Gustov was a Russian dwarf hamster. I did not name him that, but it suited him.
My (former I guess) friend and roommate Beth had decided she wanted a dwarf hamster. She picked up Gustov and brought him home. He was sweet and adorable from the beginning, but he was not mine so I didn’t pay too much attention.
Then later Beth tells me he’s escaped. She was very sad, and set up little traps in an effort to catch him. This went on for days until she finally gave up, but still wanting a hamster she went and bought a new one. A white female this time and named her Valentine.
A day or two after this Gustov apparently discovering that the outside world sucks returned to Beth by way of walking across her feet while she was on the computer. He allowed himself to be caught but it was instantly apparent that Gustov liked Valentine about as much as I did and so Valentine getting a roommate was out of the question.
So, Beth asks me if I want a hamster, since my cat had gone away by this time I think, and I had sworn off pets, I was hesitant, but they don’t live so very long and it wasn’t like I was imprisoning him, he came back of his own accord.
And so I had a hamster. He ended up being one of the best little pets imaginable. He never once bit me hard enough to hurt though he did startle the shit out of me a couple times. He was defensive but not offensive. This means he didn’t like me reaching in and touching him but if you let him climb into a cup and then took the cup out he was more than happy to be held and explore, and he would rarely poop and never pee on you. He was extremely brave in that he would peer over any edge and hang by just his back legs.
He quickly gave up on his wheel after discovering it went no where and started to plump up, which was adorable, I mean its funny to think about something that weighs like an ounce as obese. But he totally was.
I tried making ghetto habitrail for him out of clear piping and PVC elbows but he would have none of it. He used it once as if to prove to me he could and that he knew it was there and then completely ignored it. So I took it out.
I got him a bigger wheel to accommodate his “bulk” but he ignored it with equal vigor after a brief recon, and the occasional patrol.
He also hated his hamster ball, I would set him on the floor he would roll around for about 20 seconds and then b-line straight for my feet and sit there. So I figured what the hell and gave up, no one makes me exercise, nor should they, so why should I insist he be fit, I mean what, is he going for the gold in the hamsterlympics? No.
Whenever I pestered him I made it a point to give him a pumpkin seed, which he would stand up and take with his little hands, and then bite. I should have filmed this but my camera is such garbage.
I did get some pictures of him with my phone and the like, I’ll post them here when I find them.
My friend Gustov died on 8-25-08.
I’m not exactly sure when but I know he was dead or dying when I went to sleep because I looked at him and it seemed like he wasn’t breathing, but he slept really sound and I figured if he is dead, there’s nothing I can do about it but if he’s not I can let him sleep. I consider sleep to be sacred and avoid waking anything up that sleeps if it can be helped.
I checked on him and he was in the same position, so I tapped on the glass,I knew then he was dead, but you know, hope and stuff. Nothing, and then I picked up his house, nothing, still hope, and then, I touched him and he was cold. I’ve been crying ever since.
From the pictures you can tell he died in his sleep. I had just the day before changed his floof refreshed his water, and played with him and fixed his wheel, making it lower so his chubby self could get to it easier, and even gave him some frozen broccoli which he loved and ate about half of.
I was just talking about how in hamster years he’s like 200 but I wish he had made it to 300.
I buried him in a camera case with bedding and his salt disc which again you can see he inexplicably slept on. Since his floof was recently changed it was easy to spatula him into the case without disturbing his position, and his house was able to go with him. I don’t feel bad about him being in the dark because he only came out at night and he liked the dark. Plus he has his house, the one he preferred since as you can see he had two.
I dumped the remainder of his food over where I buried him and watered those seeds with the remainder of his water. Later I will ring the site with bricks so I don’t step and crush him. His place will mark not just his own passing but the passing of pets in general from my life. Gustov was the best case scenario and I won’t fuck it up by being greedy.
I’m going to miss hearing his little crunching and scuffle-digging and the tink of seeds against the glass as he kicked the shitty ones out of the way. Most of all I’ll miss him looking at me through the glass and standing up and staring at me when I said “Hi Gustov,” at which point I’d set the cup in with him and he’d climb right in knowing it was time to go outside and explore sleeve and dresser world.
Video of him.
Gustov will be the last non engineered life I purposely own. The Buddhists and peta have it right in one way. Avoid attachment, don’t own life. I know I was a good owner, I know he was healthy and well fed and happy as humanly possible, but he still died on my watch and it was my responsibility, even if not my fault.
Update: http://www.good.is/post/utahs-four-day-workweek-experiment-did-it-work/ See? What did I tell you? Less work means more time for other things and since we all share common goals 90% of the things people do on their days off end up helping society in some form or another anyway. The argument that the fiscal motivator is the only motivator is absurd on it’s face and the only reason we even give it a second thought is because of a 200 billion a year public relations push funded by the top 1% who need us to continue working until we die so that they can continue their obsessive compulsive pathological greed driven economic rampage.
Update: For a talk that explains how profit isn’t only the motivator watch this talk. http://vimeo.com/22633948
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“All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.” ~Aristotle
To understand the nature of jobs in America and pretty well anywhere else with money as of this writing (4/29/2011 1:29:41 AM) just think of the apparent absurdity of the following scenario. Soliciting bosses like bosses currently solicit workers.
Imagine making them compete for your labor, by requiring them to send payment up front which you will keep, only then working for whoever sent the highest amount and best benefits packages. This instead of the traditional model of building a portfolio or resume and begging them via interviews for the privilege of selling your finite time at a loss to an immortal corporation. This thought experiment nicely illustrates the fundamental injustice of the Corporate/College assumption of workmanship.
The structure of our society is not the only structure it could have it is merely the way which results from allowing (by definition psychopathic) http://underlore.com/TBA/?p=1694 corporate entities the standing of people and allowing them to then in turn use that standing in ways one would expect of immortal and immoral intelligences.
Why don’t they compete for our labor? Why do we even desire being owned by some corporation as a human resource in the first place, much less why have we allowed that relationship to degenerate into a bidding and begging game, like so many slaves jockeying for a particular kind of whip?
Why all this social focus on jobs? It seems to me that we have forgotten the point, generally.
A job is a means to an end, and that end is the provision of basic needs and hope. That is the point of society, to accomplish together what we cannot accomplish alone. To provide for the individual. We are not ants, society is not an end in and of itself, nor indeed is life. Only pleasure and life combined provide purpose. Beyond that basic truth, the decision rests with each individual to determine his or her place and goal.
The concept of work as a way of life was required as a function of agriculture and industry since farming was inescapably labor intensive and presented a common goods problem wherein the sedentary profited most. This is know as the free rider problem. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Free_rider_problem In order to motivate everyone to work who needed to work, deception had to be used.
But now escape is clearly possible. Our productivity per hour of labor is growing exponentially as a result of technology. I think we have reached a point where our own random desires can be harnessed to accomplish everything that needs accomplishing if the proper artificial barriers were eliminated and the proper voluntary social structures were created.
Eventually all physical maintenance will be a matter of code and material scarcity, nothing more. We should admit this and speed up the process.
We as a society need to admit that no part of society exists without any other. If a job is worth paying for it is needed by someone, and that someone is needed by someone else, and so on. Thus we all deserve a share of the profit of our nation and society, not merely what we can squeeze out of adjacent others directly for ourselves, but in general from the profit of the state. They deserve it for being the children of our ancestors and our distant cousins. They deserve it for simply being members of our human tribe.
So too should we all share in the debt, and the responsibility. After all the top 1% only exist by the fiat of property right. Clearly they don’t produce anymore. The argument for their position’s justification is circular. They accomplish X with wealth thus they deserve their wealth. Wealth as I have written elsewhere is about luck and accident of birth. Allowing them free right to amass as much as they can is anathema to the concept of democracy. http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105
We need to scrap the idea that you must earn your right to exist from the social lexicon, because everyone (except some suicides which are by definition pathological) feel worthy of living.
Further, forcing everyone to participate in society is as destructive as forcing everyone to be president. A person’s absence can be as helpful as their presence, sometimes more so. If we truly embrace democracy, the idea that everyone is fundamentally worth the same thing, then why do we force everyone to try and “earn” their right to exist in the same way?
Forcing me to get a job on pain of death and starvation is an attack on my civil liberties and an unfair exchange when I am not allowed to abstain from society’s restrictions. I am born a slave to the law. What do I get for that? It must be something more than simply the benefits currently allotted.
The price that must be paid for our obedience should be a living wage and the opportunity, not the requirement, to “better” myself. That is only fair.
The provision for those who simply wish to live quiet lives, and reap the rewards of one hundred thousand years of human progress currently is wage slavery at best and abject poverty leading to death at worst. This is unacceptable. What good is all this technology if we don’t let everyone enjoy it?
I’m glad some of us are driven to contribute, that will always be a part of our psychological landscape, but if everyone is required to be type A personalities then all of our achievements become meaningless because each advance will merely be used as a tool for another advance. We are not mayflies.
Essentially our society, the bottom 99% anyway, is expected to be pathologically OCD and workaholic.
Some of us don’t aspire to owning 400 gold plated Escalades. Many of us don’t even vote. I mention the vote because many people are content to be kept. This has been a valid, even encouraged, choice for women for a long long time, and now I say we extend it to everyone. What’s wrong with wanting to be taken care of? The technology allows it now. Some of our greatest minds had patrons, not employers. Patrons. The closest modern analog are grant holders and privately funded general researchers. I say since we have the technology we make contribution strictly voluntary.
I think you’d find that things across the board will improve. Like a dog on a leash, sometimes the best way to get it to move is to let go. We need to free people and guide the society that emerges from our collective efforts. Government has long over stepped its bounds as a tool to attack common good problems.
America has a long history of being a strange mix. Most clearly between communism and capitalism. The country has long grappled with, and miserably tried to reconcile the drive to let (make?) everyone live in a Laissez-faire economy, and securing our style of life with regulation and subsidy to the point of a homogenizing commune. (Ever notice how all the rich people wear ties?)
I think there needs to be a middle ground. The country agrees, but only practically, only subconsciously. It agrees as a manifestation of the war between them. To continue the metaphor I say we decide the borders by treaty rather than rifle fire. Sue for peace, as it were.
Clearly as a nation we have accepted a few things that logically support my assertions. Specifically, a basic national compromise, composed of two primary concessions that keep the country from tearing itself apart and descending into a second civil war.
1. That money will be spent to help the poor, no matter how badly the Republicans want to enforce a lethally detached amoral social Darwinism.
2. That money will be allowed to accumulate, no matter how badly the Democrats want to feed a million homeless crack addicts on what Bill Gates gets in interest every month.
The hyperbole of both these concessions is intentional.
Typically, how this has manifested has been the right wing seeking to unbound business regulation in search of a setting that will make the Horatio Alger myth a reality, and the left wing trying to tax the rich to the point of not being painfully wealthy anymore, to make their vision of a social utopia for all a reality. Obviously we both want the same things. Health and happiness all around. (Those who do not are psychopaths and are a completely separate problem. Again, http://underlore.com/TBA/?p=1694)
The problem is they are competing based on incorrect assumptions, and their compromises are not articulated. Sure occasionally congressmen will work together in a limited “both sides of the isle” way for specific purposes, but that’s not what we need.
We need a systemic admission from both sides that neither approach can ever be allowed to “win.” We all know that is the case, no matter what party has a majority clearly no side is (openly anyway) actually trying to eliminate the other. It’s like how you never see Coke trying to hostile take over Pepsi. If Coke bought Pepsi Coke would be in anti-trust land, so its best that they maintain the oligopoly, and keep us paying 1$ a can for what costs four cents to make(and rots our bones).
They of course would never admit that, and we all lose out. That’s (arguably) trivial when it comes to soda choice, after all I can say screw them and drink water or tea (I do). But it’s not so trivial when you have a country to run and use the same logic.
Letting the right and the left fight each other in this endless Orwellian pseudo war is sucking up resources at a phenomenal rate. And this is where we get back to jobs.
Is it ethical to let some choice few collect the money knowing full well that this collection means vast numbers of other people will die or worse?
The right and the left are arguing about how to fix the American economy, putting money here and taking it from there, making sure certain cash flows close and others stay open, desperately trying to keep the flow, to them, the same, despite the fact that there is only so much wealth to be had, and only so much can be extracted from pre-existing sources.
The system funnels money to a select few places. That flow of money is called the economy. Specifically the materials economy. Natural resources are converted into wealth and as it flows through the system changing hands and forms, the illusion of a cyclic system is created. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM
It’s like eddies in a stream. Sure there may be a whirl pool or two, you may even live in one, but if the water ends up in a cistern at the end and is never allowed to evaporate, eventually the rain will stop and that whirlpool is going to dry up.
The whirlpool is the economy, the cistern is the government and the rich, and the water is the money. The solution isn’t to talk the government and corporations into dumping some of their cistern water back at the beginning because they can not and will not dump ALL of it.
The solution is to let the water cycle happen. To put a percentage of the top back into the hands of the bottom, directly. We need rain. We need a default payment of some kind. A national profit sharing program. Not just rivers streams and aqueducts coupled to a giant hydraulic despotism, but free for everyone, rain.
I know that’s simplistic, but look into it yourself please. I can’t possibly explain every aspect of it concisely. I’m just trying to reveal the fundamental illusion that is causing a doomed effort.
This desire to “create jobs” which are just people, is futile. The money originally has to come from somewhere and the fact is the earth is running out of money precursors.
The right wing has it wrong in that the free market won’t solve anything because a fundamental fact of economics is that, dollar for util, it’s cheaper to be rich. Which means that even in a completely deregulated setting the economy would collapse or solidify into total aristocratic stagnation, where in the poor and the rich never switch places. Which is eventually as bad for the rich as it is for the poor since eventually the poor will wise up and start decapitating the wealthy.
The left wing has it wrong in thinking that if you make a government program for all those in need eventually everyone will be able to work and thus their product will offset the spending. But again, the money will end up in fewer and fewer hands, only this time instead of the rich owning the money it will be government officials controlling the money.
Both sides ignore the fundamental nature of money, the one trait it has that makes all these stopgaps just that. Money has it’s own gravity. Money is attracted to money. Money is a unit of effort and we all require an effort be made to live. Predation is the system of exploiting the effort of lesser beings, and we are the top predators. I say we exploit the lesser beings we have made, machines, and allow ourselves to enjoy being the top of the food-chain. At least until we can be free of it entirely. http://underlore.com/TBA/?p=663
Even the ultra rich never stop. I mean really, once you have 10 million in the bank, why get up for work? Because we are convinced that we must constantly take more. Of course we don’t call it take, we call it “make” as if we’re actually creating something when the precise opposite is true.
This is why the cold war boiled down to the USSR and USA. Both systems are extremely good at getting the people to work/pay without killing the bosses/officials. A great break down of that whole idea can be found in The Sovereign Individual. (ISBN-13: 978-0684832722)
The left wing thinks that everyone who calls for a free market is secretly corrupt and actually just wants a get out of jail free card for being a plundering jackass, and the right wing thinks that everyone who calls for plentiful unemployment benefits and medical benefits secretly want a pot clouded tie dyed commune.
Of course, neither extreme is true. We always exaggerate the differences between us and them.
That’s all well and good you say but can you do any better? Frankly. Yes. I can.
I think a systemic compromise can be reached, and here is what I propose in the broad strokes. This type of thing is not a new idea but applying it to the current context is new.
And here it is, The Grand Compromise. The peace treaty of the wings, so that maybe, finally, we can fly.
Good news and bad news for both sides.
Step one: Eliminate all government assistance programs, state, federal, and local. No food stamps, no unemployment, no disability, even. And the right wingers in the crowd go wild right? And the leftists wish they had felt differently about gun law and were packing right now.
But wait, step two is for you guys. We put a cap on personal wealth something like 500 million dollars, and a larger cap on corporate wealth something like 5 billion. Everything above the cap goes to the government. We then flat tax everyone’s income above the living wage, and institute the negative income tax until something better comes along.
Every American citizen gets a monthly check up to the living wage as determined by an independent third party. I would suggest a figure directly related to GDP and average income.
This way, everyone gets enough to live on, and the market is generally freed of regulation. Rampant greed can be safely indulged because no corporation will be able to wreck the system. Between the flat tax and the cap, everything gets paid for and everything stays a safe size.
We’ll also need to develop a real cryptocurrency to free our country from the tyranny of interest bearing currency. Bitcoin is a good start. Something that the banks can’t ruin.
As a long term bonus this would allow society to convert efficiency into freedom. As technology advances and jobs are innovated out of existence naturally profit in other sectors will expand. Money typically doesn’t dry up, it’s a bit like energy in that respect, it just gets converted and flows around mostly unless rich people are hording it.
Eventually you would end up with very few key businesses, such as fusion facilities and robot manufacturers, and such a whopping monthly check that everyone gets to live in luxury.
Making money will become a game and an art form, rather than a cutthroat world destroying endeavor run by psychopaths that threaten to reduce 99% of the world to abject poverty and radioactive glass. With all our needs met, and a sense of security we’ll go back to being the bastion of education, justice, and compassion we once were.
But hey, no one ever listens to me, why start now.
Criminal behavior is all sourced by the same demons that haunt all of humanity. As Clive Barker said, all who do evil are suffering.
The process has been generally and philosophically understood for recorded history, the only thing that changes is how it is stated and what is done as a result. All humans have needs, and if those needs are not met we turn into the most frightening predator we have yet seen. A predator that will pursue those needs with ruthless and fearless determination that knows no pain or death. A predator that delights in the utter annihilation and torment of whatever we perceive to be standing in the way of our fulfillment of that need.
But, we also have a near infinite capacity for compassion, forgiveness, and change. The need for revenge is a relic from our primordial past, a way to cohere a group through tough times that cannot be controlled.
As Nicole Kidman said in the interpreter, vengeance is a lazy form of grief.
What that means is that in being wronged we have lost something. Something that can never come back. Figuratively if not literally something dear to us has died. And rather than face the grim reality of the fact that it is gone and there is nothing we can do to erase that act we think we can control the situation from the other end.
We think we can inflict suffering that we perceive to be equal on those that have wronged us and that is justice. But in the end, once our vengeance is satisfied, as rarely as that occurs, we still must face our grief.
In a classic impact bias we think that once we’ve had our fill of torture porn, our righteous indignation, our base animal needs indulged with a guilt free excuse, our bloodlust sated, the pain will be removed, or seriously lessened. But this is wrong.
What actually happens is that our grief was always there, waiting like a patient vulture until only it remained. Indulging in vengeance is like taking heroin for a bullet wound. Sure you feel better for a time, but the wound is there, waiting. Perhaps even killing you.
The real solution is to prevent future pain, and not in some brutal torturous show. There is no deterrent but prevention and obviation. Vengeance never saved lives, it always takes them. Granted killing a killer can be the best action to take but by definition we will never know. In not knowing the future we never know if this was his last kill after he goes on to cure cancer.
Once the harm stops, once you are safe to indulge in vengeance. That is the time to grieve, and make peace with your loss. Once that is done you can approach they or it who wronged you in strategic way, and save our children from the same pain in the future.
The best option is to understand why the thing happened and work to remove that reason from society for all time.
And that is what I have done. And that is what I am doing.
You should check out Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander or the TED talk “Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?”
The fact is TV is not a function of culture but the creator of it, and that culture is one of exploitation and brutality.
TV provides context control and defaulting* standards which in turn shape what you think of as your own decision making power.
I’m not saying don’t watch shows, I’m saying don’t watch shows with commercials, or just passivity let the TV run in the background.
While shows themselves are often manipulative in and of themselves they at least have an indirect agenda, not one that is openly exploitative and deceptive.
The idea that you can “just ignore” the commercials is dangerous ignorance. :/
Based on Dan Ariely’s demonstration that the default is typically chosen when the chooser is confused, and that context defines the default, then i use the word “defaulting” as a verb to indicate the manipulating of the default for purposes of influence.
I’m attempting to understand why there is no distributed Internet.
It seems to be that the existence of a shortwave radio based Internet would have hugely beneficial implications.
To my understanding shortwave has extreme range. Would this not allow for Internet access in rural areas where traditional Internet is simply impossible or extremely impractical?
It also seems to me that it would be possible to distribute the load, thus obviating the need for both a central infrastructure and fees.
It seems to me that one could adopt an almost bit torrent model where in those who want to share can, those who don’t don’t.
Now I am extremely ignorant on this, but I’m trying to correct that. Any comments with additional information would be great.
My question is basically the same as the one I posted to Wiki answers.
What prevents the existence of shortwave radio distributed Internet?
It seems that data transmission over shortwave is at least technically possible. According to this page anyway.
It seems that shortwave for commercial purposes is illegal, which is all well and good, indeed that may work for us here. But what about for non profit?
Would it be legal to make a Shortwave non profit radio Internet service provider?
Does it even matter? I mean, couldn’t this type of thing be hosted from anywhere in the world pretty much?
I want more data. Please comment if you have some 🙂
This page contains a particularly disgusting bit of text…
One notable detail is that 2.4 GHz WLAN band is partially overlapping amateur radio band, and thus WLAN hardware can readily be used by amateur radio licensed operators with higher power radio gear than what the general population “license free” usage allows. (“Free to receive by anybody”, “transmit only between licensed radio amateurs”, and “[2]no encryption” rules usually make these very unappealing to spend time on.) Regulation details differ around the world.
No encryption? That is simply disgusting to me. It’s like transparent backpacks, searches without warrants, wire tapping, etc.
Mayhaps it’s time to start a new form of piracy harkening back to the old days. Maybe our enemy needs to be the FCC again, instead of the RIAA and Comcast.
