Never been one to let the carrier drop

I slept last night for about 3 hours. I awoke with the feeling that I was staring at a blinking cursor under the word ‘READY’ – like I was waking up at exactly the right moment. I had one problem-dream, involving moving cars about in a parking garage. It had not progressed to the nightmare stage when I exited it.

Lucid dreaming is still beyond me, but I do have certain new capabilities, like the ability to find the exit in dreams. It does seem that I think less circuitously and more directly when I get more sleep.

Of late – the last two years I think – I’ve been sending a lot more personal emails to various people in which I write about myself. One part of me thinks this is stupid egoism, but another part has found that for whatever reason, writing to one particular person, imagining their viewpoint as I write, is more helpful for certain types of internal debugging than writing to a entire blog. It’s a lot easier to imagine that the single reader cares about me.

In general, I’ve noticed, they don’t get responses. Actually, the majority of email responses I get are to ‘action emails’ i.e. ‘would you like to do this next week?’ or ‘Should we dump this database using this technique?’. I did recently send a ‘Would your label like to represent me for a album?’ email, but it didn’t get a response either. Pity.

I am planning on recording another album starting in the next few weeks – I am looking for a space to record it in, and have sent out several emails inquiring about practice spaces. I do hope some label will decide to represent me for it, since I don’t even have the marketing skills of a cute, cuddly puppy. The theme for this album will be what I’ve learned about the world and myself in the past two years. It should be interesting.

Anyway, I hope that my personal emails don’t cause too much harm. I try to moderate my desire to say anything that pops into my head with a understanding of who I’m writing to. Occasionally I fail, which has been known to cause distress both for me and the people I write to. However, overall the exercise has been worthwhile, so I will likely continue to do it. I do think people sometimes get the wrong ideas about me from these emails, and maybe I should balance them out with emails that indicate that my life is steadily getting better, I am in fact mostly sane, and I’m not evil incarnate.

Anyway, to all those who reply, or even who accept them, thanks for “listening”.

From @ClintJCL:

Idealism unattached to practicality is a useless daydream, man.

That would apply to the previous post if the following did not:

1) I didn’t learn anything from the thought exercise
2) I didn’t get any satisfaction from writing that blog post
3) It wasn’t part of a larger, more overarching topic (or topics) which are what is my personal definition of utopia and how can I get from where I currently am to that place, or more productively, recognize what attributes of that place are in where I currently am and make myself happier by enjoying those attributes
4) It wasn’t part of a larger thought experience which is the question of where the intersection of representative democracy where the representatives are the ones interested in the topic at hand, direct democracy, communism, and technology is. I will be fascinated to see how the Chinese take advantage of the internet and computer technology to make their communist system work better and more efficiently, and I think this sort of thought experiment is worthwhile in it’s own right.

I would also comment that if one is sufficiently nihilist, everything is useless and pointless – and yet, here we are with time on our hands, so let us strive for the simple joy of striving, and think because it beats the alternative. IMHO.

I feel like if there are places available to live, and people living under overpasses who would rather be living in houses, we’ve failed. I don’t care if those people like to drink, or don’t feel like waking up at 9 am.

I feel like if there are people wanting to travel, and seats empty on airplanes, then we’ve failed. I don’t care how many bits are set in the registers in some computer that pretend to be their account balance.

I feel like if there are people who want to work, and things that need doing, and those people aren’t able to find jobs then we’ve failed. I don’t care about the registers in some computer that pretend to be some corperation’s bank balance

I feel like if there are people who want to learn, and seats left at the university, then we’ve failed. I don’t care about either the bits in the register that are the university’s account balance or the bits in the register that are the individual’s.

I understand that the value of money is largely tied into our beliefs about it. I also understand that there is someone who would rather be living indoors than under a street overpass, but who would also rather be writing music than software at this point. So I feel like you (plural, whoever’s in charge around here) have failed me. Or maybe I have failed me, because maybe I do this to myself out of a lack of faith that you would pay me to do what I want to do. On the other hand, I’ve dipped a feeler in the water in the form of my tunecore account, and money has not come in in droves despite the fact that one of the songs I cowrote with Jessica has a million downloads off my web server. So someone out there is cheating. Okay, enough, stop. The money thing is stupid anyway, and most of us know it if we stop and think about it. Really, I am telling you to grow up, whoever is hoarding all the money. Get that stuff in circulation. Stocks = meaningless. Let’s crash the system, and force it to reboot in a way that fits the earlier statements in this blog post. Chris, aside from the drugs to make everyone docile, This Perfect Day was a fucking awesome system. Why isn’t it here today?

And hoarders.. of which I’m one and I speak to myself as well.. give it away. I’ve done it, over and over, and you will feel sooo much better knowing it’s in circulation and being used in the ways it was meant to, instead of in your way. Living in the ebay world means you don’t *have* to hold onto everything, because you can always get what you need when you need it. Aside from the issue of money – which, as I’ve said above, needs fixed and I keep waiting to see someone with the clout to do something about it stand up and admit that it’s all just bits in computer registers, and what’s needed is better software and less of a “You must work to deserve to eat” attitude.

Joe McCartney would have my balls.. except this is my time, not his.

Well, I recently bought a macbook pro and I have a bad feeling it is going to be returned – the first computer I’ve ever done so with.

The problem is the OS – OSX 10.7, which apparently is unable to run *any* of the core applications that I use my macbook for. No vmware fusion (at least not without a expensive upgrade), no Cisco VPN client (and the native VPN software is totally unable to communicate with my VPN concentrator), and no Flex Builder (again, at least without a *very* expensive upgrade).

So, my first plan of attack is to take it to the apple store and ask for a downgrade. If that doesn’t work out, I will be returning it and shopping the used market for something with 10.6.

Robbie Robb, “In Time”

No fear, no loss, no tears,
The time is almost here.
Our dreams will all come true, I promise you,
‘Cause I can see for miles and miles.
In time we’ll be dancing in the streets all night (all night, all night).
In time, yes, everything will be all right (all right, all right).
It’ll take time but we’re going far,
You and me, yes I know we are.
In time we’ll be dancing in the streets all night.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.
In time we’ll be dancing in the streets all night.
All night.

One heart, one soul, one mind,
Our eyes will not be blind.
We’ll see this rain come down without this sound,
We can all, we can all break free.
In time we’ll be dancing in the streets all night (all night, all night).
In time, yes, everything will be all right (all right, all right).
It’ll take time but we’re going far,
You and me, yes I know we are,
In time we’ll be dancing in the streets all night.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.
In time . . .

In time we’ll be dancing in the streets all night (all night, all night).
In time, yes, everything will be all right (all right, all right).
It’ll take time but we’re going far,
You and me, yes I know we are,
In time we’ll be dancing in the streets all night.
All night, we’ll be dancing,
We’ll be dancing, we’ll be dancing,
All night . . .
We’ll be dancing in the streets all night.
Dancing . . .
In time, we’ll be dancing . . . all night.
We’ll be dancing in the streets all night.

Okay, so ClintJCL posted a reply to my last entry, which I’m going to take one point at a time.

Clint: I don’t need to subjugate worlds, there’s plenty of evidence of how things work here in the real world.

There’s evidence for all sorts of things here in the ‘real world’. If the latter phrase has any meaning.

Later in your reply you suggest that I’m unable to use logic in considering the way the world will behave. I don’t think that’s true – I just think we start with a different set of beliefs, from which different conclusions logically follow. One of my beliefs is that there is no objective ‘real world’ – that there are in fact a whole series of subjective ‘real worlds’ occuring individually inside the minds of each of us. There’s more data coming at us than we can possibly absorb and the dataset that we choose to experience, and believe, and call our own is driven by our beliefs.

Clint: You can’t just “stop funding” for NARAL. They are free people free to collect money from other free people. People don’t just magically do your bidding – or indeed you’d be able to subjugate this world.

I wasn’t suggesting we ‘stop funding’ in the sense of officially declaring ‘No more NARAL’. I was suggesting that we as individual free people start spending our money and energy in more efficient ways than continually funding a equally balanced debate over whether we should or shouldn’t publicly fund abortions. Basically, saying those who are pro-choice provide funding for abortions. I understand that your view is if there were no longer pro-abortion activist groups funded by pro-abortion people then anti-abortion people would quickly act to make abortion illegal. My counterargument is that perhaps the anti-abortion people are taking a extremist stance because they are emotionally upset by the fact that their dollars are going to fund abortions, and they might take a more moderate stance if that was not the case. Essentually, I’m suggesting that both sides disarm since it doesn’t seem likely that either side is going away, and we agree that anti-abortion people don’t have to fund abortions in exchange for anti-abortion people agreeing not to try and make abortions unobtainable. I don’t know whether this would work – it probably depends on what the motivation of anti-abortion people is. If they are just upset that their resources are going to kill people, they should be willing to come to some agreement. If they see themselves as guardians of the public morals, then they may be unable to disarm whatever the cost. I think that laws to legislate morality are sick and wrong, and maybe what we should be doing instead of taking them all on a case by case basis is banding together to try and convince people in general that legislating morality (as opposed to laws to reduce harm) is a bad idea.

Clint: Furthermore, if you limit the funding of some activity only for those who believe in it, then activity is not determined by what is right, but by who is rich. If only 1% of people support something, and they are poor, it doesn’t get funded. What you are basically asking for as a tyranny of the majority run by aristocracy. There’s not simply a magical amoutn of money available for what a group of people want or need.

Well, right now, what we have is a system where activity is determined not by what is right, but by who is both rich and inclined to grab power. I’m suggesting that we should remove the second part of the equation. Ultimately, I’m not a big believer in money – a system that tries to represent all types of value in a single variable is inherently flawed, because among other things, there are different types of value and they don’t play on the same field. Some things become more valuable when more of them are made (i.e. a fax machine) while others become less valuable (i.e. a scarce resource). Some things gain value when they are copied (i.e. music that becomes a cultural rosetta stone, video games that support multiplayer modes) while other things do not. Some types of value are eternal (i.e. a song, once found, is ours forever) while others do not (physical resources like gold and oil get used up, and can only be used once). Abstracting all these things to a single variable seems likely to cause problems.

Clint: Hell, if you only had people who believed in vaccinations pay for them (instead of funding research through compulsory taxes) — between the antivax crowd, and religious people who don’t want to fund science, our vax tech would probably be 100 years behind, and you’d probably already be dead from measles.

I don’t know that. Why I don’t know that would be a subject for another, much longer debate.

Clint: Except you’d probably have never been born because we’d be speaking Germany or Japanese, because if things were your way, only people who believed in war would fund the army, and we would end up defenseless and unable to magically conjure up an army by the snap of our fingers after Pearl Harbor.

I’d still have been born, just born into a different world. Whether it would be better or worse is not something we’re equipped to predict, because of emergant behaviors. Also, I think a lot of people believed in WWII being a necessary thing, and where you have a bunch of people believing in something, you are going to get results pretty quickly. Consider how quickly the Apollo system – the biggest machine ever built by man, and a much more complicated animal than, for example, a atomic bomb – was designed, built, and deployed. I believe in war to protect against insanity. I don’t believe in war over resources, or political or economic idealogy. I think the majority of people would believe it was necessary to ramp up military technology and assemble a army to fight in WWII – and Germany and Japan weren’t really equipped to attack mainland U.S. and by the time they had been, we’d have built some things to fight back. I also think that if you just had those who believed we needed to be ready for war now fund war tech, the results would still be a much larger army than we need to protect us against the current level of threat.

Clint: Then again, we might not have even colonized America, because columbus was funded by the king – and if the king only got money from people who believed there should be a king….

I believe there will always be people who believe in exploration, because curiosity is a fundamental part of intelligent life.

Clint: Then there’s the whole national health care vs american health care. We’re the only industrialized nation where you basically only pay into health care if you believe in paying for it.. (Of course, lots can’t afford it, which speaks to my aristocracy points above.)

I see your point – and I believe that health care is a much better thing to be funded by the government than extreme levels of military tech.  I think the majority of people want access to health care. I also think that insurance is something that, when run for profit, tends to slide towards corruption. The problem with *any* for-profit insurance is that the company has motivations to try and cheat the insured, in order to maximize profit. I also think that hospitals are vastly overbilling because they can get away with it – they’re a industry that is not required to submit a quote prior to work, a industry where you often can’t easily hop over to the competition.

Clint: You’re such an impressively logical person on the computer. I have a hard time comprehending why your excellent mental abilities only seem to work inside the computer case, but not outside. It’s damn confusing to me. At least it’s interesting.

I think that we start from different precepts. It’s not that I’m not using logic, it’s just that I’m using that logic on a very different set of views than you have.

Clint: BTW – politics is truth, and affect everything. Every breath you take, the quality of air, every bite of food that goes into your body, the flame retardant chemicals in all of our bodies, every time you poop, your sewage, your computer usage – it’s all governed by politics. Politics is simply the administration of reality. To ignore it is to basically ignore a large portion of how the real world works. It’s good for stress (physical effects of stress on the body), but poor for fostering a proper understanding of the real world systems that actually govern us.

I don’t really agree with this statement at all.

Clint: Of course, if only people who believed in funding computer research paid for it – we probably wouldn’t be talking online right now. Compulsory military taxes made the research and implementation of the internet possible.

Definitely don’t agree with this statement. We as consumers loved computers, bought them by the droves. Computer networks were inevitable. And, I think that if the military hadn’t built the ARPAnet, someone else would have. There were a number of other, competing network designs – ARPA just happened to be the first people who chose a big enough address space and implemented it enough places.

Clint: Just call me secretary of keepin’ it real.

Well, start out by defining what the world ‘real’ means to you. Are you a objectivist? Do you believe in the quantum observer effect, and if so, what effect on the system does having me as a observer have, given that I don’t believe the system I see in front of me is the only reality, and I believe that the flaws I see in it are reflections of the flaws in me? Is it more important to be firmly grounded in the sickness that is all-american ‘reality’ than to be happy? If so, why?

Ending the abortion debate – and problem – in one easy move: If we took all the money that we’re spending on pro-abortion punditry and put it into a trust fund to pay for people’s abortions instead – basically, stop funding NARAL and the other political organizations agitating for abortion, and instead just have those of us who are pro-choice contribute directly to a trust fund to make sure people who can’t otherwise afford abortions have access to them, would this not end the problem and let the rest of the health care and reproductive health people get their money?

Actually, we could take this all sorts of fun places. We could have only those who wanted war contribute money to the army, too. 😉 Right now, it seems like a great racket to be in is to be a political action organization who sends out emotionally inflamed emails every few weeks saying how if you just send $35 now we can beat those no-good-nicks on the other side (who are doing exactly the same thing). In other words, we’re spending a lot of money getting nothing done while we carefully balance two opposing forces. Sending the money to support abortions directly seems like a better solution.

I pretty much try to stay out of politics – I don’t watch the news, I try not to read any news – because among other things it seems totally pointless and like the entire system exists to benefit the politicians. But it does seem to me like we could end the debate and just have pro-choice people directly provide funding for abortions – and end up spending less than we’re spending now for organizations to shove ads at each other.

So, recent adventures in my life would look like a speed bump – some might even call them a major crisis.. except that they’ve led to a awful lot of enjoyable experiences. From Devine doing my hair to a ride on the pacific starlight, not to mention a visit to the beach and the monteray aquartium, there’s been (so far) more silver lining than cloud. I’m hoping that it stays that way.

updated the site.