Cute.
But really, it never fails to amaze me how this logic doesn't bother some people.
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago. -Bernard Berenson
The Issue
Workers across the nation have gone out on indefinite strike over what they claim are substandard wages in the Book Publishing industry.
The Debate
1. "We are the backbone of this country, and we demand a fair wage rise!" says union leader Zeke Longbottom. "I don't think a 20% increase over two years is too much to ask. Unless the government forces employers to give us our due, we'll shut this whole industry down! Let's see how well Innomina's economy manages without any Book Publishing, huh?"
2. "We pay our employees very generous wages," says employer representative Buy Silk. "Especially when you consider that without us, they'd be OUT ON THE STREET. Hear that, you scumbags? OUT ON THE STREET! Anyway, my point is, if you cave in, you make our entire industry uncompetitive. You can't do that in the global marketplace. It'll hurt the whole country. The best solution, economically speaking, would be to relax industrial laws and allow us to fire troublemakers on the spot."
The Issue
The increasingly militant Animal Liberation Front struck again last night, freeing dozens of chickens bound for delicious snack packs.
The Debate
1. "These nuts have got to be stopped," demands concerned consumer Fleur Shiomi. "They need to face the fact people want snack packs, no matter how many innocent chickens must be sacrificed. Besides, chickens would do the same to us if they had the chance."
2. "These Liberationists are highlighting an important issue," pleads Anne-Marie Dodinas. "Too often, animals are put through needless cruelty, just to make their flesh taste a little more deliciously succulent. I'm sure we could ban the more horrific abuses without putting too much of a dent in our national obesity figures. Couldn't we?"
3. "Animals have feelings too!" yelled protestor Al Frederickson, before being set upon by hungry passers-by. "Free the animals! Ban meat-eating!"
4. Economist Beth Jones has an alternative. "You don't need to take away the people's right to choose. You just need to build the costs of animal suffering into the price. A tax on meat-eating, in proportion to the amount of cruelty involved, would do the trick. Plus think of the benefit for the national coffers! Of course, poor people wouldn't be able to afford meat, but that's just more incentive for them to get jobs."
This post is about Linux, and specifically failures associated with assumed knowledge and duplication of effort in Ubuntu. The so called, “Linux for people”, distro that has gotten so popular recently. And to a lesser extent the draconian methods employed by the rulers of the Ubuntu community.
I will be doing the majority of my future standalone posts in this manner to increase exposure. Humans are audio visual creatures.
This post was instigated by a fresh bit of hate mail I received on my blog, in response to a comment I made on a completely different page several months prior. At first I was merely going to delete the comment and play some titan quest, considering that it was a Ubuntu comment made on a page related to sociological issues, but I realized that this was a first. Never had anyone gone to such lengths to send me hate mail. After all, people are generally far more lazy than they are mean. The practical upshot of this is that I obviously struck a nerve. So in an effort to start a debate which may end up helping computer users and the open source community in general, I've made this video.
I gave Ubuntu a serious effort, and it was a dreadful mistake. It has mountains of potential but it is not ready for public consumption by any stretch of the imagination. I'm now going to quote a piece of a post I made which perfectly expresses my feelings on the issue at hand. Tutorials, assumed knowledge, elitism, and the distance between ignorance and stupidity.
What I said was this...
“I'd like the community to quit linking to other people's work when that work is not useful, if you guys can write a tutorial, then write an app, if its so easy and straight forward. If the tutorials are so good, then why cant they be batch files? Ignorance is not stupidity, and I'm tired of seeing people talked down to like not being born with Linux in the cradle is somehow a personal flaw. I have a decade of professional computer and tech support experience, I am not the problem here, and nor are most users.
This demand for continuous duplication of effort is unrealistic and elitist. Just because you had to walk to school and use a slide rule does not mean the rest of us should have to. Prior art is the foundation upon which all technology is built and this applies to Ubuntu. A Tutorial is not a solution, its a stop gap until a real solution is found. The community needs to acknowledge this. The standard defenses/apologies for why Linux is an unusable, impractical, specialist, piece of crap, do not apply here, as this is intended for normal users... "Linux for people." Remember? So don't tell us we should prefer CLI, don't tell us we should be comfortable with compiling our own ware. These are OPTIONS not requirements. “
For the complete post, see the links section in the description of this video.
My opinion on this subject got me banned from the Ubuntu forum for all time, no discussion. Although I'm sure they'd tell you I've broken some vague and subjective rule regarding what boils down to manners.
Despite my problems with the community, I still had faith in the operating system and was looking for more diverse ways of field testing it. I thought the best solution would be a live boot version that would run off of a USB flash drive. A quick Google confirmed that this was possible, but oddly enough at the time of the search, again several months ago, there were no downloads of a USB installer, or an image to be copied to a USB, or a zip file package, or any other automated and user friendly solution. There were however a wide variety of forums posts, numbering in the thousands, and tutorials that told me in exhaustive detail how I might build such a portable install myself.
This I feel is unacceptable for a variety of reasons. I chose to voice this opinion on another forum in response to one of these tutorials. My response entitled, “Why bother?” made in October of 2007 is as follows.
“I swear the more I see these "tutorials" the more I feel like they are written by newbs to impress newbs.
I'm thinking that if a person really knew what they were doing, which is implied via the creation of a tutorial, and really wanted to make it easy for others, which is also implied, and really didn't care about looking smart over being smart, again implied they'd write a simple app batch script installer or whatever.
In fact it's silly that canonical doesn't offer a usb reinstalled image or installer for usb. Some machines don't even have cdromss you know.
Ubuntu: Linux for People ...who are assumed to already know Linux.”
Part of one negative response was not surprisingly also draconian in nature...
"Your criticism of the author for not providing a(n) image is particularly out of line."
This theme is all too common among supporters of the open source operating systems generally, and if an alternative to this attitude is not accepted, I fear that closed source will dominate the operating system market right up until home AI becomes smart enough to translate human speech into machine code, and obviates software as we now know it generally.
I feel that I generally have the right to criticize whom ever I like for whatever I like and that my attack on software development priority and forum policy is hardly important enough to warrant limitation of on the freeness of my speech.
The only thing out of line about this entire exchange is the fact that many seem to feel their right to speech supersedes others.
My criticism is on topic, and I am far from alone in my opinion.
The others simply don't have the patience to speak up. They're busy using operating systems that work out of the box. And don't wish to go through the increasingly complex processes of forum registration.
For most, time spent equates to money lost. The whole open source operating system community with its fetish for guides, tutorials, and showing off, has resulted in a computer experience so time consuming, and annoying, that most would prefer to pay to avoid it. I have only to point to Microsoft and Macintosh to demonstrate the validity of this point.
Further, the community seems to forget, that a tutorial, as I said before, is not a solution in and of itself. It is a stopgap. In my opinion the whole community considers a tutorial a solution because the authors of tutorials, who often tend to be moderators of forums, like the one that banned me, like it that way, because they get attention and praise so long as their tutorial remains the only solution. To any given problem.
This is only natural from a human behavioral standpoint, but it must be addressed seriously and soon if open source, and perhaps more importantly the ethic it spreads, is to prevail.
Links:
http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-install-ubuntu-linux-on-usb-bar#comment-870
Potentially, transhumans will be endowed with a greater capacity for love, empathy and emotional depth than anything neurochemically accessible today. Our selfish-gene-driven ancestors - in common with the cartoonish brave new worlders - will strike posterity as functional psychopaths by comparison; and posterity will be right.
Scare-mongering prophets of doom notwithstanding, a life of unremitting bliss isn't nearly as bad as it sounds.
Thus mescaline, and certainly LSD and its congeners, are not fail-safe euphoriants. The possibility of nightmarish bad trips and total emotional Armageddon is latent in the way our brains are constructed under a regime of selfish-DNA.
In any case, our descendants are likely to automate menial drudgery out of existence; that's what robots are for.
The impregnable well-being of our transhuman descendants is more likely to promote greater diversity, both personal and societal, not stagnation. This is because greater happiness, and in particular enhanced dopamine function, doesn't merely extend the depth of one's motivation to act: the hyper-dopaminergic sense of things to be done. It also broadens the range of stimuli an organism finds rewarding. By expanding the range of potential activities we enjoy, enhanced dopamine function will ensure we will be less likely to get stuck in a depressive rut. This rut leads to the kind of learned helplessness that says nothing will do any good, Nature will take its revenge, and utopias will always go wrong.
Unfortunately, the true altruists among our (non-)ancestors got eaten or outbred. Their genes perished with them.
Hopefully, the need for manifestos and ideological propaganda will pass.
The contrast between true and false happiness, however, is itself problematic. Even if the notion is both intelligible and potentially referential, it's not clear that "natural", selfish-DNA-sculpted minds offer a more authentic consciousness than precision-engineered euphoria. Highly selective and site-specific designer drugs [and, ultimately, genetic engineering] won't make things seem weird or alien. On the contrary, they can deliver a greater sense of realism, verisimilitude and emotional depth to raw states of biochemical bliss than today's parochial conception of Real Life.
Post-humans are not going to get drunk and stoned. Their well-being will infuse ideas, modes of introspection, varieties of selfhood, structures of mentalese, and whole new sense modalities that haven't even been dreamt of today.
Citizens must not fall in love, marry, or have their own kids. This would seduce their allegiance away from the community as a whole by providing a rival focus of affection.
And above all, when suffering becomes truly optional, we shouldn't force our toxic legacy wetware on others.
Enhancing serotonin function - other things being equal - is likely to leave an individual less likely to submit to authority, not docile and emasculated.
Animal suffering is just savage, empty and pointless. So we'll probably scrap it when it becomes easy enough to do so.
Down on the farm, tasty, genetically-engineered ambrosia will replace abused sentience. For paradise-engineering entails global veganism. Utopia cannot be built on top of an ecosystem of pain and fear.
But as science progressively gives us the power to remould matter and energy to suit our desires - or whims - it would take an extraordinary degree of malice for us to sustain the painfulness of Darwinian life indefinitely. For as our power increases, so does our complicity in its persistence.
Even unregenerate humans don't tend to be sustainably ill-natured. So when genetically-engineered vat-food tastes as good as dead meat, we may muster enough moral courage to bring the animal holocaust to an end.
Selfishness, whether in the technical or overlapping popular sense, is a spectacularly awful principle on which to base any civilization. Sooner or later, simple means-ends-analysis, if nothing else, will dictate the use of genetic engineering to manufacture constitutionally happy mind/brains.
But the attributes of power, status and money, for instance, however obviously nice they seem today, aren't inherently pleasurable. They yield only a derivative kick that can be chemically edited out of existence.
Likewise, intense and unpleasant social anxiety was sometimes adaptive too. So was an involuntary capacity for the torments of sexual jealousy, fear, terror, hunger, thirst and disgust. Our notions of dominance and subordination are embedded within this stew of emotions.
Sado-masochistic images of domination-and-submission loom large in a lot of our fantasies too. The categories of experience they reflect were of potent significance on the African savannah, where they bore on the ability to get the "best" mates and leave most copies of one's genes. But they won't persist for ever.
Allegedly "immutable" human nature will change as well when the genetic-rewrite gathers momentum and the reproductive revolution matures. The classical Darwinian Era is drawing to a close.
Unfortunately, its death agonies may be prolonged. Knee-jerk pessimism and outright cynicism abound among humanistic pundits in the press. They are common in literary academia. And of course any competent doom-monger can glibly extrapolate the trends of the past into the future.
Yet perhaps asking whether we would appreciate ecstatic art of 500 or 5000 years hence is futile in the first place. We simply can't know what we're talking about. For we are unhappy pigs, and our own arts are mood-congruent perversions.
One hopes, on rather limited evidence, that the birth-pangs of the new genetic order will be less traumatic.
Windfalls and spending-sprees do typically bring short-term highs. Yet they don't subvert the hedonic treadmill of inhibitory feedback mechanisms in the brain. Each of us tends to have a hedonic set-point about which our "well"-being fluctuates.
The endless cycle of ups and downs - our own private re-enactment of the myth of Sisyphus - is an "adaptation" that helps selfish genes to leave more copies of themselves; in Nature, alas, the restless malcontents genetically out-compete happy lotus-eaters. It's an adaptation that won't go away just by messing around with our external environment.
A few centuries hence, we may rapidly take [im]material opulence for granted. And this virtual cornucopia won't be the prerogative of a tiny elite. Information isn't like that. Nor will it depend on masses of toiling workers. Information isn't like that either. If we want it, nanotechnology promises old-fashioned abundance all round, both inside and outside synthetic VR.
The experience of this-is-real - like all our waking- or dreaming consciousness - comprises a series of neurochemical events in the CNS like any other. It can be amped-up or toned-down. Reality does not admit of degrees; but our sense of it certainly does.
Thus Huxley doesn't offer a sympathetic exploration of the possibility that prudery and sexual guilt has soured more lives than sex. In a true utopia, the counterparts of John and Lenina will enjoy fantastic love-making, undying mutual admiration, and live together happily ever after.
If suffering has been medically eradicated, does happiness have to be justified any more than the colour green or the taste of peppermint? Is there some deep metaphysical sense in which we ought to be weighed down by the momentous gravity of the human predicament? - Only if it will do anyone any good. The evidence is lacking.
Moreover this transformation of the living world, and eventually of the whole cosmos, into a heavenly meaning-steeped nirvana will in no way be "unnatural". It is simply a disguised consequence of the laws of physics playing themselves out.
Until now, selection pressure has ensured we're cursed with a genome that leaves us mostly as callous brutes, albeit brutes with intermittently honourable intentions.
This isn't to deny that love is real. But its contemporary wellsprings have been poisoned from the outset. Only the sort of love that helps selfish DNA to leave more copies of itself - which enable it to "maximize its inclusive fitness" - can presently flourish. It is fleeting, inconstant, and shaped by cruelly arbitrary criteria of physical appearance which serve as badges of reproductive potential. If we value it, love should be rescued from the genes that have recruited and perverted the states which mediate its expression in blind pursuit of reproductive success.
When sexual guilt and jealousy - a pervasive disorder of serotonin function - are cured, then bed-hopping will no longer be as morally reckless as it is today.
And just as during much of the Twentieth Century, any plea for greater social justice could be successfully damned as Communist, likewise today, any strategy to eradicate suffering is likely to be condemned in similar reactionary terms: either wirehead hedonism or revamped Brave New World. This response is not just facile and simplistic. If it gains currency, the result is morally catastrophic.
But one does one's best. The ideological obstacles to genetically pre-programmed mental super-health are actually more daunting than the technical challenges.
7.Men must suffer in order to acquire any sex.
To whom it may concern:
For one, these parents are set for life if they play it right, as they should given what she's undoubtedly going to need. I'd say the instant Oprah hears of this young lady and her sickeningly clean cut family, its gold plated stroller / book deal time.
But seriously, with thousands of children living in poverty in our own country and countless millions more abroad, I don't think this particular child is any more deserving of help than any other, no matter how adorable she is. Perhaps even less so, if you want to look at the matter clinically.
I think all children deserve a shot at life, even the ones that don't get PayPal donate links.
I have to ask, why is it when something bad happens they always call it a miracle? Is it really a miracle that this poor person is effectively going to spend her whole short life in a hospital?
I love how 3/4ths of the video are about the painfully banal couple that produced her. I don't care about her parents, and neither does anyone else. All they care about is what they see as the cool freaky small kid.
Why is it when a bus full of school kids explodes and one survives with half her face burnt off its a miracle? If this is the best your god can do, you can keep him. I don't see this as a miracle I see this as a tragedy.
Gotta love the Internet, the modern freak show. Is everyone proud of their gawking? Would you care so much about this child if she were normal? Obviously not.
If she grows up normally in terms of intellect you think she'll appreciate being so objectified and showcased?
And yes mom, she would have been put down if she were a dog, whats so wrong with saying that? Its true. Pointing that out does not mean you agree with it or endorse it. Self righteous narrow minded twit. It's called freedom of speech. Google it. How quickly we turn into Stalin when someone flames us on the intarweb.
Besides, judging from the pastor or whatever you rushed to her side, you presumably think she has heaven waiting for her anyway, so whence comes the anger even if the poster did suggest euthanasia? By your logic would it not be in her best interest?
You Christians don't even act like you really believe in heaven. I mean if I truly believed in heaven and hell, and I truly believed that asking forgiveness saved my soul, and I truly believed, that after a certain age, hell, that is, being tortured brutally for ALL TIME, was a real possibility.
I'd quickly and painlessly murder my own children to insure their entry into heaven and to shorten their suffering. After all, this life is worthless compared to the next, right? And hell is a much bigger problem then death, right? As a parent would you not risk hell to ensure your child's entry into heaven? I would, and I don't even have children.
But no, Christians fight death just as hard as atheists, if not harder. So, I smell bullshit.
And where's the outpouring of support for the hundreds of families that actually lost their children this year? Oh right, they didn't make a cool little freak baby for the Internet to ooo and ahh over. They aren't interesting, right? And make no mistake, thats what they all see her as, the only reason they even pretend to care is curiosity and guilt.
You people disgust me.
Some of us know people who didn't get a miracle, and are infuriated at the implication that these people somehow deserved a miracle to keep their child alive while others did not. The ego of this implication is astonishing beyond words, and that comes from a guy who considers himself a latter day Buddha and potential savior of all sentient life. :)
The only real miracle here is that people will believe anything, even if its in complete contradiction.
Every living human is a miracle, or none of them are, not just the cute little white American female ones.
News flash, she's not an angel, or a doll, or a toy, or an object of wonder. She's a human being, which is more than I can say for most of you. I deeply pity what its going to be like for her to grow up surrounded by you people.
Fortunately for her, the media has the attention span of a 5 year old cocaine addict with ADHD, so she may get a bit of dignity in a little while.
I hope she makes it long enough to be repaired by future gene therapy.
I wish her luck, but no more than the rest of us.
We all deserve a good life, so long as we are sentient, regardless of size.