has a habit of patenting every little thing, seen that personally. Not sure if this held up, the NEST thermostats are still on the shelf, so the fact that Honeywell tried to patent the fact that you can plug the thermostat in probably hasn’t done very well. The thing is that I am absolutely sure that the NEST people did their patent homework and Honeywell is probably not going to have much of a csae. In any case patent suits are long drawn out affairs and an entire product life cycle will have come and gone before it’s over. Of course that also doesn’t mean that Honeywell’s safe. Far from it. I know of some thier aircraft stuff that might come up for some innovative new competition. For that matter if I had just a little more investment money, I have an idea myself.
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Here’s the NEST story straight from the horse’s mouth:
That stuff about finding new ways to sell to a market that had been stagnent, well that is exactly the point. That’s the problem with big companies for the most part.
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John, Honeywell doesn’t have to have much of a case if they can tie up NEST in litigation NEST doesn’t have the resources to defend against.
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It doesn’t matter if the case has merit. Honeywell probably has a legal department larger than the entirety of Nest. Lawsuits like this are practically free for Honeywell. Now, as the article states, Nest is a special case with quite a few Silicon Valley deep pockets behind it, but how many other small companies don’t have that luxury? What happens to those companies whose potential investors are scared off by the legal battle?
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Actually lawsuits like this aren’t ‘free.’ Legal will bill the product line for the costs, which will have to come out of the product lines budget. The product manager gambled. He was probably seeing a revenue drop and is using the lawsuit to show that he’s “doing something.”
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My expectation is a dis-aggregated corporate structure, either by breaking functions into separate corporate entities — such as using temp workers for production, hire a consulting form for management, subcontract R&D — or by extensive use of contractors, perhaps with ownership interest in the core corporation — look at the way Hollywood employs production companies as subcontractors for film and television programs.
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my expectation too.
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Isn’t that basically how Enron ended up being structured? I can’t see much good coming from that, and a disassociated aggregate like that would probably be fairly trivial for a large established corporation to disrupt.
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Of course they are a threat to Honeywell. All innovators threaten the establishment, because they change the rules, and the establishment only understands the rules.
I always wondered what the buisness climate would be like if we set corporate tax rate by size instead of profit. Obamacare does that in a way, so I think you’ll see more flexibility and mobility among business–something more decentralized, and less easy to regulate and control. Which would well satisfy the law of unintended consequences, but in a positive way for a change.
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They aren’t a threat right now, they’re simply too small. But they have the potential to become a threat. That’s why Big Business is all for Big Government. It allows them to keep those threats from becoming real.
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I foresee a different scenario: a couple of guys come up with a good idea, build a prototype, test it to destruction, make all the corrections, and then farm out the production, assembly, and sales to two or more other small companies, each producing perhaps a small part (or several of them), assembly at still a different company (or several companies), and sales through still another company. No companies has more than 50 employees, most far less, yet the Big Boys with their huge overhead can’t compete. Slowly, one by one, the little guys overwhelm the Big Boys until they collapse.
As for obliteration by the dinosaurs, you DO know that the mammals survived, while the only dinosaurs that made it past the K-T boundary were birds — small, flighty birds.
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In my journeyman accountant phase I spent a couple of years servicing F.A.S. installations, either setting them up or reconciling them against the Fixed Assets already on the books. During one stint I worked at a company whose business is designing, setting up and debugging plastic injection modelling assembly lines.
Once they had the process worked out the design and equipment would be sold to another company (often as not in Third World location) to operate the process at scale.
A very profitable business with some interesting accounting issues, but an example of what you’ve described: conceive, develop, debug and divest.
http://www.nypro.com/
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The problem with that scenario is that the value creation is spread out over a large number of small companies, which means that it’ll be hard for any one of them to attract the kind of investment necessary to grow, or that one of the big boys could simply buy out any part of that chain.
I know that dinosaurs died out (I don’t care what SCIENCE! says, a chicken isn’t a goram dinosaur. Dinos are cool, chickens are not). But with Obamacare the dinosaurs have built an orbital defense platform to keep those pesky asteroids at bay. And that brings in the metaphor overpressure alarm.
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Unless of course the 15+ little companies all have stock or shares owned by a single small-cap fund. The fund managers make up funds all the time, buying shares or what have you, and selling shares and all on the market as a bundle. Funds started to spread the risk of buying single stocks, it might work to combine the members’ investment now.
So you have the managers draw up the dissasociated small cap widgit fund.
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So things are not as they ought to be, when were they ever? There are times that have been better than others, but no time in history was, in fact, golden.
If the restrictions of The Affordable Care Act prove to be as onerous as many now predict it will be challenged with sufficient force to overturn it. (I did mention that the unions now are becoming upset?) In the meantime we have a choice, we can dwell on the why not, and give up, or we can work out ways to surmount the present restrictions, while, at the same time, working to remove them.
It is just possible that some of the new structures that are developed to by-pass ACA will prove desirable. You never know where innovation will come from, but, by definition, it certainly will not come from doing things the way they have always been done.
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Await the hour when they start to scream that automation is killing American jobs. The more automated you can make your production, the fewer employees you need to get bigger.
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If I had one wish, it would be to have the ability to hit people who think automation destroys jobs in the head with a mallet and suffer no repercussions. It is, quite simply, one of the stupidest ideas in economics. Right up there with the idea that economies are zero sum games.
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Unfortunately, automation does destroy jobs because there is always going to be the right hand side of the bell curve who can’t do any job more complex than the kind of muscle-powered / rote assembly jobs that machines take over. Eventually you end up with a huge pool of people who have exactly two things to offer: their votes in elections and their bodies for riots.
One thing too many people seem to forget about space colonies is that since you can’t transport your total tech base in toto to the new colony, you have to drop back to a tech base you can support and that requires more people to do what the machines you can’t bring enough of along did back on the mother world.
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Only in the short term. Unfettered either education or economic expansion catches up and the people unemployed by automation (or their descendants) find employment. We’ve been hearing the same lament for centuries. It’s pure, unadulterated, high-test, weapons-grade, nonsense.
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Again, look at the bell curve. Unless you are arguing that we live in Lake Wobegone you are going to hit the point where a growing part of the population doesn’t have the brainpower. Even when we went through the industrial revolution, the jobs were relocated. Someone who was only bright enough to walk behind a plow could work on the assembly line tightening screws. Automation takes over both plowing AND screw-tightening, what do you propose the lower end of the IQ curve do?
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If I knew the exact answer to that I would soon be a wealthy man. But we’ve run across this kind of thing before. Properly tightening a fastener is actually significantly more difficult than picking cotton. Yet, in the early 20th century American blacks sucessfully made the transition. And screw-tightening has long since been automated (it’s actually why the Phillips screw was invented). Today’s production line workers mostly feed the machines and do QA, things that are rather hard to automate. But even if they are, I imagine most of them (or their kids) could find employment as low level programmers. It doesn’t take that much intellect to turn a flowchart into code, just a bit of training on the language itself.
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One reason a company will invest in expensive technology is to reduce the total number of employees needed produce a similar amount of goods. For a long time our greater productivity meant that, in spite of high wages and generous benefits packages American workers receive (particularly in unionized industries), American manufacturers were able to compete on the world market.
Other countries are now applying our production technologies, often in newer streamlined plants, with less concern about employee safety or environmental impact, etc.. Their labor costs, while rising, remain massively lower. This contributes to our inability to compete. (It is now cheaper to ship wood from North Carolina to China and the finished furniture back than it is to build it in North Carolina — North Carolina is a right to work state.)
On a side note: I do think it is a good thing that the Cuyahoga River no longer catches fire and that we have not had another incident like the Donora Death Fog. We just have to realize that clean air and water does come at a cost.
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Unfortunately, automation does destroy jobs because there is always going to be the right hand side of the bell curve who can’t do any job more complex than the kind of muscle-powered / rote assembly jobs that machines take over.
There are a LOT of jobs that aren’t “more complex,” they’re just…different.
A robot can’t smile, or make judgement calls, or just do “a bit of this, a bit of that.”
I don’t like getting my food from a living person, but some folks really like the human interaction angle– that doesn’t take complex abilities.
For that matter, a lot of machine upkeep is very simple. 90% of freaking calibration work— the thing I was offered when I flatly refused to go nuke– can be done by a monkey, if you can teach them to do the thing. Teach someone to calibrate torque wrenches, you’re golden. (There’s a big machine. You set the wrench in it, push a button, and it torques it up, then tells you what the pressure it released at is. Replace and repeat.)
A lot of stuff is not done right now because it’s either illegal to select someone suited for it, or you can’t pay low enough to get folks started and trained up to being worth the price of a trained worker. (The military takes off some of the wage-gap stuff, oddly enough- they’re allowed to kick out folks who aren’t suited, and the work needs to be done anyways.)
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on the calibration being done by a monkey thing, you are wrong/right. Most of the work is as simple as you state, The need for skills comes in if you are not just checking the settings/accuracy of the equipment but, need to adjust or repair the equipment to return it to proper function. I did the job in the military and have done it as a civilian. There is more to the field than taking readings. Though some parts of it should be done by a moron with a sense of meticulousness. Actually some types of retarded people would do better than fully functional mental types at the routine tasks
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I know. I did the same thing.
Now, imagine the part that can be separated from the rest and done by anyone who can follow directions actually being done by someone else, rather than the highly trained and skilled repair/troubleshooting guy.
It already effectively happened in my shops– but with “lazy” taking the simple stuff, instead of “can’t do better.”
I’d almost argue that such things should be entirely done by folks with various issues, just based off of how the really good high level techs usually SCREAMED ‘autistic spectrum.’
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I do not scream autistic spectrum, I have learned to hide most of it ;) Still I take your point. Then again part of my becomming skilled was thbaby steps of dimentional, multimeters, signal generators
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True, but there are a LOT more torque wrenches than techs that really need training.
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I do not scream autistic spectrum. I whisper it! Actually I don’t test autistic spectrum but can act it if I’m VERY sleep deprived and high on coffee. Body language becomes opaque and I just… go on.
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I am mostly teasing you. I really wanted to hire a methodical moron (old time medical diagnosis, not insult) for Torque wrenches, multimeters etc. You are not the only person appalled by the mind-numbing monotony of some parts of the job. one company I worked for actually had one of the bosses friends doing that chore. His only problem was that his mental abilities were damaged by an accident and he kept believing he could step up and make decisions
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I wasn’t sure…so went with “meh, act like it’s serious and use it to elaborate.”
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Prior to the development of the crank- and later water- powered grain mill, grain was ground on a simple saddle quern by, generally, female house slaves. In some areas (Scandinavia I believe) they were called quern-slaves, and that was pretty much what they did. She would grind and sift meal and in a day she could grind meal for a small household to bake with. It was drudgery, that eventually destroys your back, and since there was a daily demand there was no release.
The development of the rotating crank mill and the Roman hourglass mill meant that more grain could be ground, though generally the work was moved to male slaves who had more muscle to move the larger stones. With water mills, the grain milled was increased greatly and slaves were no longer used as the motive power. This meant both that there was work for mill-wrights and millers and transporters but also there was an increased call for grain which also increased farming….and it also meant that there was a call for bakers (before there was not enough flour available to make a go of it commercially) and those associated, supporting jobs.
Automation in this case meant that a drudgery job went away, and higher paying jobs appeared because of the greater amount of production appeared. It also meant that there was less economic reason to keep slaves in that industry. I don’t guarantee that the women that ran the querns had better lives or wound up doing a nicer job, but I would guess they wound up doing another job, maybe weaving, maybe processing flax for linen, maybe baking, but there is always work for hands unless there is something to prevent it – like legislation or minimum wage laws or Obama’s happiness law.
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ONLY if I get to hit half of them. Otherwise it’s a no-go.
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Wish #2 would be for the ability to deputize people. Because I think that otherwise my arm would start getting a mite tired.
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Obamacare didn’t do that. SOX did.
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Re: Jewish success being despised. I got to talk quite a bit when younger to a woman who lived through Hitler’s rise to power. She told me that the government made a huge point of keeping your money in Reich Marks as a matter of patriotism. This obviously let to you being stripped of everything if you were obedient, and if Germans have one true stereotype it is obedience to Father and the Fatherland. The Jews on the other hand ditched the toilet paper money as fast as they could for gold, jewels, fancy porcelains, cut glass and art work. When they were impoverished is it any surprise the Germans blamed the Jews for avoiding poverty, instead of blaming their own evil government and their personal foolishness? Not if you know human nature.
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Thomas Sowell had some interesting discussion on this as Middleman Minorities — minority ethnic groups that handle jobs like money-lender, peddler, etc. They are hated and despised and the targets of mob violence wherever they exist, regardless of what nationality they or their oppressors belong to.
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I think you have a typo there- “but my verbal reasoning is next to non-existence” should be “but my spatial reasoning is next to non-existence.” Feel free to delete this comment at your convenience.
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yes, spatial. Sorry. This is what I get for not having caffeine early morning…
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As a Mormon, I had never thought about it that way, but I suspect you are right. There is a culture of “hard work and clean living”, and while that has less of a dramatic effect in areas where there are a lot of us, I remember living in Colorado Springs. Everyone was surprised that I had no criminal record AT ALL, and was still looking at the bottom of the barrel jobs- looking back, that was probably why I had so little success job hunting. (Why is he going here, and not looking for something better? I don’t trust it!)
When I ran into you a couple years ago at the Reno Worldcon, we talked, and I realized how culture and work ethic similar we were, despite being from different backgrounds.
I have to wonder where this will lead in the future. After all, Jews now have a secure homeland.
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“After all, Jews now have a secure homeland.”
ROFLMBO!!!
Secure? Surrounded by Moslems and Islamists? (I figure one is more political)
Secure only in the sense of the old Marine mantra: When you’re stuck in the jungle, with your pants around your ankles, and find you’re surrounded by the enemy — Attack At Once!
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yep.
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secure homeland
My initial reaction was that small sound Loki made as he lies in the floor of Stark’s office after the Hulk has pronounced him a ‘puny god.’
My second is, ‘Oh really?’ — as delivered by Ke$ha as the devil in What Baby Wants on Alice Cooper’s Welcome 2 My Nightmare.
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OT: Anyone have a Kindle Fire? Mine will not bring up the store front (whatever you call it) or web browser, I just reset it so hopefully fixed it, however has it happened to anyone else?
Really nice article part re failure was interesting. Myself I am so risk averse and do not want to do anything unless and until I know how it will pan out. Even looking for a new job has been scary and Not Fun.
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You need to get over that fear, or it will eat you alive. Fear is normal, just remember to act as if it weren’t there ;) In striving work-related situations, of course!
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Re. Kindle. I have a paperwhite at it is working fine at the moment (1425 CDT), connected to the storefront quite easily for a change.
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Thanks. I think the reset fixed it. Will know in a couple of days.
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As I have said before (might be here, might not), but a lot of the unpalatable things about Mormonism started to become fringe in the late 1980s. I had already left it by then. The Church I grew up in (I came from one of the families that knew Joseph Smith) was very xenophobic about outsiders. I do miss the music (hymns before the hymnal that is used now). Plus each of the branches and wards had a personality. I know it is considered a plus in the Mormon Church, but when I have been in one church (yes, I did set foot in a LV church about ten years ago) it was exactly the same as the building that my parents church in Utah. It was surreal and bland.
Since all of my family members are still in the Church, I hear about the changes.
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While thinking of Sarah’s post, I was reminded of so-called “White Privilege”. Blacks (and other minorities) who believe in it likely think of it as “Whites stick together” while Whites who believe it it likely think “other Whites are bigoted so they discriminate against non-Whites”.
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It’s really not so much “white privilege” as the fact that whites are less likely to assume racism or sexism is behind jackassery. When we encounter a jackass we attribute his or her behavior to the individual. When a minority with a persecution complex runs across one he thinks it is evidence for the bigotry of society while ignoring the vast multitude of encounters that belie that assumption.
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Correct Jeff, “White Privilege” doesn’t exit. It is something made up by minorities and supported by liberals.
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It wasn’t made up by minorities. It did exist, in places like the Jim Crow south. But by looking to those examples we can see that it no longer exists. The entire point of the Jim Crow laws was to reinforce white privilege in every interracial interaction. On top of that there were a set of societal expectations that reinforced the privileged status of whites. Even to the point where blacks were expected to step aside for whites walking down the sidewalk.
It just shows how far we’ve come that people can now think that one person using a racial epithet is evidence of society-wide discrimination.
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But not merely to enforce “white privilege” but also to use the coercion of government to prevent businesses from undermining Jim Crow by choosing to deal with African-Americans. Segregation actually cost business money, hence the attempt by the railroads to undermine it with the Plessy v. Ferguson case.
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Which is why things like affirmative action need to go. Because nothing says one race is superior like a complex socio-political system designed to ensure others remain inferior.
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Just to be a jerk here.
There is a case that it does, in fact, still exist. See, when oppressed minorities fled Jim Crow for Northern Cities, they would have gotten into politics in their new home. Who would have inspired their political practices, who would their role models have been? There is reason to think that the politicians coming out of that were heavily influenced by the politicians behind Segregation.
If this is the case, ‘White Privilege’ can be understood as something that really exists, deeply intertwined with what I think I’ve heard Drak refer to as ‘Poverty Pimps’. If Al Sharpton is effectively a white supremacist, white privilege is the practice of NOT putting white supremacists, practicing government as clean and transparent as that of the South during segregation, in charge of oneself in the name of ethnic solidarity.
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From long term personal exposure Rev Al’s role is to maintain a level of anger in the “community” so that the people who live in the “community” don’t realize what’s being done to them and stop voting Democrat.
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Good Heavens! You surely don’t expect him to get a real job do you? And if he started to fix their problems, he would put himself out of his current job.
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“Privilege” means the speaker is using leftist-activist privilege to deny reality.
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Felt the need to mention Kipling’s “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_copybook.htm in relation to this post.
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Somebody had to do it. I’m just bad you beat me to it.
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Glad. GLAD. Glad you beat me to it. Sheesh.
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I love typos
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Well, that was weird. I have no idea what I did to make that post prematurely. Was trying to insert an exclamation point. It was supposed to read:
I love Typos!
Just not when I’m the one making them. ;-)
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“I love Typos!”
That is what they say at my local blood bank.
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::Rimshot::
On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 11:47 PM, According To Hoyt wrote:
> ** > RES commented: “”I love Typos!” That is what they say at my local blood > bank.” >
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Well, I feel the need to mention his “The Three Decker” about this attitude in the writing field:
http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_threedecker.htm
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1. IMO it was advantageous, in terms of realpolitik, for the early Christians to blame the Jews rather than the Romans for the execution of Jesus:
a. It was not a good idea for an upstart sect to tick off the Roman Empire and its state religion.
b. It is plausible that there was a power struggle as Christianity left its Jewish roots and became an autonomous religion. Scapegoating the Jews during that struggle might have been convenient.
(Sarah mentioned a religious argument. I don’t know what it was about and do not wish to participate; the above is submitted purely in a spirit of sweet reason. expression of fawnlike innocence)
2. Some Israeli propaganda aka hasbara makes me think that although hubris is not a Hebrew word, maybe it should be.
3. Back when I worked for a government contractor, I dealt regularly with a Mormon-dominated organization. Its behavior, to put it mildly, was less pure than driven snow. I am not calling for Mormophobia; I am suggesting that Mormophilia be seasoned with salt.
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The Early Christians did blame the Empire for executing Jesus. But the Empire was pagan and evil, and you expected evil pagans to do that sort of thing. Similarly, one expected Herod to join in, because he was a Herod and Amorites from the Herods do evil Herod stuff. Either Pontius Pilate or Herod having a glimmer of interest in what Jesus was saying was better than one expected.
The depressing part was Jerusalem’s Jewish leadership also persecuting Jesus, versus giving him respect as either the Messiah or a true prophet. Of course, there’d always been a lot of complaint about this, primarily by prophets in the Bible complaining (as members of Israel) about Israel’s faithlessness.
Now, as time went on, this depressing aspect got more important, because there was a lot of family feud going on (as one can read about in Acts and other historical sources) as well as a lot of proselytizing on both sides; and because both Jews and Christians ended up being persecuted by the Empire for different reasons, and sometimes being confused with each other. More and more, both groups tried to promote separate images. This was exacerbated by the destruction of Temple Judaism and Jewish presence in Jerusalem back in the AD 70 bad stuff. With Judaism having to be re-centered on things that didn’t involve Temple stuff, and with large chunks of the Jewish Septuagint gradually being declared not really Jewish Scripture by Jews while becoming central to theology among Christians, and the Masoretic Hebrew readings gradually becoming central to Judaism while other Hebrew readings were used by Christians….
Well, there was a lot of bad blood and accusations of lying and cheating on all sides. It didn’t help that some rhetorical schools thought hyperbole as a rhetorical device was all in fun, while others took it seriously. And the Roman government always liked “divide and conquer,” so they were fine with all that.
However, the official people to blame for Jesus’ crucifixion have always been Humans Who Sin, which would be practically everybody. My own culpability is a lot more interesting to me than working out the exact degree of culpability among persons alive in Jerusalem that day.
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In keeping with Sarah’s post, I will not take this further, at least at this time.
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The mention of “luck” reminds me of what my sister used to rant about when her children were younger. She has three, and would take them to restaurants often, and was often told “Oh, you’re so lucky to have such well-behaved children that you can take places.”
Used to make her CRAZY! As she would say, “That’s not LUCK, that’s hard work, every single minute of every single day.”
And too many parents of our mutual acquaintance still think it’s “luck”…
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Right. And too many parents believe the lie that to physically discipline their children is to permanently mar their little personalities. Thankfully, my mom never heard that philosophy, and I didn’t believe it by the time I had kids. And now my kids are saying
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Oops! Hit the wrong thing!
And now my kids are talking about how badly behaved their contemporaries are. An saying how they plan on spanking their kids as needed.
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Same with my kids. And I too get told “you’re so lucky they do well in school.” ARGH
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Anxiety alert: maternal anxiety level at 3. Yah, with my Asperger-scary-math-genius son, I’m sometimes told “that’s a very lucky problem to have.” Excuse me, what is “lucky” about anything that is called a “problem?” No, it’s just a different problem to have, and there is little likelihood he’ll be the next Zuckerman. I will feel “lucky” when he has a job and lives independently. Lucky that I dodged a bullet, that is. Possible alternative: 30-something with a command center in the basement, not so “lucky.” I ask myself whether I could live like Warlock’s mother in Live Free or Die Hard, living on ill-gotten gains from his command center shenanigans … sigh … no, don’t think so … but those people would probably tell me I’m lucky he knows so much that he can do those lucrative illegal things … that scene from that movie really freaked me out.
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LOL on the command center — when Marsh was eight, his brother was worried about some middle school grade. So, being a GOOD brother, Marsh broke into the school computer and was going to change it. At the last minute, he realized this might have issues so he went and asked his brother, who almost had a heart attack.
Genius has other levels of issues, including in Marsh’s case, being in the one in a thousand level, the fact that this is not his world. It’s sort of like being condemned to live with people with seventy IQ forever — for a normal person.
I’ve kept him grounded and socially engaged, and he doesn’t think of people as “things” but let me tell you, it took effort.
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It sounds like that normal people are like puppies to him– comparison of IQ.. I can see that would be a problem. Those kind of people need translators.
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Except that puppies are fun. :-P
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I was trying to be nice. ;-) so maybe most people are more like vermin. :grin:
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Hmm. I have a villain character in one of my storylines (vaguely plotted but mostly unwritten as of yet) that goes horribly wrong in exactly this way. Extremely intelligent -> extremely alienated from others -> eventually growing angry with his isolation and deciding to “fix” the problems with mankind with unethical genetic experiments. Of course, for the world to be made safe for his creations he’ll have to clear a little space, and who is going to miss most of humanity anyway? They’re hardly better than animals!
He ends up playing a bunch of evil governments off against each other: They each sponsor his people’s efforts (particularly chilly elitist Eugenicists), and release engineered death-plagues to wipe each other out. They each think they’re a special “superior race” – who is going to miss the people they despise? To the evil mad-geneticist, they’re all insects, and this is funny as hell.
Anyway, the protagonist geneticists and doctors have to figure out how to stop each new virus, and the other more action-oriented protagonists have to find this guy and stop him. One of them points out that this guy has spent all of his vast talents destroying things that he hates, and precious little time actually creating anything that he claims to love.
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sounds interesting
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From observation of The Daughter, I suspect that it all depends on the given day. Puppies can be a nuisance (exhausting, loud, rambunctious, messy and destructive) as well as cute. ;-)
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Part of the issue is that he’ll ONLY work if he’s motivated by something he wants to do. Otherwise, he tunes out and plays with math in his head. I used to complain about this to my cousin — his Godmother — who specializes on super gifted kids. She kept saying “but this is perfectly normal” and I kept saying “SHUT UP. NOT my kid.” Eh. So far, as I said, he’s way better socialized, has friends and I’ve got it through his thick skull that if he wants to “send stuff to Mars” he needs a degree.
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Sounds pretty normal in his gifted bracket. I worry about my step grandson… he has been figuring out mechanical apparatus (and gears) at the age of six. He doesn’t do to well in school. I am sure he has a pretty high IQ, but because of his other problems (eyes and low verbal skills) he won’t do as well as he should.
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well, if you can get his parents to make him read aloud to them (excuses, like “i am cutting up chicken, honey” work) and make copies until he’s ready to murder them, it helps with eyes, etc.
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Remind me to ensure that you and my mother never meet.
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Re: command center. There was a story last week of a kid who lived I his mom’s home, in the bedroom he grew up in, gorging on snacks – until he sold Tumblr to Yahoo! for 1.1 Billion Dollars.
Wish one of my kids had a command center in their bedroom like this!
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Like I said … I don’t think it’s likely my little darling will be the next one of these genius billionaires. Upthread I said Zuckerman when I meant Zuckerberg the FB guy. It would be nice though … I still think the basement criminal scenario is more likely … bleck
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I’m admiring one of Glenn Reynolds’ links to the Klingon child raising plan: Invent a mythical older sibling that you had killed before your child was born for misbehavior. “See, that’s what got your older brother killed.”
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We did that.
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Well, that explains a lot …
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Dad always said he could trade me in for a pony if he acted before I was 7.
I think my step-mom and step-sister were horrified, I was just wondering if I would wind up in the paddock and if I’d like it.
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It will permanently “mar” their personalities. This is why we do it. To allow their personalities to go un “mar”ed would be to allow them to grow up incredibly self-centered, impulsive monsters.
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Really, there is only a short window of opportunity when it comes to children; if you don’t have their undivided respect and attention by about the time they are taller than you, it’s likely a lost cause. But until they grasp cause and effect and make the connection between their own behavior and the concepts of threat-and-bribery – which in my experience, doesn’t really kick in until three or four – then attempting to discipline them, or expecting very much from them is like trying to herd cats. (Now and again one reads of some goblin parent beating a two-year old to death for some transgression or other, which is tragic on several levels, one of which is that the two-year old is simply incapable of grasping the concept of rewards, punishment and their own behavior and impulses.)
Once you can say – ‘Darling, behave or Mommie will spank!’ or ‘Darling, be angelic, and Mommie will get you some candy-attractive toy-take you to Disneyland’ and they take that into advisement and amend their own behavior in response, you are on the right path. One has to be consistent with the threats and rewards and always, always, always deliver on a threat/promise. Children, above all, crave consistency and firm rules. ‘This is the rule, this is the punishment for breaking them. Your choice, sweetie.’ I read once, in a discussion of child-rearing books, that in the 1920-1940s, the advice to parents wasn’t much different from that in dog-training manuals, which seemed to horrify the writer/commentator, but to me it seemed actually quite apt. Here you have a small, self-centered and impulse-driven mammal, who can be appealed to with a system of rewards and punishments. In either case, dog or child, they have to be brought to a state where they can be turned loose in the general population – and for everyone’s sake, they have to behave.
And although I only had one child myself, I used this system in everything from babysitting as a teen and bringing up my little brother, to guiding school-kid tours on military bases, running a Girl Scout troop and teaching Vacation Bible School classes.
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Same practice Heinlein advocated in StarShip Troopers.
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actually slap on the buttocks, sparingly, was ONLY thing that worked with kids pre-verbal. since they went from pre-verbal to barracks lawyer at around two and half, I slapped diapered butts a lot. But it would bring them to a stop COLD. After barracks lawyer kicked in, taking computer cord away worked. That’s my experience. They did understand immediate negative stimulus follows on this action (screaming insanely; pulling cat’s tail; biting adult.) but nothing more complex.
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I can’t keep up. Is B. F. Skinner hated or loved by academia at this point? Note, not asking if he was right, just is he loved or hated now. (Can’t keep up with the current acceptable philosophy any more)
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We’ve ALWAYS been at war with Eurasia!
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I know I am stepping on toes here, but not all children respond well to corporal punishment. Our objection to corporal punishment is not that it is cruel, but that it was counter productive.
The Daughter had, and still has, a very strong sense of personal space. A whack aimed for the tush might land anywhere, as she resisted instinctively. By the time you got past the fuss over that, the original issue was the least of anyone’s problems. I finally found that a hoola-hoop dropped over her head, with the announcement that she was in ‘time out’ allowed us to address what needed addressing without distractions.
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You’re not stepping on toes. I think corporal punishment should be on the table — it doesn’t work for every kid, the same any other punishment doesn’t. It worked better for Robert. For Marsh, it crushed him and he’d go into these “grief” jags. So we joke he didn’t get spanked as much as he needed — but he was JUST different. Distracting him also worked. It didn’t for Robert.
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Distraction is good, but it only works up to the point of the child’s determination, and that the apparent success of the offered distraction was intended to distract me… ;-)
Suggesting another reason that this particular otherness is shunned by those outside of it: The world is caught between the expectation that the brilliant will save them and a nagging suspicion that they will become enslaved to those with cleaver minds.
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Older son insists younger son plays me like a fiddle :/
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I suspect this part of the mantra of most elder siblings. ;-)
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The secret if there be one to solving a Rubik’s cube is to internalize a language with self-invented vocabulary to describe the cube in its various possible states and words to describe the possible moves – this allows the mind to remember and reason about going from state A to state B and back again and so on and so forth. Folks who have trouble seeing the cube in their mind’s eye are more or less equivalent to dyslexics trying to read – the words run together and are hard to remember if you will.
The alternative to internalizing such a language is to make moves haphazardly.
As an alternative to holding the cube in hand as an aide memoire for the necessary self-invented language lay it out on paper. Assign a symbol to each color, Arabic numbers do well – for the number phobic use any WingDing character set to suit – and lay out a chain of matrices as for the sides of a randomized Cube then write the rules for interchanging symbols between adjacent (as defined in the Rubik’s procedure) matrices then write the procedure. The process ends when each matrix is all one symbol. Working backward may help write the procedure moving from a solved cube to a haphazard cube or to a randomized cube.
For folks who don’t really want to spend the time necessary to really solve the puzzle it’s pretty straight forward to take one of the solution books and see how the use of words in the solution book can be equivalent to the procedure described.
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It is easy enough to pop a corner, disassemble and reassemble in proper order the cube components. Never fails.
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Most people who had extreme nearsightedness and/or astigmatism from babyhood have lousy spatial abilities. It’s not brain damage; it’s lack of early input.
I was very nearsighted and astigmatic. Once I got my glasses at age 2 1/2, I was still pretty clumsy about understanding distances, volume, etc. I used to play obsessively with putting water into things and pouring it out, because I really couldn’t see how it fit. I couldn’t understand in Driver’s Ed class how you could possibly see where something so big and fast as a car was, in relationship to the road and other things. (I’m usually quite good with spatial relationships in the dark, or with my eyes closed. If Rubik’s Cube sides had different feels to them, I wonder if that would help?) We will not talk about how I fared in geometry class.
So yes, the only way I could solve spatial puzzles was trial and error, or physically handling things until I understood them; and Rubik’s Cube was something I could only solve by reading one of those solution books and following the directions quite blindly. I enjoyed following the directions and even memorized them, but it was still something more like magic than a process I understood.
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One of my problems as well. I had lasix surgery when I was in my mid-30s. It did help some, but I still had the astigmatism. For example, I would put a plate down on the counter and it would fall to the floor. I would see the counter but I would be off a few inches. *sigh With my new glasses that fixes astigmatism, it helps, but I get tired of them on my face… so I take them off and only use the reading glasses for cross-stitch. Now that was a big help … I could see the holes now.
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I can build furniture, but I can’t read instructions. I’ve tried to explain to Dan — I FEEL the pieces, and think with my hands.
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I hadn’t heard your take on the Jews and their sanitary habits making them obviously “lucky”.
One other thing about the origins of anti-semitism that is rarely mentioned. When Christianity ruled politically in the Middle Ages, it prohibited lending at interest as per biblical injunction. So if you wanted a loan, you went to the Jews who weren’t prohibited from charging interest to Christians. So if you were a king and wanted to finance a war or a series of monuments, you could either tax your people until they revolted, or you could borrow the money at interest from the Jews. When you couldn’t or didn’t want to pay off the loan…well, look at those evil Christ killers. We should get rid of them, starting with those greedy ones (to whom I owe money, ahem).
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That attitude really hasn’t gone anywhere. We saw during the Occupy protests how easily rants against “banksters” turned into rants against Jews.
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Oh yes. It’s “interesting” and by interesting note that younger son looks like a refugee from yeshiva — how antisemitism is making a comeback. Biden the other day was propagating the old lie that Jews control every media. He thought it was a good thing, but from that to… “it’s evil” is a step.
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If Biden were smarter I’d think he had done it deliberately. If a prominent Democrat thinks Jews being in charge of media is good, then obviously Republicans are going to think that Jews being in charge of the media is bad. From there it’s a short hop to Jews=bad, which would shield the Left from accusations of anti-Semitism (because tu quoque is a valid point on the Left) and would shore up the Jewish block for the Dems.
I hope he was just being dumb. Because if a plot that Machiavellian came out of the same head that produces all of the other stupid things that come out of his mouth I’m pretty sure I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
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Joe Biden couldn’t plot a trip to the toilet.
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The volks writing Biden’s speeches, OTOH …
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They can have Hollywood back. We got much better movies when all the major studios were owned by Jews.
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We have a record of that from the 1600s (Shakespeare’s character Shylock). so it has been happening for a very long time.
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Yep, it’s bigotry of an ancient and ignoble line.
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Yes. Of course. Government…
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When they tell the legend of Queen Isabella pawning her jewels to finance Columbus, they neglect the part about Ferdinand booting the Jews from Spain and confiscating their property.
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While accusing ethnic Jews who’d converted of being secretly still Jewish so they could confiscate their property.
(fittingly, it seems the conversos often kept up a lot of the nolonger binding practices…which would support the theory that not dying as often was part of the hatred)
It just makes me sick, because… well, if I were God, one of the things I’d do with a wandering tribe is give them religious orders to avoid doing stuff that nobody will figure out for centuries. Same way I instill a ritual faith in “washing your hands” into my girls, because they can’t understand germ theory yet.
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Which is pretty much how I reconcile my belief that God created the Universe with the evidence for evolution: God couldn’t explain evolutionary timescales to farmers and fishermen who didn’t have the concept of zero yet…. but He set up a Creation of laws which they could use to figure out that later…..
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I seem to recall C.S. Lewis elegant explanation in “Screwtape Letters”: God wanted servants who could grow into sons and daughters….
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I honestly can’t get my mind around how folks have a problem with it– I don’t care how He did it, and the classic “bubbling pool of mud” thing is just too ironic as some sort of “proof” that it couldn’t be Him.
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Yep– I came to the conclusion of evolution as a viable theory later in life– when I realized that he doesn’t really tell us how he did it. ;-) Or it could just be Magic.
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Because “there was mud, then it became life” is TOTALLY not magical. ;)
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;-) yea– the thought of evolution does feel magical.
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It reminds me of writing– first comes the mud and then something emerges ;-)
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We’ve long threatened to start the Church of G-d, the Author.
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Too late. 8-)
The Gospel of John 1:1
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I don’t know where in the Book it is, but there’s also “He who displeases Me, I shall erase from My book I wrote.”
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Try Exodus 32:33.
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Which of course makes Satan ….
The Agent.
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Nope. Satan isn’t the Agent. He’s the Critic. [Wink]
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But he aspires to be The Editor.
BTW, shouldn’t we, in the spirit of eschewing sexist presumption, refer to Satan as The Editrix? It would not require much beer to develop an argument of Satan as female … ;-)
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I don’t know. I was never comfortable with the idea of G-d as anything but male, and I don’t know why the adversary should be female.
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No, no. The EDITOR
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Or, the Editor.
On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 2:51 PM, According To Hoyt wrote:
> ** > SPQR commented: “Which of course makes Satan …. The Agent.” >
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Sounds interesting. ;-)
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First laugh I got out of my neighbor, I was asking a bit about their theology and he was trying to explain why the devil fell in their theology, and about five minutes in I kind of blinked and said: “he didn’t realize it’s kind of hard to outsmart the Creator of everything?”
Thought Mr. Neighbor was going to hurt himself chuckling.
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“but sinful pride doth rule inside, and mightier than my own!”
The Devil, explaining to Kipling’s Tomlinson why he can’t just let anyone into Hell… ;-)
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Sin makes you stupid.
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One of my favorite sections of the Bible is Leviticus 13-14, requiring anybody with a spot, sore or rash on their skin to take it to a priest and ask “Does that look okay to you?”
I’ve gotta think “sick call” probably wasn’t the high point of the priestly day.
It’s just some schmutz, go and wash it again and this time scrub it.
Oooh, that looks nasty, you better try lancing that.
For the last time, I don’t care what’s on your paskudnyak tookus!
The rules about mildew in a house were undoubtedly a big hit with the junior priests, too.
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ending up with “Yes, it’s leprosy, let me put you out of MY misery at least!” as he reaches for the rock…..
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I do not recall that leprosy was a stoning offence. Live on the edge of the community? Yes. Stoning? No.
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Shunned, and killed if they didn’t accept the shunning.
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I think it was a joke. I have dealt with hypochondriacs, and therefore UNDERSTAND.
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I really need to get a good copy of all the rules one of these days, see how many have “blindingly obvious to modern eyes” reasons….. (not that it need be the ONLY reason– if my husband can have a rule that one never does stuff for only one reason, so can Himself.)
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Scholars apparently have some disagreement when it comes to identifying exactly what each of the various skin conditions were that fell under the original Levitical laws regarding leprosy.
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Especially since a hefty chunk of those rules were actually written for detecting and purifying the buildings / rooms where the disease was thought to be contaminating them.
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Your discussion of the survival advantages inherent in jewish dietary and cultural practices reminded me of listing to Sally Fallon (founder of the Weston Price Foundation, author of “Nourishing Traditions”, once, discussing her long-running conflict with Joel Furhman and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Her take was that in the long run, natural diets will win out, one way or the other, because anyone who eats a diet as low in saturated fat, and as lacking in B12 and fat soluble vitamins as is promoted by Furhman will either be infertile or will have infertile children. People can survive for many years, on a low fat diet. (And certainly the Standard American Diet is bad enough, that nearly any alternative will be an improvement, in the short term.) But there are stages of human development where animal fats are essential to proper development.
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Yep.
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yep
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I do not call your success luck, I am quite aware of how much labor was involved in the birth of your books. I will say that you have an earned advantage when it comes to going indie. You have a fan base to help gather a larger fan base. For those going straight indie the mountain that needs to be climbed to achieve notice is daunting. Still a climb for you but, at least you are past the foot hills. A newbie is looking at a vast plain to cross to reach the foothills. At least that is what the trek looks like from their perspective
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Actually I’m not sure I have any advantage. This last month two “newbies” outearned ANYTHING I’ve done — with one book each. This is not even unusual.
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That’ll change as you get novels up, and change even more when you start putting up new novels. You’ve got a big fan base, but most of us have all your stuff already. We need Moar!
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aye. And I need time to revise stuff. Right now the big distraction is getting this house in order so hopefully it can go on the market — an activity impaired byt he fact I was bad with chocolate an my palms are raw with eczema. It hurts to type, let alone to fold clothes. ARGH.
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Perhaps not, I was talking about the perception of fledglings, not the reality
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I’m always grateful to hear good things said about the members of my church, so thanks for everyone here who’s said good things about my fellow Mormons. Of course, any organization made of human beings is going to have people who are sterling examples and people who aren’t. As I’ve said before, it would be so much easier to be on my side if it weren’t for everyone else who claims to be on my side. And maybe that’s my own hubris. Probably. Anyway…
We do live in a culture that seems intent on redefining (re-prioritizing) basic concepts like success, honor, love… virtue. I don’t know if you could get a definition of virtue out of most twenty-something’s on down.
And because of the rampant belief in a perfect-able world and zero-sum economics, anyone who’s got more than someone else must have cheated that out of someone else.
Those darn rich white guys.
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How on Earth is a world with zero-sum economics perfectible? I’ve never figured out that aspect of the leftist mind.
If the world is zero-sum, then there *is* no “fair”, or “just”, or for that matter, peace for the future. Only winners and losers in the sort of Darwinian struggle that exists in a population-saturated state of nature.
My hope as an engineer (yes for the improbability of the world) is that technology gives us a way to defeat that specter that Malthus raised (through a powerful stable source of energy and advanced chemical plants) before any such limits are encountered by humanity. (The sad thing is, the problem is already more or less solved (for the next few thousand years anyway) in several ways. The politics of the people who whine about zero sum games won’t let us implement the solutions!)
I’ve encountered the zero-sum attitude more and more these days.
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Technology has already banished the specter of Malthus. Remember that in the 50’s every single expert was convinced that by the 70’s China and India would be mired in the depths of the worst famine ever recorded, and the rest of the world would be at bare subsistence levels (Soylent, anyone?). The science was settled.
Today India (and I believe China) are net calorie exporters, and we produce more than enough food to feed everyone on Earth. Why? Because of the development of dwarf cereal grains, inorganic fertilizers, and pesticides the yield per acre world wide increased by orders of magnitude. And if the luddites ever get out of the way of things like GMO’s we’ll see a step increase in the third world’s quality of life.
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Alas, at least in India, the bureaucracy seems hell bent on undoing the green revolution by subsidizing the wrong fertilizers (they pay only for urea) and discouraging the introduction of more efficient shipping and storage technologies. In some areas the governmental policies are leading to decreasing harvests and really bad soil chemistries. China’s problems are building ghost cities on top of productive farmland and contamination of soil, water, and now food (cadmium-laced rice, anyone?).
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Probably the greatest downside to science and engineering is that the products inevitably wind up in the hands of politicians.
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God bless and rest the soul of Norman Borlaug.
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Aye, there should be statues.
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I think the memorial that’s more fitting is what isn’t there– uncounted numbers of little tombstones.
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One of the last people who really deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.
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Generalizing from a single data point here, but I’ve worked with one guy that I’ve known was a Mormon. He was an honest, hard-working, mild-mannered guy. He also spent his spare time with things like recreational math instead of TV-celebrity gossip. He was a great coworker. If he is representative of their culture’s values, they will likely go far.
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er… Most Mormons are human beings, yes. But then there’s Harry Reid.
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Yep– and his land deals are legendary.
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re: “…what I would call “gifted” – i.e. high IQ – and nine times out of ten, curing their school issues consisted of telling them that they still had to study. It was just the effort required was far less than other people had to put out. But it wouldn’t look that way from the inside.” SH
If you have actually met or been in school with the really, really smart you would have discovered individuals who never studied and got high Bs and low As by what appears to be osmosis. Should they be interested they would break the curve in a course. One such individual who was in my year in college graduated with honors but not magma or summa honors but got into an Ivy League University obtaining a Doctorate in four years. He had GREs of 800 verbal, 800 math and 960 out of 970 in ( I think ) Chemistry. He also scored a perfect 116 out of 116 on the Navy’s visual, not verbal, IQ test used to screen pilot candidates. His roommate for nearly all of his college years said that instead of studying he read novels and chased girls. He also breezed through his term papers, lab reports and essays without apparent effort. Alter his getting his doctorate he taught for a few years in the IVY league then joined a corporation and eventually went into business for himself, married an ex-ballerina and had a son who became a Ph.D. rocket scientist. Currently he ( I heard ) is living in Hawaii.
Dan Kurt
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Well, a lot of people like that just don’t have _visible_ effort. They’re always thinking and picking up knowledge and then thinking about it some more. It helps to be a fast reader. But yeah, if your brain is always on the go and on acquisition mode, you don’t have to study much to secure all the info you need.
Now, what’s really impressive is that this guy had both the quick acquisition and distribution of academic knowledge, and a fair amount of social skills.
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The absolute best folks I ever worked with were at the worst job, the Startup-That-Didn’t, and happened to all be Mormon. Most kind, hardest working, best co-workers ever. The thing failed due to the stupid people at the top, hired in from Hollywood and record studios apparently because the money people thought the Mormon technical founders lacked sufficient sleaze.
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I’m trying to picture a sleezy Mormon, based on the LDS that I know, and all I can come up with is an accountant sporting gold chains, big rings, and a grill.
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There are a few– used car salesmen, lawyers, and other professions of that type (insurance) do have a few. Mormons may have less sleaziness, but still have a few people who are bottom-feeders (just like any other religion or affiliation).
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Harry Reid.
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Ah yes. The two words nearly guaranteed to cause my wife to erupt in a Hulk-like fury.
Harry Reid.
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That sounds like one of my jobs in the late ’80’s … except for the Mormons …
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While it’s gratifying that this is a hard thing for others to visualize, I just have to think about going to High School.
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You better stay off my lawn.
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I’d totally be on your sidewalk wearing a leather jacket and running a switchblade comb through my hair. If I had a leather jacket. Or a switchblade comb.
Or hair.
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That should make you stand out in my neighborhood….
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Oh, and one more thing regarding belief that seems apropos here:
“Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love… true love never dies. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.” -Hub (Second Hand Lions) by Tim McCanlies
I highly recommend the whole movie and the DVD extra regarding the craziness around getting it made for all you other writers out there.
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I love second hand lions. It’s one of my favorites.
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“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
“YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
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That speech drives me crazy, because it’s so close to the truth, but wrong in small and vital ways, and I lack the rhetorical skill to explain exactly why it’s wrong.
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Clams lack rhetorical skill!!!!!!!
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Plagiarist.
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I think I know what you mean– and if I am right, it works if you remember that he’s using the materialist definition of truth, the scientism version of “truth,” and the definition of “lie” that means something like “make a claim that doesn’t fit into scientism’s truth.”
A lot of TP’s writing has that effect on me because he’s coming around to the facts from the wrong way, so his perspective is…odd. Like when our tuxedo cat– the fluffy one with an uneven splotch on his nose– looks into a mirror; it looks exactly like him, and is a true image, but because it’s flipped over so you’re looking at it “backwards” it doesn’t look like him.
Note: werefoxes lack rhetorical skills too, it seems. Assume lots of hands waiving in the air to try to form the ideas so they’ll get across.
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No, you’ve really hit it on the head. Pratchett has an underlying core of common sense that struggles at times to get past the layer of political correct nonsense that lies atop it. Its funny at times to see how his book themes struggle at times as a result. His last couple of books are the worst in that – in whatever process they get written … ghost? – the common sense layer fails to escape. Snuff is pretty bad for that.
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Death is probably my favorite character in Discworld. What happens when Death does try and escape himself – or is removed from his work? From his standpoint what he says here is true. Man can rage against Death’s work, but Death knows within himself that he will always win – or that the structure of the universe will fall apart.
Unlike Mr.P I believe there is something greater at work in the universe than man’s dreams. So man can hear the call within himself that there is right beyond himself and that will resonate with, ‘Learn to do good; Seek justice, Rebuke the oppressor; Defend the fatherless, Plead for the widow.’
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It equates the material with the true.
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Yes. That’s especially frustrating, given that Death himself is an anthropomorphic personification. There are obviously abstract concepts that exist!I don’t know whether that’s a failure on the part of the author, or some mental hang-up of Death’s; The worst part is that I like that dialogue, even as it drives me crazy.
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Hey, I’d managed to space that Death is a personification– in that way, it makes a sort of fridge-logic, doesn’t it? He’s sort of physical– at least, you directly find him in universes as himself– so if you read his use of “true” as “can be directly observed”….
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No humans don’t need fantasy to be human. What they need is aspiration, the opposite of despair. If we quit striving, we wither and die. If we die trying to be better than we are, we succeed none-the-less. It’s after Memorial Day but if you read Herman Wouk’s account of the Battle of Midway in War and Remembrance, you’ll get an inkling. The torpedo plane pilots knew they would all be slaughtered if they attacked without fighter escort, but they attacked anyway, going to their certain deaths. Their failed attack set the Japanese fleet up to be destroyed by the late arrival of the dive bombers. As my wife likes to say, “Sometimes you have to die to get the happy ending.”
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But isn’t fantasy the root of aspiration? You can’t aspire to a state until you can picture it in your head, and unless you’re going to confine yourself to mimicry that means you’ll have to create that state out of thin air.
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Either way, it’s that ability to dream, to see with an eye of faith, if you will, that spurs one to action.
> >
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I think that’s Pratchett’s point. Left to itself the Universe doesn’t have justice, beauty, or duty. We wish to live in a Universe that has those things, and in so wishing, create them. But they only exist as long as the believe in them. That’s why Santa Claus (I do hope you caught the subtle allegory between Hogfather and Santa Clause) is important. He exists, but he isn’t real. Just like justice, beauty, and duty.
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I think you’re right about his point, but I also think the discussion was on how he’s almost right… but his philosophy gets in the way.
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Heinlein said something very similar in TMIAHM
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No population likes strangers in their midst. That’s a human thing. We’re tribal. But the pervasive anti-Semitism throughout history, starting with the Romans, had another origin. “The Man is Hiding The Stash.”
Before I read the full post, I’ll comment what I thought when I read that comment yesterday: Heinlein. Methuselah’s Children They were rounded up and were going to be interrogated for the secret to long life, and the “ephemerals” weren’t going to take “genetics” for an answer.
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Re: Rubik’s Cube. I presume you had read one of the books with solution patterns in them? And still couldn’t solve it? Because I’ll bet none of your friends “solved” it. I’ve only known one person who ever ACTUALLY solved it on his own, and that was my father (and his solution is radically different from others that I’ve seen). Note: Clearly other people have done it. I just never met any. If you were trying to solve it without one of those, don’t feel bad.
The Rubik’s Cube was the only thing we were able to find to keep him nailed down and off his feet after he broke his ankle, requiring a plate and two screws to hold it together. He solved it by making diagrams of flattened cubes and drew how they changed when he turned the faces. Took him three weeks, and then, of course, he could solve it in a few minutes once he created the two or three patterns to move things around.
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I did a Kobiyashi Maru on it.
I took it apart, then put it back together.
Everyone was amazed at my cleverness in “solving” the Cube, until they found out about my Gordian solution.
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Oh, no. Dan — and younger boy — solved it within minutes of being handed the thing…
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Joe Biden couldn’t find his own ass if he had a treasure map and a native guide. The day Obama picked him for VP is the day I really started to worry.
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A stupid VP is insurance against bad things happening to the P. Also, since VP is a powerful position for someone able to use it (the whole president of the senate thing, being on the cabinet, etc.), presidents who want to rule alone have traditionally appointed nobodies or stupid people as VP. This backfired on FDR (or would have, if he hadn’t died just before getting censured).
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We’re also incidentally promulgating the lower class lifestyle of promiscuity, indiscriminate spending, violence and dependency as the way to be. This is what makes you “authentic”.
My favorite form: “Everybody does X, anyone who says they don’t is lying.”
Thus far, it has never been something I even desire to do, let alone have done.
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Everyone has secret writing projects – anyone who says they don’t is lying. :-P
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Hmm – how else can this be humorously subverted to bandwagon people into constructive activities?
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well, true of all my friends… and my family.
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I didn’t know you’d found out about that …
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Finally!
But… does admitting to my imaginary online friends that I HAVE secret writing projects make them not secret anymore?
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Nah. We’re imaginary. ;)
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Ya’ll used to be just voices in my head. I’m so glad I found you. (Sniffle.)
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“… but where did all you zombies come from?”
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YES!
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Though isn’t it “But who are all you zombies?”
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Nope; I double-checked before quoting. Unless this copy is of an older edition of the story or something, it’s “… but where did all you zombies come from?”
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Uh. Okay. Part of my issue is that I originally read this stuff in Portuguese and sometimes I remember it in the translation of the translation — if that makes sense.
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Reputedly the script for Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo was originally written in English. It was translated into German and then back into English. This had some interesting results.
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Looks across the room at The Spouse. Looks at self. Nope, not even everybody here has a secret writing project. You should be thankful.
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Very old that one.
“He who accuses all mankind convicts only one.”
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Advertisers know that the band wagon effect will hit a spot, or nine out of ten prefer would not be seen so often in their copy.
Still, in the past the popularity argument was usually countered by the lemming Mommaism: And if everybody were to jump off the side of a cliff, would you?‘ or the more direct, ‘I don’t and you won’t so long as you are under my authority, so not everybody does.’
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Oh how I hate the Pillar of the Community is a monster trope.
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Aw, maaaaaannnn, you just went and planted a story in my head! And here I’d planned to take to day off. *stomps off to write down idea and lock it in a dark drawer far from the computer*
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Literal monster, non-metaphorical good guy?
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Alternately you could look at the founding myth of the the Jews: the barbaric murderous slaughter of entire populations as their lands were stolen.
But hey, they had an Estate Agent in the Sky, no?
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This made them different from other nations, how? Do you have some tribe or nation that was founded in pure loving kindness?
Is your name vilejones?
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We Jews believe that we’re descended from runaway slaves. I used to think we are unique in that regard, but reading Livy it seems that the Romans also believed that after Romulus founded Rome, a bunch of runaway slaves and other men in trouble joined him.
I don’t know if that is true, but the fact remains that while all ancient cultures had slavery, Israelites and Romans both had rules that somewhat mitigated the damage. The Israelites turned slavery into indentured servitude and made slavicide murder. The Romans figured that if freedmen still had duties to their former masters, and were useful politically, people would be more likely to manumit them.
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And what planet are you from, that your tribe has a lily-white reputation going back into the mists of time? Because there are no such on THIS planet.
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My heritage includes the unicorn tribe from rainbow land. Unicorns were spontaneously generated, and lived on a diet of dew and moonbeams. However, they were mostly too stupid to defecate, and often died from trying to eat grass. A super intelligent race of mules wiped them out, in the theory that they were a bad influence on horses, and as annoying as pot smokers. This was generations ago. Humans with unicorn blood are effectively entirely human as far as family history of atrocity is concerned.
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I know I am late to the party, and have yet to read all the posts, so if I am simply re-plowing ground already covered please forgive me:
And I’m sure some young thugs just need love and understanding.
More likely, needed, as in their formative years. Outside of a personal epiphany cultural habits are very hard to change. A person who has not seen self-discipline modeled, who sees the thugish rewarded with more comfortable lives, will conclude — well to quote from chapter 42 of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22:
On the way to finding the quote I wanted, I found this telling one, from chapter 34, :
I know that this reflects the culture I have been trained in, but, at some point in your life you become responsible for the choices you make and actions you take. Then again, I have read enough anthropology to know that what is considered good character is cultural.
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OK, this time it must be stupid WP tricks. Nothing was italicized between the two blockquotes, and only the word good in reference to character in the last line was italicized. Head –> desk.
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WordPress hates me. You comment here, so it’s starting to dislike you too. AND I’m fairly sure it’s plotting with Facebook also.
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Facebook is evil on it’s own. It doesn’t *need* to plot with anyone.
On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 10:00 AM, According To Hoyt wrote:
> ** > accordingtohoyt commented: “WordPress hates me. You comment here, so > it’s starting to dislike you too. AND I’m fairly sure it’s plotting with > Facebook also.” >
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Yes. To break out of it often takes a road to Damascus experience.
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Yes– I had one of those ;-) It launched me into the Navy.
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Starting this anew, because the prior was hard against the right margin:
Angels (even Fallen ones) are without sex, of course. But the verbal dexterity, the talking others into actions, even the challenge to the rightful authority of The Creator can all be ascribed to the worst traits embodied in feminist thought.
Mind, I do not say Satan should be male or female, simply that it is sexist to assert G-d could be female but deny Satan might be.
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You attempted a serious response, when I could barely stop myself from writing: “You don’t know why?”
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300+ comments and no one used the dreaded words: Anglo Saxon Protestant Work Ethic.
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Have you seen the state of the Anglo Saxon’s work ethic these days?
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Isn’t that a major element upon which this particular discussion centers?
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Hmm, something that might fit this topic loosely:
Thomas Edison:
I’ve read a contemporary biography of him, and the modern tale spun about him seems completely out of character relative to these older sources I am familiar with.
The modern narrative about Edison (mostly spun by the Tesla fanatics) is that he was just a greedy businessman who stole all of his inventions from his oppressed workers and didn’t understand anything.
I’ve been told that he set electronics back by fifty years by ignoring vacuum tube technology (when he was the one who first investigated thermionic emission and the diode effect in earnest.) (Not quite the first, but the guys in England published, then moved on. He tried to make something out of it.) Employees from his lab went on to develop the triode and the discipline of plasma physics in general. How is that holding things back?
I’ve been told that he would steal from his overworked employees (when the account I read in the biographies were that he moved heaven and earth during several of his failing business efforts to make sure everyone was paid until he went under. And that he would pay his creditors back, even after bankruptcy absolved him of the debts, with the proceeds from later more successful efforts.)
I’ve been told that he wasn’t a “true genius” like Tesla, who could have intuited the proper filament for a lightbulb (apparently based on a lot of Tesla’s own assertions that he was just that good). That Edison wasn’t a ‘true genius’, he only succeeded because he worked hard and tried all sorts of things, not because he was actually a decent inventor! (And where do people think any of this knowledge/skill comes from?)
I’ve been told that all there is to know about him is summed up in the war of the currents, when from what I’ve read, that was one microscopic part of his long career.
Anyway, what do you think? It seems to me like a modern day religion in search of a devil is pulling off the distortion of his memory. What is it that makes him so anathema?
Anyway, this reminded me of that. (Or perhaps I’m just annoyed at the distortions and it keeps coming to the top of my mind). But it seems correlated to the idea that the good people are failures, and successful people can’t have anything worthwhile to teach the world.
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While I don’t know enough about Edison to offer an informed opinion, that isn’t generally a detriment on the internet.
So far as the lightbulb filament is concerned, is not systematic exploration of variables a basic application of scientific principles?
I guess phonograph records and movie projection might be “stolen” from employees who used Edison’s resources and support to develop their ideas — although the people making such arguments often take the view that the government is entitled to a lion’s share of profits from ventures precisely because the environmental conditions making their success possible have something to do with the government.
But the genius that marketed and promoted those inventions into major industries was certainly Edison’s. It would have been easy enough to dismiss those early phonographs as worthless, parlor novelties with no useful applications. Expensive, offering poor sound reproduction and with limited available programming it is easy to imagine many potential investors turning down the “opportunity” to get in on the ground floor.
(For that matter, imagine the marketing people advising Gutenberg, “Johann, it is an interesting toy but who vill buy all these books? The masses can’t read, and these are too expensive for them — they might get ideas above their stations and take time away from productive enterprise — and those who might be interested in these “books” already get plenty of reading in good quality hand-scribed editions. Your shoddy “books” can’t compete with such artful product. Wait, what’s this you’ve … printed, you call it? Then slyly did he insinuate his hand into milady’s bosom whilst, stroking gently, he whispered into her ear …)
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This is what a lot of people don’t understand: there already was a small-scale scribal industry serving a small-scale mass-market, particularly students. There were manufactories of lay scribes (many being literate laywomen) in many of the big cities and university towns, and you could get various grades of book-expensiveness (ie, plain or illustrated? Extra colors and rubrics? Colored illustrations or just b&w ink ones?).
Early printed books basically were automating the manuscript “factories.” It took a while for the printing press to get more economical than scribes, though not as long as computers, etc.
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I’m pretty sure that there was also a school of thought going on that felt that there might be a market for printed books, but once you filled that niche (Bible, St. Agustin, Galen, some latin classics) you would have a massive physical plant investment left idle because then you are only going to replace damaged copies and printing up new copies for the university students.
And it was true, which is why the search was on for the Greek and Roman texts from the Muslim world, and then travelogues, how-to books, prophesies and…then you have a widely reading public.
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Well, some of those things were circulating in manuscript too. But of course, that sort of thing is less likely to survive (especially among common people whose houses aren’t as nice as nobles’, and whose walls aren’t as lasting as monasteries’).
And a lot of single-page stuff circulated from woodcuts, etc. — playing cards, for example, were “printed” long before Gutenberg, and we have St. Bernadine of Siena trying to get playing card makers to switch to making holy cards and cards of the Name of Jesus, long before Gutenberg.
But yes, the circulation of broadsheets and pamphlets and newspapers obviously jumped in a big way once type printing was invented. Holy pictures too.
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I’m talking about new tech opening up new markets, and in fact making new markets possible. Wood block printing had been used in the textile trade since late Roman times, but the development of moveable type made books available at a lower price and made books available to the public that would not have been able to own one. This drove literacy, which drove a desire for more texts.
IT did mean that you didn’t need a scriptorum full of scribes listening to a reader giving one word at a time so the scribes could write it down.
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One notes that it was two new technologies.
The other was cheaper paper.
As long as the first step in making a new book was, How many ewes do we need to breed? no amount of printing would help.
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Also greater disposable income as trade opened up. These things tend to work together.
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In his series Connections James Burke, a science historian, explained that there were upsides to the black plague. Two I remember were that labor became scarce and those with skills could demand higher wages/prices for their goods and there was an ample supply of linen rag with which to make paper.
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On the bright side, in Oz the Great and Powerful, Oz does tell China Girl that there is one real wizard where he comes from, and it’s Edison.
(That’s the point at which — something spoilery happens. 0:)
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Ew. I was looking at this as a subject line in the comments email folder and I though stash = mustache >> 70’s porn ‘staches … where would the man in a 70’s porn movie be hiding the ‘stash? and then my OS crashed and started going ew … ew … ew …
Be demmed if I will suffer that alone when I can get a bulk discount on brain bleach if enough of us need it.
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Ew, ya gotcher bulk discount right here. That will take a couple of gallons to eradicate.
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The Gramscian march through the institutions.
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