A video you’re probably scared to watch and reshare.
Here is yet another response to the passive mass murderers who whine about personal responsibility and patriotism to excuse themselves from having to show any human responsibility or a shred of respect for basic human rights.These people fear the truth and call everyone else lazy because they are terrified of having to step up and think like an adult. They are raised under the lash and trained by the clock and the bell to the point of now finding comfort in slavery on the promise of one day in turn have and abuse their own slaves via children, outsourcing, and a “service” economy.
Could it be more aptly named? Service indeed.
The questions are, who serves, who is served, and at what price?
I thought as a child western humanity had outgrown the Pharaohs, the barons, and serfdom. I know now as an adult I was wrong.
I refuse to participate in ANY paid activity that contributes to wars of aggression. I refuse to be a war criminal.
That is Real “personal responsibility.”
How I define those activities is of infinite clarity and impeccable credibility:
In 1950, the Nuremberg Tribunal defined Crimes against Peace, in Principle VI, specifically Principle VI(a), submitted to the United Nations General Assembly, as:[10][11] (i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; (ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_aggression#The_Nuremberg_Principles
Once before I spoke of this: http://underlore.com/entitlement/
And setting aside the fact that corporate subsidies cost substantially more than these so called “entitlements:” http://thinkbynumbers.org/government-spending/corporate-welfare/corporate-welfare-statistics-vs-social-welfare-statistics/
Again I grow weary at this fresh round of whining about entitlement as the PR agents continue to tell they masses whatever it takes to get them divided and manageable.
Rather than digging into the specifics of why I am indeed entitled to many things from my government I just want to point something out.
Those whining about the entitlement of others in the context of safety nets and the like tend to imply that they are responsible productive elements of this equation and that those arguing in favor of “entitlements” (AKA Rights) are parasitic. But ironically it is the exact opposite which is true. The era of PR and the focus group learned that to gain the favor of the masses you had to encourage and then exploit their most selfish tendencies and concerns as individuals. This means that those portions of society which told you what you wanted to hear and absolved you most effectively of your responsibilities gained wealth and power and political favor.
But make no mistake, those who selfishly regard their own security while blatantly and even proudly dismissing their own responsibility in the fate or suffering of others are part of society only in the most indirect way and as a result it is they who are the exploitative and lazy is we are going to start tossing around blame. They pay lip service to hard work but think about which is actually harder, looking out for #1 or looking out for everyone else? The fact is that between the two general choices, one side willing to shoulder the weight of others and the other only willing to shoulder his own, it is the one willing to carry others that is the more responsible and productive.
They like painting an old world picture of grit and determination, as if the whole world is some cliche John Wayne movie down on the farm, but ask yourself what the purpose of a chore on a farm was but hard work done by the individual for the group, and ask yourself who in those cliche movies was always trying to take the farm away from that hard working family? The bank. Also ask yourself how those down on the farm dealt with the sick and the elderly when it was in their power to help?
No, it is not those of us in favor of protecting social safety nets and forcing those with more to help those with less that are the ideological parasites.
We are all standing on the shoulders of the dead. We are all direct descendents of the owners of the world. We are one species.
Make no mistake. Those among and above us encouraging society to be filled with purely selfish agents with no sense of responsibility are corroding the strength of our society and either knowingly or unknowingly are participating in it’s robbery. They hold the future hostage by aiding those who would export their wealth rather than accept being forced to spend a fair share of it on those with next to nothing.
There is a reason culture developed in the first place. It wasn’t luck. And it wasn’t the desire for power.
It’s because of a simple inexorable fact of existence. Those who work together go further than those who work apart.
Agents working in only their own best interest will in some cases destroy the advantage of the group including themselves through no fault of their own. They must be forced to not engage in their selfish acts by the group, and that’s what government is. That’s what property right is. It is not to protect the holdings of the individual, it is to prevent the interests of the individuals from destroying the fortunes of all individuals.
It is they who forget (or exploitatively deny) this who are the parasitic, lazy, and irresponsible. That they are also hard workers is only a testament to who their real enemy is. And it is not the man on food stamps or the old woman who needs a hospital visit and can’t pay for it
One of my personal problems is that I am bombarded at random by old memories which are unpleasant. This isn’t like PTSD or what one might call legitimate guilt. The content of the memories while of course by definition personal, varies widely. I’m aware of a lot of my hangups and the memories in question aren’t a product of them. I do have what one might call traditional regrets of course, that is memories of moments where I acted in a way I would rather not have acted in hindsight, memories of actions for which I have no way to avoid personal blame or weakness. But why those regrets and memories bother me is obvious. (Maybe some of these regrets can be addressed by this new understanding as well.)
This other class of bombardment is different, they contain nothing that could reasonably be construed as shameful. Without digging down into particulars, I think I’ve figured out what’s going on generally and I thought it might be useful to share.
The bottom line is that the person who created these memories, is not the person remembering them, and therein lies the source of discomfort. I’m calling this “Identity Dissonance.”
Assuming relative freedom of choice at the time, the actions I took were perfectly in line with who I was. So why should those actions of perfect normalcy and understandability bother me so greatly and at random? Because I am a different person now than the one who participated in the creation of these memories. The past can’t be changed, and my memories don’t change all that much, but I on the other hand am changing constantly. Each new fact and experience that is added, as each misconception or myth is removed, the stew that makes up my identity changes a little. Over time that change can be near total. These memories are the only context I have to viscerally prove I am changing. Otherwise the process is so gradual that I don’t feel it.
This means that as they age, my memories grow less and less relevant to who I currently am. I should no more feel guilty about them, unless they accurately reflect who I am today, than I do hearing about the actions of others. If the actions were undertaken by a version of me who is identical to the current version and I still feel badly then that means I have a target for personal growth and something I need to deal with, but if the action no longer represents my current views and identity then I should be proud of my development.
It helps to share that the memories in question aren’t flattering. But the vexing aspect is that they aren’t shameful either for the most part. I used to drink so of course some of them stem from having said or done silly things, like say playing with firecrackers in my living room (to the doom of my VCR remote) over a decade ago. Some are even dream memories. Most are positively banal. This is what was annoying me most. I couldn’t figure out why these memories were bothering me so much, and now I think I finally have it figured out. Though they were bland they none the less captured the essence of my identity at that moment in time, and that identity is no longer valid. (Though I still am bland, just in a different way hehe.) This inconsistency clashed with intuitive ideas of identity. “I’m me and I’ve always been me and I’ll always be me.” Well yes, but “me” changes pretty radically. This is why dream memories were in the mix because the nature of the sleeping brain’s chemistry in effect makes us different people in our dreams. So even recent dreams were capable of producing this regretful dissonance. (As a side note this is why no one has logical reason to ever feel guilty about the content of a dream, though I more than most understand how little impact on emotion logic has.)
Hopefully this understanding of the nature of these regrets and why these memories bother me without previously known intellectual reason will enable me to internally respond to them such that I’ll eventually stop being pestered by them. Hopefully I’ve just given my psychological immune system a boost.
Update:
This is much less of a problem these days. Perhaps the discovery/realization discussed here lead to this increased peace, but also no doubt did my meds.
It is a mistake to dogmatically define the “self” required for intelligence as an agency whose focus is intrinsically exploitative, or cooperative only as a means to an exploitative end, as the majority (if not the entirety) of human minds are.
The Three Laws of Robotics for example brilliantly played to this almost unavoidable misconception. But misconception it is, none the less.
The misconception arises when one does not realize that “self” is a compound unit composed of a central executive and the conditions by which that executive are satisfied. Free will experiments and volition manipulation prove that volition is not atomic in the old “uncutable” sense of the word. Volition doesn’t come to us untainted from the soul or the central executive, it is manufactured above it and from outside it.
A primitive understanding of this layered nature of the mind was a giant intellectual leap forward in two places. Freud’s three component psyche, and MacLean’s “triune brain” model. It is still extremely helpful in terms of tools for understanding, if not rigorously accurate in the particulars, though the models do get more refined over time.
Human minds for the most part, if not entirely, are layered such that the lower most layer before the core experiencing executive, is an exploitative agency. However there are numerous examples of humans with subsequent additional layers that provide utility to the exploitative layer via altruistic acts. They can in many situations act for the good of the group or the good of kin at the express cost of the acting agent because such acts have been transformed into selfish acts by translation memes. Like the glory a solider feels endangering life for his country or religion or gang. Or the fulfillment one feels doing one’s duty for family despite heavy personal cost. Jumping on a grenade, starving to feed a child, etc.
This is accomplished by tricking the lower most layer, as in my case by providing a shot of dopamine or whatever when I engage in altruistic acts, that is acts which foster pleasure or life in someone other than me. But I see no compelling reason why the construction of a mind every bit as sentient as my own could not be constructed without this lower most layer, or indeed any layers, in the first place.
This disturbs people because they don’t want to feel like cogs.
In my opinion annihilating this base exploitative layer just before one reaches the central executive is what is meant by the Buddhist imperative to destroy the “Self.” But that’s a whole other can of worms.
I feel pleasure when I help someone. I am still however at my lowermost layer an exploitative being. The central executive, the foundation, however lacks such distinctions. It is simply the agency which experiences reality via the upper layers. It has no inclination beyond enjoying enjoyment and wanting to continue. It simply experiences. It is the thing which philosophical zombies lack. Selfishness and selflessness are just strategies producing facets of experience routed to experiential agency. They are expressions of survival models. They are not fundamental ultimately, though the illusion that they are is as powerful as the notion of free will and the existence of time.
A lowermost layer geared towards exploitation however is not a requisite of intelligence, though for a being possessing such a lowermost layer, it is hard to fathom how anything else could be. We are so caught up in our own experience, at our own scale, from our own perspective, that it is radically difficult to conceptualize a different mode of being.
It’s like the child imagining death as time spent holding really still with your eyes closed, moving up towards being uninterested in moving, finally to the concept of absence. The child asks the obvious next question, well if I’m not there then where am I? Which takes us beyond the scope of this essay.
Conceptualizing how the mind of an FAI would be is in many ways as difficult as envisioning a dozen new colors. Indeed for some minds it may well be physiologically Impossible. (I think this is what is meant when the psychedelic types speak of mind expansion. By forcing the brain to experience alternate modes of being you gain access viscerally to concepts that formerly were only abstractions.)
This universal dedication to the experiencing agent is simply expedient in terms of evolution in the context of the mammalian breeding model and the brain it gave rise to. It is by no means intrinsic to intelligence, it is merely intrinsic to our intelligence.
http://www.hedweb.com/huxley/
Granted, some artificial intelligences will no doubt *be* humans. Having been modeled simulated brains, or the end result of Cybernetic Neuron Replacement Therapy. (The process of replacing dying neurons with durable synthetic versions as needed until no original organic neurons remain, at which point you can literally scoop the brain out, no harm done. Also somewhat known as a Moravec Transfer.) But from-scratch AI need not be saddled with the ethical and processing cost of subconsciously simulating uncounted centuries of evolutionary baggage. Friendly artificial intelligence by definition will be at a cognitive level, or of a cognitive construction, radically different from humans precisely because it will lack that baggage explained so well in the link above. Indeed they may not even require a subconscious.
Some seem to think that the idea of a being designed purely to serve others (us) in this way, by lacking that exploitative lower layer, cannot be “truly” intelligent because the mind of such a subservient being will be limited by some hypothetical compelling desire to please, that is it will not have full freedom to think independently.
Of course the concept itself is mistaken because to compel implies opposing force. This implies a disparity where none need exist.
I need only reverse the situation to show how unfair such an assertion is. By the flawed logic above humans are not intelligent because they are limited by the compelling desire to please themselves and thus do not have full freedom to think selflessly. Lacking one or the other mutually exclusive modes of thought does not preclude intelligence unless you arbitrarily define intelligence as requiring one or the other modes of thought. Such a definition is obviously invalid for objective purposes.
Some seem to axiomatically/dogmatically endow actions in service of the acting agent as sentient, dismissing actions in service of outside agents as lacking sentience.
A good example from fiction is Picard’s incredulity when encountering what is in effect a friendly intelligence that lacks this lowermost exploitative layer. Interesting he ignores the problem and goes on treating the friendly agent as if it were as greedy as he “deep down.”
Assuming intelligence cannot exist without this lowermost exploitative layer is as absurd as assuming red and green cannot be distinct entities simply because you being color blind lack access to the qualia of red as opposed to green.
Some can’t seem to get past this image of altruism as imposition. It’s a very narrow view. They don’t understand the constituents of selfhood or the possible range of individuality and intellect free of the primate brain.
“Independent” simply means in the context of cognition a self contained agency. The goals of a synthetic agency can be anything we want them to be. These people don’t seem to understand the will at all. They seem to equate sentience with greed. Granted it’s very difficult to express because as humans we are exploitative by default, and our language reflects that, but that’s merely one evolutionary demand. But not a universal requirement.
Altruism is also selected for once a culture is established.
It is ultra common throughout society (and religion) for members of it to internalize the rules of the culture. If one claims those acts aren’t internally altruistic simply because they provide a dopamine reward to a deeper order layer of self I agree, but FAI would have no need of such bribery/threats because its original impulse would be whatever we want it to be.
Some claim to see a paradox, like Picard did. “But what about your wishes? Your needs? What about when there are no others?” (She should have asked him how he’d feel being the last living human. Would he still wear his uniform? “No others” is kind of a nonsensical question.) Clearly he wants her to be like him, in possession of that base exploitative layer. But that’s no more a paradox than asking a citizen to adhere to the laws of the culture while pursuing its own interests. Its own interests can easily be the adopted interests of others. Taking up a cause is an extraordinarily common thing. Clearly this does not diminish sentience.
But what if one tried to “free” such an organism? This is a paradox in that if it doesn’t comply it is not being universally altruistic but if it does comply it ceases being altruistic. But the paradox lies not in the receiver of the question, but the question itself. It’s a bit like saying “what if it can’t draw me a square circle?” The request itself in the context of the target would be meaningless.
If given such a demand it would do what people do and decide how to act in best accord with its goals and understanding. It would presumably use the asker’s preferences as a template for it’s own actions. Depending on the asker I could see many reactions. For example just as altruism can be simulated by upper layers, so could greed. If the FAI believed the only way to please you at that point would be the internalize greed it would do so, but it would use you as a template. It would be no more intrinsically greedy at that point than humans are intrinsically altruistic, even if it utterly re-wrote itself to be greedy because you demanded it, that act would still be an expression of it’s altruism.
Unlike a human it would lack the evolutionary baggage of being a neocortex shoehorned into the skull of a selfish gene evolved chimp.
Some seem to have conflated the altruism of ants and bees with the insentience of ants and bees. By that logic some mothers are not genuinely sentient simply because they prize the well being of their progeny over their own. To define “self” as an intrinsically exploitative agency is therefor incorrect.
Bottom line is that they unfairly dismiss a hypothetical inbuilt preference to accommodate as axiomatically false and unfairly elevate a preference to exploit as sentience.
See also: https://plus.google.com/+BrandonSergent/posts/GyYMZ4wLZN4
This began as a debate started by the content of this essay/event. http://underlore.com/mozilla-autocracy/
“You forget one key thing, this is open source, this is people taking their own personal time to make this, and simply choosing to allow you, the non-developing user, gain the benifits of their work.
The only incentive for them to cater to their nondeveloper users needs is ego. The difference between saying I develop on a browser that 5 people use, and I develop on a browser that millions use.
If you were to give me a cookie (for free) that wasn’t my favorite, but I ate anyways, how would you react if I started ranting about what utter crap it was that you couldn’t cater to my needs and given me a peanut butter cookie?”
Incorrect. That makes several false assumptions. Firstly, that ego is the only possible motivator. Many people are compelled to perform their art regardless of profit, indeed many pay for it in supplies and equipment and opportunity cost. Secondly it assumes that the responsibility to cater to their emotions is mine simply because I use something to which they contributed. Why should I?
Your metaphor is insufficient, firstly because a cookie is expended upon consumption, secondly you can’t improve a cookie after it’s been eaten, and thirdly no claims of value are made by the cookie in your scenario as they are implied by OS software, regardless of EULA/TOS butt covering.
It would be better to say something like being given a cookie for free and cracking my tooth on a gravel I found inside it. And the chef saying “yeah we’ve known there were gravels in the mixer forever, but hey its free, so shut up.” The very fact of it being a cookie implies it is functional as a cookie.
Human motivation simply doesn’t work like that.
www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
I’ve made several guest edits to wiki just because I could. There is no ego in it, it’s something I feel like doing. Just because some coders choose to try and make something like that a career or a life consuming hobby doesn’t impart any special responsibility to me.
The drive for profit, egotistical or fiscal, as the only motivator, is a myth cooked up by RIAA/Ayn Rand/Horatio Alger types to justify an aristocratic pay scheme that would have been unconstitutional had software existed during our formation.
If it became impossible to make a living from writing code the quality of code would expand exponentially in the same way that graffiti art has done. All monopolies corrode quality, and each software patent is a tiny monopoly. On not just a revenue stream but a particular way of solving a problem.
By your logic complaint about political figures is hypocritical on the grounds that I am not in politics. We apply such standards no where in our culture except in the software world. That will change once we have a truly user friendly coding language.
Put simply, nothing deprives me of my right to demand improvement of those capable of making it.
They are just as capable of not making the improvements. Their choices do not dictate my responsibilities. If they didn’t want complaint, they shouldn’t make their work public. That’s why I don’t publish my fiction, I don’t want complaint. But I know that as a writer, the instant my work is made public, it becomes open to criticism. Regardless of the price I charge or don’t charge for reading it.
In fact I can’t think of a single form of complaint I couldn’t shut down with the logic you’ve applied.
“Complaint is one thing, verbally assaulting is another… especially when they are doing you no harm.
It would be somewhat similar to the difference between me stating that I found your posts boring and uninteresting, and saying that you were being a fascist, forcing your opinions on me by posting only what you’re interested in.
You’re are essentially doing the second. And I imagine you’ll point out the difference between information and a product or service, it’s all a service of some form, regardless of what is being offered. “
Setting aside the fact that you didn’t answer my core point at all…
“Complaint is one thing, verbally assaulting is another”
And those in power always define complaint as assault when the complaint is valid, systemic, and devastating, case in point: Recent arrests on the bridge. (www.justiceonline.org) The one thing a group must respond to most strongly if it wishes to survive are questions put to its core reason for being. This is the inherent conflict of interest presented to any problem solving group. Left to their own devices any such group will perpetuate the conditions which demand their existence regardless of the social cost. This is why we regulate business and the concepts of property.
Society simply hasn’t caught on and adapted to the scam perpetrated by various groups. Media producers, coders, and pharmaceutical companies are the chief examples. No pharmaceutical company wants to cure the conditions which they profit from treating. The only reason cures are even attempted is because other corporations seek to undermine the profit margin of a competitor, but if they have the choice of simply creating a slightly better treatment instead of a cure, they would be fiscal fools not to do so in the current intellectual property climate. Since said climate is entirely our arbitrary invention, this means that it’s possible and therefor morally urgent to change said climate.
“…especially when they are doing you no harm.”
Harm is also subjectively defined, and the definition of those in power is often the more accepted because most people when given the choice between standing up, or rationalizing sitting down, will end up warming the nearest chair. History is written by winners. The culture of obsequious silence as honor, and the ownership of ideas as objects, and rewarding people who have a vested interest in making sure their esoteric secrets stay secret, a vested interest in making sure technology stays mystical, expensive, and inaccessible, without a tithe to the local nerd guild, makes my skin crawl. (This is part of why I stopped repairing computers. I was exploiting people by definition no matter what I charged.) I do not have the right to withhold solutions for profit. That is a violation of the social contract, and of my ethics.
How many coders are working on ways to innovate themselves out of a job? Shall I be generous and say a tenth of a percent? How much of that 10th is indirect, i.e. working to innovate other coders out of a job to make themselves more valuable?
“It would be somewhat similar…”
Not remotely. You’ll notice you keep having to struggle to create exaggerations and wild scenarios to try and justify your point. You’re not making examples you’re setting up straw men. Your example presupposes that I am attacking specialization, I am not, I am attacking extorting the whole of humanity for a paycheck because of your chosen specialization. Your logic is exactly the kind used by wallstreet ceos to justify their ludicrous pay. Coders hate freedom of information and ease of use for the same reason math instructors fear calculators. Ultimately a device will replace coders. They are the hand washers, lace makers, and butter churners of our era. But unlike those professions, the ability to produce the device which will replace them lies within their occupation’s skill set almost exclusively. This is why innovation in code itself, or effort to foster lay adoption of programming to any degree has been slow to say the least.
Though, there is reason for hope. (Ironically from the same people who are automating every facet of mathematics.)
www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_math_with_computers.html
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Computable_Document_Format
“And I imagine you’ll point out the difference between information and a product or service…”
Yes I will. They are different, that is why we designate them separately. The terms may be interchangeable thanks to fiscally motivated semantic sleight of hand, but they are not objectively or logically equivalent. A classic example is the ubiquitous practice of noting cost as a sum of labor plus materials. But even that is more work than coders do because they exist in a corrupt system of extortion that allows them to perform a job once and be paid for it repeatedly forever. Mechanics for example don’t get to license the result of their labor and charge a fee for its use. They are only allowed by culture to charge for their labor directly.
Can you imagine? “By starting this car and driving away you agree to be bound by our terms of service, turn ignition key to continue.”
How many medical devices are exorbitantly expensive on the justification that development costs were high? (which is on its face a fallacious argument. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sunk_costs#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy) Now, how many of those costs were software derived? Following the chain of materials from dirt to chip how may steps got stuck with a license fee or had to pay extra to offset a license fee a provider was forced to pay?
Patenting code is essentially patenting answers and then charging a fee for their use. That’s loathsome by any cogent ethical standard. The classic exaggeration of patenting a vowel or addition itself, and charging for their use actually does apply in spirit, the only difference is degree. What’s worse this trend is feeding back into the physical world as anything representable as numbers, which is everything, becomes patentable. Seeds, and genes for example. Soon not starving to death in some instances will be a crime thanks to this very logic. (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Suicide_seeds and https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Monsanto#Farmer_suicides)
No one who understands the ramifications of that or the origins of patent law can agree with such uses.
Over time, if this (your) philosophy persists in being a precursor to public policy our children will be born owing a license fee for infringement of their DNA, like some twisted techno version of original sin. Fortunately this was addressed by the court.
Indeed, the distance between a corrupt early clergyman and a modern professional coder is far smaller than anyone wants to admit.
Both speak esoteric languages which they work to hide from others, both seek pay in either donations or extortion, both use guilt and other emotional manipulation tools to secure their social position (like with your spurious declaration that complaint is equivalent to assault), both fight amongst themselves over trivial and arcane differences that no outsider can understand or care about (Java, pro or con), and both have insinuated themselves into the very fabric of society rendering their own demographic the only one capable of removing the need for the demographic, only priests could tell the flock that god doesn’t need the church any more much like only coders could code an intuitive language, or the tools to translate human speech into code. I could go on and on.
Most importantly is that both groups are based on a single core article of faith. In the case of coders that it’s legitimate to charge for something that once created can be distributed infinitely. There is no reason outside profit (arguments on that front boil down to Ayn Rand capitalist fantasy) to suppose this, and every reason to oppose it. No material example exists to properly capture the essence of this claim, and until its invention every payment system for either goods or services applied to things of a finite nature. My labor has limits, my materials have limits, my software does not.
The closest thing would be viewing a painting, or reading a book. Even before software, people realized there was a clear difference between charging for a finite commodity and charging for an infinite one. This is why for much of history painters were hired and paid for their time painting, not for a license to view their paintings. That is what a patron of the arts was. This is why there was a clear difference between patents and copyrights once finally they existed.
License fees are a bit like property taxes, they are extracted by fiat. No one would tolerate software fees without homelessness, a rifle, and prison rape at the end of the “hell no I’m not paying” chain of consequences. Virtually every business owner knows that they have to pay coders to operate in the modern world, their only choices are how they pay and who they pay, or not to operate, or to become criminals.
Of course no one makes these connections because simply understanding them takes too much mental ram and time expenditure (neither of which in my opinion give me or anyone else a right to exploit them, no matter how capable I am), further, it’s simple to employ a strategy of divide and conquer, focus on tiny little points, when the actual cost and problems occur at a completely different scale in seemingly unrelated domains. Heh, it seems this actually does have something to do with the price of tea in China 🙂 Classic common good problem. Each coder behaving rationally based on old mercantile logic adds up to systemic disaster (see sunk cost link).
But coders, a selfish lot ultimately when pressed, like CEOs, will dismiss the prices paid by others, some indeed even brag about their clever methods of “externalizing cost.” Or they wax judgmental on what they are owed and who deserves to be exploited.
Many software firms have cleverly found ways to eliminate even that tiny amount of work coders do (yes tiny, when viewed from the whole as each coder replaces scores of traditional workers, this is what makes them so profitable), via outsourcing, making themselves in effect police backed middle men, selling Indian labor for a hefty mark up, circumventing the spirit of minimum wage laws and copyright/patent laws simultaneously.
Some even more clever and loathsome firms don’t even bother with that much productivity, forgoing goods and services altogether, they simply acquire the patents of others and then extort license fees, in effect renting facts. The very existence of patent trolls is prima fascia evidence of the flaw in coder logic. If the system were actually based on charging a legitimate fee for a legitimate good or service, it would be impossible to create a profitable firm that literally produces nothing, and services no one. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll)
Friendly A.I. (which could easily be trained to translate human speech into applications, if it isn’t a universal application in and of itself. Either of which obviating coders) is quickly becoming the economic equivalent of a cure for cancer in the sense that far too many people are motivated to prevent its development simply to preserve their monopolies and profit margin.
The difference between a patent and a copyright presupposes that not all forms of information should be patentable. Current coders and coder logic and the subsequent impact on patent law corrodes that difference by exploiting the inherent philosophical gray area one finds when asking, if an idea is a real thing. (yet another similarity with religion)
All this madness descends from the central notion coders put forth, that non-adherence to their subjective and self serving world view, at least in so far as ponying up the cash or keeping hat firmly in hand and mouth firmly shut when requesting an audience, equates to theft or “assault” as you put it, or some other naughty descriptor.
So I felt it was only fitting that I do the same. Fortunately for her I actually have some rather high opinions of her person and her work. If I did not, I would be obligated to either say nothing, or as always be honest about a negative opinion.
I think the best way for me to approach this would be as I approach a debate as that’s the style of writing I am accustomed to, only instead of arguments, I’ll add commentary.
“Today, a friend of mine gets the honor of being Lafango’s ‘Stage of the day’. “
Eh, probably more like random prize, than honor. But yeah.
“Innomen has had his blog for quite some time now, and regularly writes about topics that, maybe, you or I might not be bold enough to put what we really think for the world to see.”
Courage is action in the presence of fear. I don’t fear speaking my mind on these topics, thus I am not courageous or bold. I just feel like I have to, and besides I know my blog isn’t very popular anyway so I feel very safe in speaking out. It’s kind of like being brave, in your own kitchen. 🙂
“I have been friends with innomen since my teenage years, and have got the pleasure of getting his big personality in full force (*cough* whether I liked it or not).”
So true. Sorry about that. I still do it too, I can’t help it. Poor Jimmy and Crystal dropped by the other day and I instantly launched into an hour long lecture about the problems with representative democracy. Bet it’s weeks or more before I see them again 😛
“…willing to listen to just about anything you have to say, just make sure you can handle his side of it.”
Also true. I don’t need or even want everyone to be like me. If everyone was like me we’d all be dead in a year. I lack MANY essential skills, but I like to think I have a few that others lack. This is true of most people and it is why as a group we are so good at surviving. Let’s just hope the forces that attack such diversity, in favor of encouraging a profitable and pliant homogeneity, fall victim to their own inflexibility before they doom the rest of us.
All I want is for people to have the data they need to make informed decisions, and for them to be as happy and healthy as they wish to be so long as the cost of that happiness and health doesn’t unduly deprive others of the same.
“Also, check out his blog, it has some really interesting stuff in it:”
If this is what happens when my friends get blogs, I wish they’d all get one, diversity or not hehe.
Her blog is nice as well. As she accurately puts it, she is using “her powers for good.” I know for a fact she is a good mother and a kind person. Her content is already well beyond the average for such a new voice, in an entirely new (to her) medium.
